> I wandered around Mériadeck this afternoon. A group of skateboarders practiced tricks on the elevated plaza.

> Parts of Mériadeck are lush. A plaza with a fountain is surrounded by trees and enclosed on all sides by modernist buildings unlike any others in Bordeaux. It is calmer here in this planned neighbourhood than in the rest of Bordeaux, and the air is clearer.

> Other parts, including the plaza, show their age. The elevated walkways and plazas connecting the residential buildings are notable both for their community-building ambition and present disrepair. Still, I like how the ground plane has been dissolved in Mériadeck. You can imagine office workers commuting from their apartments to their offices using the elevated walkways. This place has charm, or at least what's left of it. Nestled in the otherwise deserted plaza is a water feature still covered in living greenery, and the entrance to one of the municipal buildings has a light and space-style art installation clearly intended to play with the light of some now-broken spotlights.

> I wander through a huge grocery store and near-abandoned sporting goods store. There is tension between the humanist instincts which raised a neighbourhood of curvy modernist towers above a network of green pathways and parkettes and the urbanism which surrounded it with the infrastructure atmosphere of a planned commercial district.

> I leave Mériadeck to sit at a cafe near the courthouse.