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.
One of a series of drawings by Architect Louis Kahn in 1953 of Philadelphia which illustrate the city through the movement, speed, and flow of its vehicles rather than by its physical configuration. Building blocks are simply suggested as a residual space defined via the accumulation of marks which define the traffic flow.
To follow the cabspotting post... we move above to the trajectories in the sky . Flight Aware offers realtime (almost - there is a six minutes delay) as well as departure and arrival times, progress along airplane paths, data analysis, discussion groups, pilot itineraries, route analysis, traffic graphs...
In this living map the city of San Francisco is studied via the trajectories of individual cabs moving through the city. The map is created by these multiple itineraries and also analyzed by an array of artists. Social, economical and cultural tendencies of the city begin to become evident.
In this New York Times Article "From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm" researchers speak about movement of groups and instinctive group organization. We humans are not the most advanced.
A mapping of Amsterdam incorporating public participation
done by Amsterdam's Waag Society in collaboration with Artist Esther Polak (2002)
"Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attampts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city's users.
During two months (3 Oct to 1 Dec 2002) all of Amsterdam's residents are invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. This is a portable device developed by Waag Society which is equipped with GPS: Global Positioning System. Using satellite data the tracer calculates its geographical position. Therse tracers' data are sent in realtime to a central point. By visualizing this data against a black background traces, lines, appear. From these lines a (partial) map of Amsterdam constructs itself. This map does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real people."
Notation A/V is the original class that I developed and taught at the University of Michigan to explore the possibilities of digital audio and video recorders as tools of notation through which to study the city. This website of the original course presents the assignments developed and student projects which took these readiliy available devices and exploited them, using them as drawing tools.
Motion Mapping is part of an ongoing research on issues of temporality, public space and representation.
Visitors are drawn into a luminous penetrable volume of string in which two small LCD screens presenting student work are embedded. Upon entering visitors quickly disappear into the solid while others already inside suddenly reemerge while interacting with the disappearing and reappearing ghosted projections of the previous users of the space.
The project was inspired by Parallel, an example of Vision in Motion by Moholy-Nagy. In this 1937 photograph by Ryuji Sibata the mosaic pattern of a swimming pool’s bottom in its distortion reveals the movement of a swimmer as it interfaces the body of water.
Martha Skinner is founder of 10^10, co-founder of fieldoffice and assistant professor at Clemson University. She studies our built environment as a delicate ecology using representation methods that visualize the cycles of life in order to more acutely address temporal, social and environmental issues. Her work includes several Living Maps of cities, which include NY A/V and BiCi_N, projects that involve the inhabitants of our cities in their daily routines to affect, in real-time, possibilities for social and environmental change. As the 1999 Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan, Martha developed Notation A/V, a seminar about the merging of drawing and moving image, a methodology she exploits in her work to filter, transmit, capture, and celebrate the intangible qualities of the passing of time with solutions that address the relationships between humans and the ecologies in which they are situated.
Allen, Stan. “Mapping the Unmappable: On Notation.” In Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation
Batty, Michael "Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events", in *Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design l29*, No. 1
Corner, James. “The agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention” in Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Cosgrove, Denis. “Carto-City” in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
De Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. (S. Rendall, Trans.).
Hajer, Maarten and Reijndorp, Arnold. In Search of New Public Domain
Hall, Peter. "Flight Paths." in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.). Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. Vision in Motion
Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Ross, Rebecca. "Perils of Precision." in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
Schwarzer, Mitchel. Zoomscape, Architecture in Motion and Media
Tschumi, Bernard, Event-Cities series
Tschumi, Bernard. Manhattan Transcripts
Tufte, Edward. “Multiples in Space and Time” in Visual Explanations
uploading
Vetters, Trui. ‘Night on Earth’: Urban Practices and the Blindness of Metatheory. In The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis
