Geographer Ye Fu Tuan once said that places security and space is freedom.
He thought that although we crave freedom, we never really go beyond what we already know.
And because of that, we can't really claim we know the places we inhabit.
Places where, for the first time ever, more than half the people in the world are living.
Adventurer, author, filmmaker and teacher Daniel Raven Ellison confronts some key urban issues of today in a project called Urban Earth.
The idea is to forget what we think we know about cities, to show them as they really are and in a way that most of us never see.
We're basically living on islands. We live in a bubble watching TV at home.
You get your mode of transport or you walk to work and then you're in another bubble and then you might go for dinner in another bubble in the city.
And so you get the impression that you somehow know the city.
In 2008, Daniel explored three of the biggest cities in the world for Urban Earth, Mumbai, Mexico City and London.
He set out on food across each sprawling metropolis, through some of the most dangerous communities in the world, from one extreme edge to the other.
He took a single photograph every eight steps.
Each picture was taken with the camera pointed directly in front of him to avoid being distracted by the things people are conditioned to find interesting.
That's a cute dog. No matter who you are, you know, rather than going on holiday somewhere and saying,
oh, I'm going to go and see the same museum that every guidebook and every person tells me to go and see, I'm going to walk across the city and see what it's like for the people who live there day in, day out.
Urban Earth is about documenting truth in cities, about showing them as they exist and not as people choose to see them.
Urban Earth is all about going out, having an adventure and seeing what the biggest habitats on our planet are really like, the cities, the places that we live in.
Although we share these urban spaces with millions of other people and walk the same streets every day,
we are actually more disconnected than ever before.
The bigger cities grow, the more disconnected we seem to become, despite technology doing its best to keep us linked together.
Daniel believes that the media is to blame.
The media creates all sorts of problems that just really need ironing out because whenever they tell a story that's bad about a place, that's what sticks people's minds.
It's like if you go out for a night out, you tell your highlights, you tell the low points where you got mugged, whatever else.
You tell people all the normality or the unusual stuff.
And what Urban Earth does is it starts to address that by saying, well, we're going to walk through a city and see what it's really like away from those peaks and troughs that the media always try and tell us about.
By taking the pictures and then putting them back together as star-free films for each location, Daniel hopes to bind cities together and cut through the tangled wave of urban experience.
Whenever the media portrays Mumbai, for example, it's the train lines, the slums, and then the skyscrapers.
London is the city of London and there may be some council flats.
In Mexico City, it's the idea of the big squares and that sort of stuff.
We have these tour books and different guidebooks that tell us to go and visit certain places or to see certain things.
So we somehow sort of fix in this expectation that when we see images of a place, we should equally see those things.
Each film acts as a portrait of the city as a whole, breaking down the boundaries that we and the media have built in our minds.
In Guadalajara, in Mexico, a group of 100 people walks across that, the second largest city in Mexico.
And for them, a group of British standards, very moderate people, walks across the city became a very political act because for those people, it was about showing and exerting their level of freedom.
Now, what we're doing to ourselves in this country, we've already got our freedom.
We're seeing our freedoms eroded in which people are scared to walk through each other's communities because of the fear that the media have driven into us.
Or we're scared to go into each other's communities because of what we might say or think of us, which is completely twisted.
We need to be engaging with each other and walking around each other's communities and talking to each other to reduce conflict, to sort of bind our society together.
Yes, you can reflect on the history of a city and its cathedrals and arts and stuff, but really what fascinates me is what's happening now and what's the future of the place that so many more people are living in.
Daniel is driven by his urge to explore, to shed preconceptions and discover places that you wouldn't normally go.
You have to forget what you think you know and explore the city in its idiosyncratic glory.
You know, I guess the way in which I do this is quite systematic.
It's just walking along every eight paces and taking a photograph because I try to be really true to the idea that I don't want to be biased at all.
But, you know, there's all sorts of themes that transcend that go across cities that are really exciting to explore.
And when we went across Mexico City, people were following things like graffiti or hairdressers or dogs or children.
Someone else had a bit of wallpaper and doing rubbings to try and sort of see how tiles on floors change as you transect a city.
Urban Earth is an adventure that he hopes others will take up too.
Adventures become a thing that people see on TV. There's amazing adventures to be had, places that are completely unknown to us right outside our doors.
And we're just going to take the alleyway we don't normally go down and ask questions we wouldn't normally ask.
And that is adventure and that is what Urban Earth's about.
Anyone can explore cities and we can understand them better by documenting the relationship we have with these spaces.
That to him is what Geography and Urban Earth is all about.
Writing the Land.
