Introduction: Urban Cartographies

C A R TO G R A P H I E S O F P L AC E

Introduction

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2 Canada and the Global Nuclear Revival

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Introduction: Urban Cartographies

MICHAEL DARROCH AND JANINE MARCHESSAULT

Media are connected to our physical environments more dramatical-ly than ever before – literally opening up new spaces of interactivityand connection that transform the experience of being in the city, itsforms of public gathering and movement, the democratic ideals of civ-itas of which we think the city capable. Urban screens, mobile media,new digital mappings, ambient and pervasive media of all kinds cre-ate ecologies in which entire communities dwell or in which singularentities take refuge. How do we analyze these new spaces?

Recognition of the mutual histories and research programs ofurban and media studies is only just beginning. Cartographies of Place:Navigating the Urban seeks to develop new vocabularies and method-ologies for engaging with the distinctive situations and experiencescreated by media technologies that are reshaping, augmenting, andexpanding urban spaces. The book builds upon the rich traditionsand insights of a postwar generation of humanist scholars, media the-orists, and urban planners. Authors situate different historical andcontemporary currents in urban studies that share a common con-cern for media forms, either as research tool or as the means for dis-cerning the expressive nature of city spaces around the world. All ofthe media considered in this book are not simply “free floating,” butare embedded in the geopolitical, economic, and material contexts inwhich they are used.

Cities are not images but living entities deeply connected to andfabricated through collective memories, social relations, and builtstructures expressed in material culture. But even though cities are notimages, they are images before they are cities – they are imagined,dreamed, and planned. While such imaginings can be understood

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through and clarified by the aesthetic systems/experiments of art mak-ing, they exceed art. They belong to a network of discourses and epis-temologies, hierarchies and power relations that are both structuredand unpredictable. Photographic and digital images, for example, arenot simply representations of imagined spaces; nor are they empiricalrecords of moments past. Rather, they are integrally tied to the veryenactment of urban space, to the creative intersubjective performanceof urbanity.

The authors we have brought together in this volume seek to under-stand the urban in and through its complex mediations, its culturalcartographies that “activate” the layers of reality in each environment.We have called our collection Cartographies of Place: Navigating theUrban to express the notion that media both anchor and complicatewhat it means to be located in the world today. With the exception oftwo chapters by two of the leading researchers in the field of urbancultural studies (Highmore and Shields), the essays in this book arethe result of many years of collaboration amongst the authors on var-ious urban research projects. In addition to collaborations (Coté, Dar-roch, Horgan, Liinamaa, Marchessault, and Straw) initiated duringthe Culture of Cities Project 2000–2005,1 the majority of the contribu-tors to Cartographies of Place participated in two symposia coordinat-ed by the editors: the Urban Research Methodologies Symposiumheld at the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in Toronto in April2007; and the Urban Mediations Symposium held at ArtCite in Wind-sor, Ontario in May 2009. Initial versions of their chapters were pre-sented at these two symposia, and we believe that this gives the col-lection a strong cohesion and shared purpose.

The impetus behind these meetings was the potential implicationswe saw for developing innovative methodologies in urban research –whether it be new forms of citizenship tied to social media, new cul-tural formations in urban contexts, or “artistic research” that redefinesthe very parameters and meanings of existing knowledge. Participantsfocused on cultural spaces, visual fabric, and the mediated characterof cities. In particular, we were concerned with research methods thatcross the humanities and fine arts such as innovative forms of ethno-graphic inquiry, object-oriented ontologies, comparative archeologies,artistic projects, and interventions in urban space.

These origins, and the concerns to develop innovative interdiscipli-nary methodologies that bring together urban and media studies, arereflected in this book’s intellectual breadth. Our contributors strive to

4 Introduction

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bridge modernist and contemporary perspectives of the cartographic,proposing a central understanding of “navigation” as a changing phe-nomenon within a digital urban environment. Navigation encapsu-lates the tension between maps as representations of territory, andmaps as interfaces with routes and routines of city life. The way inwhich the cartographic has moved beyond two-dimensional represen-tations is theorized by different authors in this volume who analyzehow these technologies have influenced our experience of place, trans-formed everyday activities or enabled political actions. The collectionthus positions “navigation” as a central form of mediation between thespaces, tempos, and experiences of the city. Drawing upon modernistparadigms for thinking through contemporary imaginaries, theauthors engage with phenomena in contemporary cities around theworld. Cartographies of Place offers original methodologies that are vitalfor understanding the ecological, social, and cultural spheres thatdefine twenty-first-century urban spaces – both designed andunplanned. Across the book’s three-part structure, the contributionsevolve from broadly stated metaphors and theories (“Legibility”), tostudies that examine how specific spaces and times of the city are acti-vated and negotiated (“Navigation”), to case studies of places and actsof place-making (“Locale”). Before getting into more detail about thecontributions, we would like to turn to some of the early considera-tions of media and environment that underpin how this book hasevolved.

