If you've read any of the various SF blogs over the past few years, there's a good chance you've come across Eric Fischer's work.  His flickr account is full of ancient maps, rad data visualizations, scanned photographs from years past, and photos of misspelled street markings.  Despite the massive amount of content he posts, we generally don't get to hear much about the work from his voice.  Lucky for us, Mission Loc@l got an interview with him:

…he’s spent his adult life trying to make sense of urban geography. “This has been a long obsession of trying to figure out what makes some places work and some places not.”

What works? San Francisco, he says. “It’s one of the few places where for the most part it’s easier to walk places than to drive.” And what doesn’t work? “Des Moines, where you’ve got pedestrian bridges everywhere between buildings so that nobody ever actually goes outside.”

And then there’s the great paradox: “Why does the Las Vegas strip work in spite of itself?” he wonders, citing the large numbers of pedestrians in spite of its inhospitable streetscapes. Could it have anything to do with public drinking? “Maybe,” he shrugs.

Read on.