Writes Matt Briggs on the new blog Reading Local Seattle:

[The German architect and urban planner] Thomas Sieverts had been brought to Seattle as part of Suddenly.org’s translation and publication of Sieverts book, Zwischenstadt, translated as “in-between city” and published as “Where We Live Now.”

The assumption of “Where We Live Now,” and one that seemed lost on Charles Mudede when he reviewed the book in The Stranger, is that the city as an organizing idea, as the vehicle of culture, as a center no longer functions. In fact, the city hardly reflects the reality, as they say, on the ground. One section of Sieverts’s book is titled, “The Distorting Myth of the City.” Stadler begins the annotated reader, “The French historian Fernand Braudel makes the astonishing claim that any city “has to dominate an empire, however, tiny, in order to exist at all,”and astonished, Stadler makes quick work that this concept comes with a number of assumptions that no longer hold.

To this day, when publications like Seattle Magazine talk about Seattle, what they really have in mind are neighborhoods like Fremont, which are white. Out of habit, out of laziness, it is standard for whites in the north (who usually speak for our city) to describe Seattle as a white city; but go to South King County (population 120,000), to Southcenter Mall (20 million visitors per year), or to Southeast Seattle (population 120,000), and this is not the case. These places are racially integrated—a social environment that year after year is becoming less and less exceptional in Seattle. (In 1960, Seattle was 92 percent white; now it is 67 percent, a figure that according to indicators will continue to fall as we go deeper into the 21st century.)

Southcenter Mall is exactly in this area that Sieverts calls zwischenstadt (the “in-between city”), and, like Sieverts, I think this kind of area is unappreciated and often misunderstood.

My point of view is this: I think of a center not as a real thing but as a necessary illusion—or, in other words, a form of cognitive mapping. In the way that we see other galaxies in the universe flying away from us, and therefore giving us the impression of being at the center of all things, when in fact any point in the universe would give you this impression—of being at the center of the universe and galaxies flying away from you—the center of the city has the appearance (not the reality) of being the center. The reality? Not one center but multiple centers; not one universe but Deutsch's multiverse.