MEDIA AND ENVIRONMENT

We do not see experience and mediation in terms of a philosophicaldivide, an either/or situation, since experience of/in the modern cityis one of mediation. This insight comes to us from many places, butwe may point to the French Symbolists in the nineteenth century(Mallarmé, Baudelaire) who began to incorporate media forms intotheir art works as they produced documentation (paintings, poems)of their everyday perceptions in the city. This is an insight that hasbeen adopted by many modern philosophers and artists, from theBauhaus artists, to Giedion, to Innis and McLuhan, and to more contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze and Agamben, all of whom are represented in our book. Indeed, their approaches are bothphenomenological and articulated through differentiated forms of mediation.

Urban Cartographies 5

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Kevin Lynch and György Kepes helped to open this relationship asan area of study using insights from art history, anthropology, andpsychology in the early 1950s. In their project on the “look of cities,”they sought to develop a new approach for analyzing and renovatingthe visual design of cities. Concerned with understanding the totalurban environment, Lynch was focused on place making in terms ofthe environment’s capacity to communicate. The city is not a “thingin itself” but a product of “being perceived by its inhabitants” (Lynch1960, 3). It was while collaborating with Kepes in 1954 that Lynchbroadened his interest beyond the ways in which city dwellers mere-ly orient themselves in a metropolitan region, to undertake studies ofour perceptions of daily experience in terms of “imageability: thatquality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evok-ing a strong image in any given observer” (Lynch 1960, 9). As he wrotein the “Visual Shape of the Shapeless Metropolis,” the perceptual formof the city needs to be “an imageable region, composed of vivid dif-ferentiated elements, legibly organized” (Lynch 1990, 67).2 The struc-tured image of the city ought to be extensible, legible at general anddetailed levels, and yet it should be an image that could unfold in var-ious ways according to the observer’s desires and knowledge.

In keeping with a modernist postwar universalism, Kepes wasdeeply committed to crossing interdisciplinary boundaries. In TheNew Landscape in Art and Science (1956), the concerns that animatedhis collaboration with Lynch emerge as a plea to rethink urban spaceaccording to human sensibilities and the technical achievements ofthe day: “Architects design buildings in which exterior and interiorspace flow together, opening up the prison cells to which we havecondemned ourselves. Painters and sculptors have absorbed new val-ues: the speed and precision of machines, the energy of a dynamicsociety, the new range of space opened by science and technique”(Kepes 1956, 70). To restore balance between scientific knowledge andour emotional and psychological state, Kepes argued, we need newsymbols for creating order – a sentiment similarly reflected in thewritings of his mentor, László Mohly-Nagy, and their collaborator, thearchitectural historian Siegfried Giedion. The search for a dynamicequilibrium was to be accomplished by identifying a “new poetry ofimages, latent in the new landscape” (Kepes 1956, 74).

The notion of a “new landscape” was a strong inspiration for theinterdisciplinary Explorations Group (1953–59) at the University ofToronto, led by Marshall McLuhan and the radical anthropologist

6 Introduction

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Edmund Carpenter, alongside psychologist D.C. Williams, politicaleconomist Tom Easterbrook, and the modernist town planner Jaque-line Tyrwhitt. Tyrwhitt, originally a horticulturalist and long-time asso-ciate of Giedion, had arrived with affiliations with the Bauhaus and themars Group, the UK wing of the Congrès internationaux d’architec-ture moderne (ciam, the International Congresses of Modern Archi-tecture). She brought a keen understanding of studies of the environ-ment and urban ecologies across time.3 Just prior to her arrival inToronto, in 1951, Tyrwhitt had initiated a vision of the city as an inter-connected combination of media and architecture through the con-cept of “live architecture” in a Bauhaus-inspired exhibition that shehelped to coordinate town planning at the Festival of Britain. Thesame year, she also helped to organize ciam 8 as its acting secretary.ciam 8 took as its theme “The Heart of the City: Towards the Human-ization of Urban Life.” According to Eric Mumford, ciam 8 “can be seenas a reference point for the new forms of public space, including shop-ping malls, renewed downtowns, and theme parks, that came to char-acterize urbanism in the rapidly decentralizing cities of the 1950s andlater” (2002, 215). In the published proceedings of ciam 8, Giedionsummarized the new problematic central to postwar urban planningin terms of the need to create a new kind of spectator citizen: “Thething that is needed today to turn people back from passive spectatorsto active participants is an emotional experience which can reawakentheir apparently lost powers of spontaneity” (Giedion 1952, 161).

