Here and There • Aquí y Allí

This book explores routines, familiarity versus discovery, and the impacts of urban planning & density on perceptions of distance and convenience. After living for 4 years in San Francisco, I moved to Barcelona. As these are cities with fairly comparable geographic areas, I wondered: where would my routines from San Francisco take me in Barcelona?

RoleAuthor

Year2025-2026

Routes printed on translucent paper, images printed on solid paper.

I mapped the routes I would take in San Francisco, then determined where the equivalent destination would be from my apartment in Barcelona. From there, the book is formatted quite simply. A photo of my routine destination in San Francisco alongside a photo of the new destination in Barcelona. The routes are printed on translucent paper as overlays.

Two Maps One Scale used to determine the Barcelona equivalent destination.

What surprised me was how inconvenient it felt to go to the Barcelona equivalents of many of my routine San Francisco destinations. Despite spanning a slightly smaller geographic area than San Francisco, Barcelona has a population density roughly 150% that of San Francisco. What once felt close in San Francisco, felt so far in Barcelona. In fact, many of the Barcelona destinations I had never even been near because my routines in there stayed within a much smaller radius.