CITYSCAPES AND FOOTPRINTS: DANCING THROUGH THE URBAN MILIEU WITH LARRY FORD*

With his imaginative and thoughtful approach to understanding cities and their milieus, Larry R. Ford (1943-2009) had a profound impact on urban research, both within and beyond geography. An open poll conducted by the Urban 1'lanning, Design and Development Network ranked Larry as one of the 100 most influential urban thinkers of our time (Planetizen 2009). He had good company on this list, with such notables as Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford, and Charles, Prince of Wales, among the luminaries. By Larry's own reckoning, during his nearly forty-year career at San Diego State University, he walked through and photographed about 1,000 cities in eighty countries on six continents--I think he-was chagrined that Antarctica had no urban settlements lo visit! Larry's influence during his career, and likely his enduring legacy, did not stem from his bold or provocative theorizing about or modeling of urban environments. Indeed, some colleagues may argue that Larry's views about the forces of capitalism that shaped cities into unjust environments for millions of people were not bold or provocative enough. As the theoretical debates shaping postmodernism accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s, Larry did not jump on the bandwagon of new urban political economy approaches or homogeneous explanatory models of urban design. As he explained in the journal Urban Geography (Ford 2002; sec also Ford 2011;, his apparent lack of interest in theory stemmed from his concerns that, it often obscured the realities of complex urban environments. Indeed, in the early 1980s Larry sounded a prescient warning about becoming overly enamored of the latest model or theory, preferring instead the interstitial spaces between theories where inconsistencies are played out (Ford 1982). His enduring influence, then, stems from how he observed, analyzed, and thought about the urban milieu, often framed by the latest idea about how cities worked. Larry became the classic urban thinker of his generation, and his many books and articles exemplify a constant of his illustrious career--informal fieldwork, or "lurking," in the urban environment (see, for example, his musing on fieldwork in Ford 2001). Larry had a passion for urban form and space. He loved perceiving and analyzing how cities worked, why they evolved in certain ways, how people moved around, and what the built environment suggested about human preferences for place and space. He would walk, observe, photograph, explore, smell, taste, and dance his way through urban landscapes. Roman Cybriwsky recalls Larry's visits to Philadelphia: "We walked the city's neighborhoods, talked gentrification and historic preservation and looked behind buildings. With Larry, you didn't just walk down Market Street--you walked behind it, where the trucks were parked and the trash bins overflowed, and you also went beneath Market through the subway concourse. You also had to find a perch for Larry up high, so that he could sec Market Street from above. Everywhere there were photographs" (Cybriwsky 2010). Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, long before he found his calling as an urban geographer, Larry developed a connoisseur's appreciation for loading docks, coal chutes, alleys, garages, and front porches. He found high spots in the city that commanded excellent views of the landscapes below and that served as perfect locales for watching parades and observing the patterns and flows of people through the streets. The minutiae of urban environments, the nooks and crannies of neighborhoods, and the layout and structure of buildings all fascinated him. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at the Ohio Stale University, Larry arrived in Eugene, Oregon, to study for his doctorate and to develop his craft of teaching and doing urban geography. An appointment at San Diego State University followed in 1970, where he began his academic career as an assistant professor. At this point, I think it is important to explain that my essay is not meant to offer a detailed, comprehensive review of Larry's work over the past forty years. …