At the Festival of Britain, the South Bank exhibition representedarchitecture in practice, while a Live Architecture exhibition in theLansbury neighbourhood of the Poplar-Stepney district in London’sEast End would “demonstrate the possibilities inherent in good townplanning, architecture and building by putting on show part of a re-planned, living community in the process of going about its daily life”(Guide to Architecture 1951, 7). The exhibition consisted of a cross-section of a residential neighbourhood containing houses, flats,shops, primary, secondary, and nursery schools, street furniture andopen spaces, light industry, a church, and several pubs, alongside aBuilding Science Pavilion and a Town Planning Pavilion. It aimed toillustrate the visual and practical advantages of postwar town plan-ning, to make intelligible the latest advances in building techniqueswith some of the structures left in various stages of completion withsections exposed to illustrate structural techniques. After the festival,these structures were completed and the entire neighbourhood was


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handed over to the city. It was the relationship of individuals to thecommunity that predominated as the core concerns of the Town Plan-ning exhibition: “The many and sometimes conflicting needs of peo-ple of different callings have to be provided for …. The lives of a baby,a schoolchild, a teen-ager, a single worker, a married woman with ajob, a mother and an elderly person are very different, but all have tolive together as one community” (Guide to Architecture 1951, 38). ForTyrwhitt, these spectator ideal types reflected ciam 8’s focus on theheart of the city, where once again the “spectator citizen” was invitedto imagine the city of the future: “Representative buildings of enter-tainment, evening education and civil administration should be visi-ble. A major stream of traffic should also be seen, skirting the area.Trees and sculptures should be in evidence – possibly also water andperhaps grass. Visitors should receive an impression of freedom ofmovement; ease of choice of activity; of places where informal crowdscan gather, places where one can ‘promenade’ and places where onecan rest.”4

Tyrwhitt was later concerned that Lynch’s renowned The Image ofthe City – in many ways the fruits of his collaboration with Kepes –still presented the notion of image as a static and atemporal concep-tion of urban life and space. Such a static image failed to considerarchitecture’s ability to delight. In a review of Lynch, she admittedthat placing too much emphasis on delight may be a “slippery slope,”but argued that it should nevertheless be addressed as essential tourban experience: “‘A clear and comprehensive image of the entiremetropolitan region is a fundamental requirement for the future,’states Kevin Lynch (1960, 110). But is this so? A graphic and pleasur-able image of one’s immediate environment (one’s habitat); a clearknowledge of one’s regular areas to which one is going; these are cer-tainly acceptable desiderata. But what can be the advantage of carry-ing around a mental map of the entire metropolitan region?”5

As we have traced in previous research (Darroch and Marchessault2009), Tyrwhitt adopted Giedion’s approach to time and histories ofmaterial culture, suggesting that Henri Bergson’s notion of durationbe conceived as an alternative to Lynch’s legible city maps:

It is just possible that an alternative, and conceivably more validhypothesis for organising an image of the city might be HenriBergson’s original notion of “duration,” or some of its later deriva-tives. This notion made a distinction between time and duration

8 Introduction

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– which might, also perhaps be interpreted as impact. Thus, themental impact entering into an urban space arousing an emo-tional response could seem to occupy a fuller amount of time –duration – than the time occupied in driving along several non-descript streets. Such a hypothesis could make allowances for thenecessary psychological process of periods of rest –pauses –between moments of great visual awareness. It is only the com-plete stranger or mentally insane who make any attempt to giveequal attention to everything they pass by.6

Tyrwhitt’s interpretation of Giedion’s studies of space-time (in Space,Time, and Architecture, 1941) permitted her to treat the city as a contin-ually mediated sphere of cultural life. In Tyrwhitt’s hands, cities mustbe studied in terms of a phenomenology: urban space is active, con-stantly shifting and changing. She proposed studying the experience ofliving in cities and not simply “the city” as means to develop newforms of urban design that were devoid of bodies and subjectivities. Asa major inspiration for McLuhan’s many reflections on the mediatedenvironments of cities as classrooms, Tyrwhitt was constantly attentiveto the effects cities and their environments have on the human senso-rium: what are our emotional responses to specific locations andevents? The 1951 Live Architecture exhibition is exemplary of this focus.In a later collaboration with psychologist D.C. Williams, she carriedout a study for Explorations that developed her own theories of the rela-tionship between urban space and memory (a project with whichLynch would later compare his own “Walk around the Block” [1956]studies of perception in Boston in correspondence with her). TheExplorations Group conducted surveys with students of Toronto’s thenRyerson Institute, probing into their capacities to remember theirurban environment (focusing on elements such as architecture, adver-tising, street furniture, and physical layout). Published as “The CityUnseen” in Explorations 5 (June 1955) and elsewhere, Tyrwhitt’s analy-sis promoted an understanding of the interrelationship between imag-ination and memory in the process of perception and recollection asan essential component of town planning research. Whereas the Explo-rations researchers set out to diagnose the effects of the media on lan-guage and human behaviour, Tyrwhitt arrived in Toronto with aninterest in diagnosing the effects of the city on the human senses. Aim-ing always to design better cities on a human scale, Tyrwhitt’s vision ofthe city included an understanding that all urban media existed in a


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relationship to each other. Experiencing place involves complex inter-relations between the built environment, imagination, and individualmemory.

