This blog is a research platform organizing projects, examples, and thoughts surrounding the idea of an urban mapping which reads the city as a network of individual activities and relationships in time rather than as a static form. This research looks at the city both from within and from above as kind of urban cat-scan. 


Monday, February 18, 2008

Trajects pendant un an d'une jeune fille du XVIe arrondissement



The accumulation of lines in this map captures the routine movement in one year's time of a young girl in Paris through her daily trajectories to piano lessons, home and school.

The study was done by French Urban Sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe in 1957 whose interest was to understand the city through the activities of the citizens. His work was meant as research for urban development decision makers.

One of his works - Paris et l'agglomeration parisienne (1952) is "a reference work, presenting at the same time snapshots of Paris and an experimentation of new methodological tools (aerial views, districts' monographs, "dynamic" cartography - that is to say making connections between different parameters - unstructured interviews, research-action, commented bibliographies, etc.)."

Another project La Decouverte Aerienne du Monde as presented in the linked blog, seems to be of an alternate approach... the mapping as done from above from an all encompassing view as opposed/ or maybe to be complementary to the internal understanding of the city via the movements and activities of individual inhabitants.

link to various books on Chombart de Lauwe and his work

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