Elise Richer, Urban Institute

Elise Richer plays center halfback for the Flanders Football Club and does social policy research for the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino imagines Marco Polo describing innumerable cities to the emperor Kubla Khan. The perpetual voyager, Polo explains to Khan that when visiting a new and unknown city, the traveler is confronted with the realm of possible lives and possible pasts that he might have lived, but from which he is now excluded. As one who has had the pleasure of visiting a fair number of cities, I have often thought that it is the stranger, the newcomer, who ends up having the most intricate experience of a place, rather than the long-time resident. A certain bridge or house passed in a foreign city holds no actual memory, since you are seeing it for the first time; but it may remind you of not one, but several other bridges or houses in other, familiar cities, thus creating a chain of interlocked memories.

Most of us are aware that we do not really see the place we live in every day. I suspect that many people are like me, and do not go out of the way to visit notable or famous sites in our own cities or towns unless we are hosting guests. In all my years in the Boston area, I don't think I ever went to the Bunker Hill monument, unless it was on a school field trip more remarkable for who sat with whom on the bus than for the site itself. Here in D.C., a city packed with monuments and landmarks, where some famous personage or another appears to have slept (literally) everywhere, the distance between what residents and visitors see is particularly vast.

Walking or biking is without question the best way to get to know a city. In cities with subway systems, traveling underground from place to place lends a disconnected air to the landmarks and neighborhoods you view. Biking or walking between points gives a clearer, more nuanced picture of how neighborhoods shift, sometimes slowly, sometimes starkly.

Biking home from soccer practice, as I did last night, shows me D.C. at both its best and worst. A small green spot near the Capitol Building serves as our practice area in this soccer- and softball-crazy city; I suspect I'm one of many residents who only view the Mall during sporting events. This green and white stone swath in the middle of the city is coated with tourists during the day and with athletes during the afternoon and evening, gradually giving way to desertion, streetlights, and the occasional mounted park police officer as night falls. As I make my way north and west to my neighborhood, I cut through parts of D.C. famous and infamous. The huge monuments and buildings, embassies and national headquarters, are eerily deserted in the evening. The biking is great, because the traffic consists mostly of aimless taxi cabs and the occasional determined out-of-towner. The only signs of life are in the bars which ring the area. There is very little residential land use.

Further up, I detour around Chinatown and the much-debated MCI Center. To most tourists, this is the stopping place for a hockey or basketball game; to me and other residents, it's a stopping place for the flow of traffic. The residential and mixed-use streets around this area showcase much of what is disgraceful in the nation's capital: abandoned buildings, vacant lots, lack of commercial opportunity. Traveling still farther north and west, however, neighborhood life returns, gradually. Although the housing stock is of mixed quality, there are pockets of renovation, and the residents who have lived through the ups and downs of their neighborhood endure the latest construction in the hopes the current upward trend will continue.

18th Street is my final climb; as I ride past the various restaurants and clubs which make Adams Morgan a destination for adventure-seeking visitors, I am reminded again and again of how few of these establishments I've actually frequented. What I think of as my own neighborhood starts when I cross Columbia Road and the row houses crop up. I am back in the familiar and known.