Writing about the Ryerson experiment while teaching at Harvard,Tyrwhitt seems almost apologetic for her focus on such minute ele-ments of human memory and the built environment: “Much of thisarticle must seem very obvious, but the fact is that we really know verylittle about how to design so as to rekindle the interest of the publicin their visual environment” (Tyrwhitt 1957, 11). The human minddoes not simply recollect (using Lynch’s terms) the daily pathwaysand nodes of urban space as a sequence of cinematic images. On thecontrary, she argues, “imaginative vision” leaps “ahead of actuality”(Tyrwhitt 1957, 11). Just as films can present events and places of thecity as simultaneous occurrences, so is our mind “living in its ownworld quite removed from the scene around us, and our vision hasbeen set for our destination. Our eyes are therefore alerted for the sig-nals that guide us along the Paths and will herald the appearance ofthe Node. In effect we see it before it appears – we anticipate it” (Tyr-whitt 1964, 16). This energy of imagination and anticipation shouldnot overwhelm the phenomenological experience of the city. Tyrwhittis concerned that citizens have lost interest in the places in which theydwell. For city dwellers to engage and have a stake in the materialityand design of urban space, they must be encouraged to care about thedesign of their cities through better education, to be sure, but alsothrough new kinds of designed spaces that encourage an interactiverelation between environments and people.

In his essay for this collection, “Metaphor City,” Ben Highmoreargues that “cultural workers (academics working on urban culturalmatters, cultural critics, cultural producers and so on) might find thework that they can most productively contribute to the future of citiesis not to borrow the garb of urban planners but to work to find new,more productive metaphoric systems both for the city and within thecity. Indeed, it might well be that the most exciting cultural work onthe city is to be found precisely here at the level of supplying differ-ent representational systems for the city.” Kepes, Lynch, Giedion, andTyrwhitt put forward this very idea: that being good urban plannersmeans understanding the experience of the city, which includes itsdifferent forms of media and images. To stage an exhibition of LiveArchitecture in today’s urban landscape would require recognizing theextent to which technologies and images themselves are embedded inand take shape through the environment and its citizens.

10 Introduction

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The Explorations Group influenced numerous urban planners;among them was the Greek architect Constantinos Apostolos Doxi-adis with whom both Tyrwhitt and McLuhan collaborated. Doxiadisestablished Ekistics, the journal based on the science of human settle-ment (which Tyrwhitt edited for many years) and was interested inmapping, creating grids, and using film to represent the increasingcomplexities of cities in terms of networks. Doxiadis, a long timeurban planner and architect, was recognized in 2006 with a majorinternational exhibition of his drawings, maps, and films along witha major symposium on his ideas. This helps to redress the fact thatDoxiadis along with Tyrwhitt have been underexamined figures inurban and media studies. Indeed, as Stephan Kowal uncovers in hisessay on Doxiadis, we can learn much from his work about the possi-ble applications of digital media to the study of urban spaces.7

Henri Lefebvre provides another approach to mapping urbanspace, one that several chapters in our book discuss. From The UrbanRevolution, The Production of Space, The Critique of Everyday Life, Vol-umes 1 to 3, and the writings collected in Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre’sphilosophy has sought to integrate temporality into an analysis ofurban space. While he remained critical of Henri Bergson throughouthis life, it is not difficult to see how their approaches to time and dura-tion share much in common (Fraser 2011). Like Tyrwhitt, Lefebvresuggests a number of methodologies for studying urban space basedon the rhythms of machines and the rhythms of human bodies. IfDoxiadis presents us with grids and maps, layers of empirical infor-mation, Lefebvre’s approach is stubbornly phenomenological, impres-sionistic, and poetic. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis might help us tounderstand urban life precisely because there is, as with Tyrwhitt’surban experiments, a mixture of the human and non-human elementsin the analysis of rhythms. The traffic light, the sewage system, the sea-sons of the year are all interconnected and yet highly differentiated inhis poetic methodology. In Mediterranean cities, for instance, Lefeb-vre and Catherine Régulier notice that “the citizen resists the State bya particular use of time. A struggle therefore unfolds for appropria-tion in which rhythms play a major role. Through them social, there-fore, civil time, seeks and manages to shield itself from State, linear,unirhythmical measured and measuring time. Thus the public space,space of representation, ‘spontaneously’ becomes [a] place of prome-nades, encounters, intrigues, diplomacy, trade and negotiations, the-atricalizing itself. Time is hence linked to space and to the rhythms ofthe people who occupy this space” (1996, 237).


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Lefebvre is interested in the street party as a radical form of appro-priation, transforming exchange value back into a useful economy.Yet, fundamentally, he is also interested in human plurality and dif-ference. This is no doubt one of the strengths of his approach to theurban environment – city spaces are highly differentiated. There arecurrently several architectural projects underway at Delft Universityof Technology in the Netherlands and the Faculty of Architecture ethZurich that have been designed to experiment with empirical appli-cations of Lefebvre’s ideas. Ongoing international and interdiscipli-nary annual conferences in cooperation with the Delft School ofDesign and the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht) have sought todevelop new approaches to cartography (shared and iterative) anddesign spatial tools for the analysis of contemporary manifestations ofurbanization.

