Culture
A Tourist's Guide For Your City's Mundane, Obscure Attractions
A handful of new travel companies ask what you'd learn if you approached the mundane in your own neighborhood like a tourist.
Ryan Griffis first took a group of locals on a tour of the Chicago Technology Park, on the west side of the city, back in 2004. He was interested at the time in biotechnology, in the political, ethical and philosophical debates then taking place in the country around how to responsibly harness the science of this growing field. In a much more tangible sense, he figured, this is how biotechnology shows up in our communities: in concrete research campuses and office parks.
No one here had particularly invited Griffis to come learn about the place, or to show it to others. “We would just walk in,” he says, sounding as if this were a perfectly common thing to do.