Design
How Do You Navigate a City With No Street Names?
A photographer documents the way residents of Amman, Jordan, get around.
To an outsider, Amman, Jordan, could seem nearly unnavigable. Until five years ago, its streets were unlabeled and its buildings unnumbered.* Even now, locals give direction by landmark, narrating the way over the phone or on hand-drawn maps.
"It's totally normal to be lost and confused," says photographer Regina Mamou, who spent 15 months studying the people of Amman get around. Once, she remembers getting directions to a party via a map the hostess had Photoshopped herself. "I had recreated it on this Post-It, and i still couldn't get to her house," she says.