This turn to space is not new. As Nigel Thrift underlines, “I think ofGabriel Tarde’s micrometaphysics, Pitirim Sorokin’s forays into socio-cultural causality, Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geography, or AnthonyGiddens’s expeditions around social theory in the late 1970s and early1980s” (2006, 139). But in the twenty-first century, the study of spacehas been pursued with renewed vigor and creativity primarily becausethe interpenetration of spaces, especially via globalization, have madeit impossible to avoid. Researchers “must necessarily emphasize themateriality of thinking and include the study of material culture, thesociology of science, performance studies from dance to poetry, site-based art and architecture, various aspects of archaeology and muse-um studies, some of the excursions into interaction design, as well asvarious developments in cultural geography like non-representationaltheory” (Thrift 2006, 140). Thrift suggests an interdisciplinary frame-work for studying the character of these new spaces and experiences,as well as one that crosses research and creation, both traditionalmodes of social science research along with new aesthetic method-ologies developed in the fine arts.

Ash Amin has noted there is also a pressing necessity to considerthe ethical dimension that underscores questions of design and urbanpublic space (2008). Concerned with the relation between publicspace, civic politics, and democracy, he argues for the continuedimportance of shared public environments as a catalyst for politicalparticipation, for demos. However, his approach to thinking about thepublic is conceived from a post-humanist perspective. He is less con-cerned with the classical idea of the public sphere as a place where

12 Introduction

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strangers encounter one another than he is with “the entanglementbetween people, and material and visual culture of public space” (8).In a formulation that is reminiscent of Giedion’s call for an active cit-izen and Tyrwhitt’s interest in spaces that delight, Amin offers fourkeywords for analyzing the vitality of public space. The first is “multi-plicity,” which refers to the extent to which the space is open to theplurality and diversity of the world as well as an openness to themixed use of space. It refers to “urban inclusion” and “the right of themany to public space” (15). The second is “symbolic solidarity,” whichaddresses the manner in which space is open to the symbolic projec-tions not of the powerful (advertising etc.) but of the marginal, thatwhich speaks to tolerance (16). Third, “conviviality” refers not to pleas-ant social interactions but “the shared experience of the well stockedand sage park or street and community centre or library.” It is a “brushwith multiplicity,” not simply based “on interest in the possibilities ofserendipity and chance” that is an intrinsic aspect of multiplicity butof “the gains to be had from access to collective resources, the knowl-edge that more does not become less through usage, the assurance ofbelonging to a larger fabric of urban life” (19). Finally, there is “tech-nological maintenance,” which reminds us of Lefebvre’s urban rhy-thms – these refer to the fact that the city is a machine that regulatesand orders the life world: from “postcodes, pipes and cables, satellites,commuting patterns, computers, telephones, software, databases,” all“regulate urban provisioning by setting the delivery systems, internetprotocols, rituals of civic and public conduct, family routines and cul-tures of workplace and residence” (19). Citizens only notice thesestructures when they break down, but within them, Amin argues, wecan detect the manner in which certain people and things are valuedand serviced above others. These are a “technological unconscious,” toborrow Thrift’s neologism (2004), and they are laced with “identities,supply and functionality” (Amin 2008, 20).

Cities have come to be defined through cataclysmic ecologicalevents, instances of militarized space, or extreme acts of violence.These events provide a historical framework that allows us to discernthe nature of such events. One of the influential aspects of StephenGraham’s landmark book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urban-ism (2011) is precisely its focus on “urbanized militarism” – milita-rized urban space that is facilitated by the development of sophisti-cated tracking and surveillance technologies. Yet this phenomenon oftracking and surveillance, of the “e-border” is also a highly elaborate


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fantasy of Western supremacy that depends on the oppositionbetween the “capitalist heartland” of the Global North and the “colo-nial peripheries,” and often articulated by an opposition betweencities. Yet, as Graham argues, such oppositions are being completelyundone by investment and migration.

