About

This webpage serves as an outcome of an urban research which I, Antonín Brinda, executed in the fall 2015 in the city of Helsinki, Finland.
Audiorecordings of my urban audio diary as well as the short description (below) of the project and a list of my „failures“ are to be found here.

In Helsinki Urban Research I created a few simple rules which I tried to follow:

  • for one month I was supposed to avoid usage of a public transport as much as possible and mainly walk when moving in a city (24/8 – 23/9 2015)

  • for one month I was supposed to avoid usage of a public transport as much as possible and mainly use a bicycle when moving in a city (24/9 – 23/10 2015)

  • for one month I was supposed to use mainly buses, trams, trolleys etc when moving in a city (24/10 – 23/11 2015)

  • for one month I was supposed to use mainly the metro system when moving in a city (24/11 – 23/12 2015) ; in this month I was already too exhausted by the whole project and did not follow the rules as I planned

Helsinki Urban Research is a continuation of a research I executed in the urban area of London during January 2015 as part of my two weeks long internship in a social and cultural centre Anatum’s Abode: London Urban Research.
In Helsinki the research period was much longer and it was not excluded from my ordinary life – I was going to school, to work, dealing with bureaucracy resulting from the moving to a different country etc.
On the one hand limitations I put on myself opened me the city in a way I would usually not experience, on the other one my daily life became to be much more complicated.

For the Helsinki research I decided to experiment with a new, so far unknown tool – audiodiary.
My thoughts were recorded in a most direct way, without corrections, without repetitions, without deep structuring. Sometimes there is a lot of noise in the recording, also my English is far from perfect. To listen to such a record might not be the most pleasant experience but it brings the researcher and a listener to unusually close relationship.