Toward an Archive of Everyday Urban Observations

*This post was originally published at medium.com on Jan 2, 2026.

In the vast expanse of the Internet, we can find both crowded places always brimming with buzz and energy, and empty places that sit in near-total silence. “dédédé” exists within the latter — it is a tiny, unassuming website, like a roadside udon shop tucked away in the mountains or an unmanned station at the end of a train line.

dédédé is a website for sharing observations about cities. Its purpose is simple: to share what we like about a neighborhood (“Good”), what we don’t like (“Bad”), or those vague, indefinable things that just make us wonder (“Why”). It is a place to deepen our collective interest and understanding regarding the places we live in. (The name dédédé derives from the Kansai dialect words eedé, akandé, and nandé, which translate to good, bad, and why in English.)

It is not a place for making decisions or reaching conclusions. It is a place to quietly record the “stuff” of the city: the way sunlight reflects off the leaves of a street tree; the roar of construction starting at dawn; a park that is beautifully maintained, yet somehow feels lonely. We believe that the fleeting, modest impressions we form about urban phenomena in our daily lives are worth preserving.

Originally, dédédé was born as a tool to support “urban walking” workshops organized by a group of friends in Kyoto. These workshops (called machiaruki workshops in Japanese) are participatory events popular across Japan, where people walk through neighborhoods to find interesting or curious things and then present their findings. Generally, these are “low-tech” affairs — a common format is to have participants draw their findings using markers on a large paper map. However, for our workshops we decided to build a dedicated website, as a simple experiment. While walking, participants could upload photos and brief descriptions of things that caught their eye; these would automatically be plotted onto a map alongside everyone else’s posts, allowing for a bird’s-eye view of the day’s discoveries.

Lately our members have become busy, and we haven’t been able to hold a workshop for a while. Because of that, we decided to spin off the website as a standalone project and open it to the public; thus dédédé was born. Unlike a face-to-face workshop where motivation is naturally high, the website alone can feel a bit quiet — there isn’t much incentive to post. We do not think this is a problem, however. Even if there are no frequent posters, if people across the globe contribute something small every once in a while, that will be more than enough to create a beautiful and educational archive that does not exist anywhere else in the world.

As of now, dédédé has no source of income, and our plans for covering server fees and other operating costs are a total blank slate. However, we hope to keep it running as long as possible, as a modest and somewhat quaint website. If the idea of dédédé resonates with you, please try to find something in your city to post the next time you head out. Chances are, you won’t get a reaction from anyone (we have no “Like” button, and while there is a comment feature, so far it is very rarely used). But in an era of information overload, perhaps that lack of feedback isn’t such a bad thing.