This interconnection between cities is examined in many of theessays in this book. Drawing upon the rich interdisciplinary insightsof urban sociology, many of the authors seek to engage with phe-nomena (from the favelas to Google Maps) in contemporary citiesaround the world. While Cartographies of Place examines some capitalsof modernity like London and Paris, these cities are analyzed in termsof global encounters and diasporas. In his essay, Markus Reisenleitner,for example, may well write about London, but it is London’s China-town marked by the “historical forces of movement and contamina-tion” that occupies him. As he writes, “My particular interest is in London’s imaginary negotiation of the British Empire’s connection to China, which imprinted itself on the Docklands/Lime House dis-trict.” It is precisely powerful popular narratives marked by culturaltrade, diasporas, and military conflict that are traced in numerousessays in the book devoted to case studies of localities in both heavilyindustrialized and developing countries. Justin Read’s essay on Rio deJaneiro is based on an “imitative modernity that was intended to‘cleanse’ the city hygienically of its tropical maladies.” Ian Robinson’sselection of “world cinema” films in this collection is concerned withmigration in the city of Fengjie, and the war torn borders of Nazarethand the West Bank. Robinson suggests how these places are formedthrough labour and militarization. Sharon Hayashi’s essay deals withcontemporary forms of anti-nuclear protest in the present reality ofpost 3.11 Japan “as the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, andnuclear meltdown.” Her essay traces new approaches to mapping col-lective actions by artists groups in Tokyo against the militarizationsupported by the right wing governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro.

CARTOGRAPHIES

The notion of “cartographies” recalls the writings of David Harveyand Doreen Massey whose work in critical geography is central to theproject of this book. According to Harvey, cartography “imposes spa-tial order on phenomena” and “in its contemporary manifestation …

14 Introduction

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depends heavily upon a Cartesian logic in which res extensa are pre-sumed to be quite separate from the realms of mind and thought andcapable of full depiction within some set of coordinates” (Harvey2001, 220). Yet Harvey argues eloquently for a new “cartographic con-sciousness,” traces of which are “writ large” in poetry and literaturefrom Shakespeare to Defoe. Reading such literature allows us to “seeourselves in a different positionality, within a different map of theworld” (221). From this understanding of cartography, “how urban lifeis experienced and practiced … has much to do with how we formand reform mental maps of the city” (221). The emergent field ofenquiry he envisages, which links geography with culture and mediastudies, is a point of departure for our book. Massey has equally chal-lenged conventional notions of cartography as a purely spatial cate-gory. Maps are not simply representations of space but of space andtime (Massey 2005, 108). Cartographic representations for Massey arethus connected to “space as a sphere of dynamic simultaneity, con-stantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be deter-mined (and therefore always undetermined) by the construction ofnew relations (107).

The objective of our collection is to bridge modernist and con-temporary perspectives of the cartographic and “navigating theurban,” especially the realm of navigation in a digital environment.Thus, our contributors ground and substantiate terms like “cartogra-phy” and “mapping” in specific practices. As Valérie November, Eduar-do Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour have argued, “the commonexperience of using digital maps on the screen, and no longer onpaper, has vastly extended the meaning of the word navigation” (2010,586). Indeed, these authors provide us with a definition of the newcartographic environments and differentiate between mimetic andnavigational systems, offering an explanation for why the cartograph-ic is (and has always been) such an important term for sense makingin the city. The ways in which the cartographic has moved beyondmere two-dimensional representations are well theorized by our con-tributors who offer multiple case studies of the ways in which mapsguide our knowledge of what constitutes urban territories and placesas much as our everyday activities or political action. Olivier Asselin,for example, engages directly with the theme of navigation via theinterplay between digital media and real locations, exemplified byalternate reality games (args). As args unfold in both mediated and


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physical contexts, they expand the so-called “magic circle” of gameplaythrough spatial, temporal, social, and technological frameworks. argsare thus involved with a contemporary transformation of our notionof “play” in terms of labour as well as strategies for revitalizing every-day life.

Jean-François Côté and Marie-Laurence Bordeleau-Payer in par-ticular challenge the belief that mapping merely defines the capaci-ty to delimit specific territories. Rather, they stress, “it has neverbeen as clear as it has now become that [mapping] was done for (andby) someone, or in other words, that ‘mapping’ always referred at thesame time to the drawing of both a subject and an object.” As theydescribe three different levels of localization (universal forms ofurbanity; the particular – one city among other possible cities; andsingular or specific places within a city), they note that “drawing car-tographies of each of these levels, from a person’s point of view,would certainly give way to quite different types of ‘maps’” that“would change from one individual to another.” They do not con-ceive of territories as static, immobile spaces, but as dynamic inter-actions between space and time; a territory is “a space that movesthrough time because of the places that constitute it,” a “mixture ofplaces.” Localizing the self within these urban territories is aboutnavigating the tension between the many “topologies” of the indi-vidual subject and the many “topographies” of the urban environ-ment. According to Côté and Bordeleau-Payer, “mapping, eventhough it is still a cognitive/normative/expressive process, has hence-forth less to do with representing a localization (which can nolonger be considered static) than with giving significance to a space-time experience (internally, locally or globally produced).”

