Cape Town under the mountains and moonlight

Cape Town under the mountains and moonlight, originally uploaded by Aaron Michael Brown.

This picture reminds me of all those nights up on Pittock Mansion, with Alex Leeding, where we would see how many streets and roads we could identify while looking down on beloved Portland, counting off all the streets that we could recognize, watching Sandy and Burnside and the interstates snake through the city, eating voodoo doughnuts, even if its one in the morning there's still traffic on the streets somewhere. Sometimes, it is only in the dark that we can see the patterns and the different ways we live in and interact with the urban environment. In Cape Town, it's particularly pronounced: it's so easy to see the environmentally protected Table Mountain, jutting from the urban landscape above the city and the oceans, and how so much of Cape Flats in the horizon is set up to allow people to get in and out of the tiny, concentrated downtown of Cape Town that hugs its sharp, nonnegotiable natural boundaries. Of course, with a little extra knowledge of the area, you could also see how in the Cape Flats in the horizon, the areas with fewer lights are the Townships, the informal settlements without adequate street lights, or you could talk about the development patterns and the city by the alignment of major roads.