1 November 04
The Feline Neighborhood
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on cats and place.
Berkeley owes much to its cats, I once read. Or at least I owe much to them: when I was growing up near there, going on walks and meeting the neighborhood cats was my main contact with the feline deities, since we didn’t have cats at home. I wonder now if there’s a relationship between neighborhoods that are good from a cat’s point of view, and neighborhoods that have been built for walkers. After all, one of life’s great pleasures to go for walk and meet up with a friendly cat. Village Homes, the archetype in this town of a humanely-planned development, certainly has many cats contentedly roaming the interior walkways and sunning themselves on vine-bestrewn wooden fences. The photographer Hans Silvester is justly celebrated for his photographs of Greek village cats. And who wouldn’t want to walk around a Greek island village?
We need to ask the cats their opinion on urban design. Will a feline Christopher Alexander come forward, please?
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It’s true!
In reading this (found at Ecotone), i’m reminded of how many cats i’ve met this way. A number have been featured in my journal, as in the entry above.
As a walking commuter, i almost felt that it was my duty to say hello to these neighbors, that it was their space i was moving through, in the end.