There are excellent books on the city, excellent books on media, butfew that effectively bring these together. Works by urbanists oftentreat representation quite superficially, using films and other media assimply illustrative. Film and media books on the city often considermedia representations as narratives without offering insights into thecomplexity of the interface, without recourse to the actual environ-ment. Scott McQuire’s book The Media City: Media, Architecture andUrban Space (2009) was among the first to address the manner inwhich contemporary media and all variety of screen technologies(mobile, instantaneous, and pervasive) have transformed the distinctarticulation and experience of urban space. His book is exemplary ofa new direction in interdisciplinary scholarship and has provided an

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important starting point for the present collection. Cartographies ofPlace actively engages with the relation between image and place as anopportunity to get at the complexity and plurality of urban life. Wehave assembled authors with different approaches to the integral rela-tion between media (print, photography, radio, film, performance,and mobile/pervasive media) and the urban, so as to capture the het-erogeneity of cities. The book is organized around three conceptualnodes that encompass the image in terms of its capacity to createforms of “legibility,” “navigation” and “locale.”

LEGIBILIT Y

The first section on legibility is very much inspired by Kevin Lynch’sThe Image and The City in terms of how cities appear to us. Workingwith the idea of the mental image, legibility has both subjectiveaspects informed by personal memories and experiences and moregeneral characteristics – how they are designed, the kinds of commonsensations they impart. This section provides frameworks and vocab-ularies through which to perceive and analyze urban environments.These perspectives map not only a range of urban experiences, butalso research strategies: these are methods to orient the researcher andreader both in making sense of the urban and in carrying out urbanresearch.

Highmore’s notion that “the most exciting cultural work on the cityis to be found precisely … at the level of supplying different repre-sentational systems for the city” serves to anchor the project of thebook. This notion is explored through distinct metaphorical systems,from the medical understanding of the city to the suggestive rythm-analytics of Lefebvre. Rob Shields also focuses on the work of Lefeb-vre as a way of distinguishing between the urban and the city – theurban is a “diagram of forces” that are informatic, environmental, andeconomic. The urban is the shadow of the city not as adjective but as“a term tightly associated with the physical fabric of the city.” Thus, thefirst two essays in the book offer a vocabulary through which to beginto discern certain aspects of place – that is, aspects centrally concernedwith the relation between “fact and fantasy,” “the real and the possi-ble.” Mervyn Horgan examines another methodological tradition inurban studies that comes to us from the ethnographic work of theChicago School. He argues that the central though unacknowledgedmethodological principle that animated Chicago School work was


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serendipity. Drawing on figures both marginal and central to this tra-dition, he demonstrates how their use of multiple methodologies forunderstanding people and places as diverse as bohemia, juveniledelinquency, community conflict, and the immigrant experience arederived in large part from serendipitous and random encounters withthe objects of everyday life. Stephan Kowal takes a phenomenologicaltradition found in the work of Giedion and Tyrwhitt and extends it tothe invention of a new medium in the early 1960s, the cartographa-tron. The cartographatron was a hybrid machine that combined filmand video to create instantaneous maps of confluent movementsinside urban spaces. Doxiadis used this new medium in his architec-tural and planning designs, and developed discussions of this newmedium in the pages of his journal Ekistics as a means to understandcontemporary space in terms of overlapping networks and “lines ofdesire.” Such an approach to mapping grew out of the studies on per-ception of the urban environment that critiqued static and atemporalurban planning theories. As we noted earlier, Tyrwhitt, a long timeeditor of Ekistics, promoted an understanding of the dynamic mobili-ty and flux of urban spatial experience, which itself anticipated therhythmanalytics of Lefebvre and other twentieth-century thinkers.Finally, Saara Liinamaa seeks to map new ways of carrying out urbanresearch, which she finds in contemporary art practices. In her chap-ter, Liinamaa identifies four different “creative urban research types”:the flâneur, the ethnographer, the doctor, and the collector. Such typestake shape as artists work to document, experience, heal, and archivethe ever-changing terrain of the contemporary city.

Thus, each of the essays in this section help to provide a vocabularyand consider different methodologies for studying and understand-ing the New Landscape of the postwar city in Europe and the UnitedStates. This new heterogeneous landscape led to a sense of space,which was unbound, porous, complex, changing, and defined througha multiplicity of media and forms of human interaction.

NAVIGATION

The second section consists of concrete manifestations of navigatingdifferent urban experiences, temporalities, geographies, and subjectiv-ities. The writers in this section consider navigation through a varietyof technologies, including Google Maps, photography, cinema, alter-nate reality games, social media, fiction, and poetics. “Navigation”

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builds on the notion of “Legibility.” Jean-Luc Nancy in Le sens dumonde (1993) (The Sense of the World) reminds us of the twin signifi-cations of the word sens, which means both direction and the humansenses. This phenomenological and sensual aspect of navigation isinherent to the chapters gathered in this section. Côté and Bordeleau-Payer’s chapter considers the complex relations between individualsubjects and city life in terms of the capacity of virtual and actualactors to map their own self-identification. They question how thecontemporary city, through its many reflective surfaces and spaces,both actual and virtual, has become an environment in which self-observation increasingly structures personal identity. Asselin’s chapterexamines how such settings are the means through which alternatereality narratives and psychogeographic games are played out. Thesenew forms of cinematic writing are no longer contained in the moviehouse or in living rooms but unfold and are performed in situ, inactual urban spaces through the use of mobile, gps, and other net-worked media. Justin Read also explores the creation of worlds andspecifically the image of the so-called developing world in LatinAmerican cities. Read takes Rio de Janeiro as a site of global powerand traces the spread of globalization and concomitant spread ofpoverty in this region through contested media spaces. Read examinesthe ways in which images of police raids and attempts to consolidatestate control in the Complexo do Alemão have rendered this complexof favelas into spaces of both intensely local and global representa-tional force. Perceptions of identity and citizenship are contestedacross multiple and often conflicting media representations at theintersection of state sources, media conglomerates, and popular cul-tural sources such as the Voz da comunidade, a favela-based communi-ty newspaper that quickly embraced social media platforms. Focusingon a variety of textual materials from novels to works of urban soci-ology and policy documents, Will Straw’s chapter takes the urbannight as its subject matter. With particular attention paid to the tem-poral fabric of everyday life, he examines the ways that distinctionsbetween night and day are imagined in terms of “regions” or “worlds”within urban settings.

LOCALE

The final section of the book is devoted to the theme of “Locale”where the different elements of legibility and navigation are drawn


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together to explore how cities are both differentiated from one anoth-er and share common attributes. Logics of comparison and new kindsof epistemologies and cultures that arise from the encounters andcrossings between cities by way certain media (old and new) in thetransnational and translocal arenas. Authors examine the cultural cir-cuits, collective imaginaries, and technological infrastructures thatconnect cities. Markus Reisenleitner excavates concrete histories ofplaces that are connected through a shared history of colonialism.Calling upon a variety of materials from Hong Kong, Darwin, andLondon that imagine encounters with strangers, Reisenleitner’s chap-ter shows how the interconnectedness of these cities is revealed in theway encounters with strangers are imagined in literary texts and pop-ular culture. Sharon Hayashi’s contribution explores the cultures ofprotest in Japan taking as her focus a collective of young artists andstudents whose experiments with new modes of address and distribu-tion (from cell phones to YouTube) expand the concept of citizenshipbeyond the national. These new performative practices of streetprotest reimagine the body politic to encompass both site specificityand other cities across East Asia to create “translocal imaginaries.” Inhis contribution, Ian Robinson argues that the cinematic bordershould be read as both a paradigmatic site of contemporary global-ization and a critical site for the re-articulation of place as a dynamicand relational expression of identity. The border remains a highlyunstable and porous space whose contingency is manifested in itsidentity as a site of strict regulation and control. Through an explo-ration of the analogous forms of contingency found in geopoliticalborder spaces and the space of moving images as indices of the world,this chapter challenges the notion that places are fixed, static formsand that images are empty vehicles for representation. In graspingboth the cinematic image and the spatiality of place as relational enti-ties, new possibilities for living in a globalized world emerge. Closereadings of Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River (2008) and Elia Suleiman’sDivine Intervention (2002) propose a critical methodology for deci-phering the politics of place in contemporary world cinema. Focus-ing her study on Detroit and its twin border city Windsor, Lee Rod-ney shows how many artists, designers, and architects have exploredDetroit as an “urban experiment” rather than simply a failed utopia.As curator of the Border Bookmobile, a “travelling exhibition” aboutthe urban history of the Windsor- Detroit region housed in a 1993Chrysler Minivan, Rodney investigates the industrialized border

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region as a site of competing forces of globalization. Rodney’s Book-mobile is both witness to and participant in transforming the imagesof these cities.

Cartographies of Place foregrounds the important shift in represen-tational paradigms from a framework based on mimesis to one basedon navigation. The collection initiates interdisciplinary conversationsand research directions at this juncture where the image is activelytransforming the geography of cities. A new grammar will help us tobegin to unravel these cartographies and come to terms with theephemeralities and complexities of place.

NOTES


1 The Culture of Cities Project 2000–05 is a Major Collaborative Research Ini-tiative located at York University to compare the urban cultures of four sec-ond tier cities: Dublin, Berlin, Toronto, and Montreal.

2 See also Lynch 1990, 65–86.3 See Darroch 2008; Darroch and Marchessault 2009.4 “Script for the Town Planning Exhibition March 1950,” Papers of Jaqueline

Tyrwhitt, Royal Institute of British Architects, TYJ\14\7, riba British Archi-tectural Library Drawings and Archives Collection, London, UK.

5 Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 1960, Review of “The Image of the City, by KevinLynch,” unpublished manuscript version, MG 31 D 156, vol. 39, file 59, p. 2,Marshall McLuhan Fonds, Ottawa.

6 Ibid., 3.7 An extensive archive of Doxiadis’s architectural and urban planning

research of since the sixties is available online at http://www.doxiadis.org/ aswell as through the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives in Athens, Greece.

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22 Introduction

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Introduction: Urban Cartographies

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Transcript of Introduction: Urban Cartographies