Alternative Approaches to Urban Cartography

How was this map created? Explain your process

I began with a map of my neighborhood acquired from satellite images. I then traced all the possible routes from my house to school that would logically be taken. I overlaid the four routes that I take most often highlighting certain stops (attractors) along the way. Using control point curves I retraced the common routes to provide averaged lines--breaking free of the grid and seeing the paths only in relation to one another. I turned the two dimensional lines into three-dimensional tunnels to allow for more calibration. The shape and diameter of the tunnels are based on information about each attractor. The shape of the attractor is defined by its popularity and convenience. The shape of the attractor is blended with the shape of the initial position to create the overall shape of the path. The immediate area around the attractors is more intense and fades as the distance from them increases. The diagrams show perspective sections and elevations, details of the area around attractors, and some global visualization tools for conveying position.

Why have typical city maps failed to embrace the complexity of urbanism?

The bureaucratic regime of city and landscape planning, with its traditional focus on objects and functions, has failed to embrace the full complexity and fluidity of urbanism, and of culture generally. This failing results in large measure from the inadequacy of techniques and instruments to imaginatively incorporate the rich interplay of processes that shape the world.In asserting authority and closure, current techniques have also failed to embrace the contingency, improvisation, error and uncertainty that inevitably circulate in urbanism.While there is no shortage of theories and ideas for addressing this condition more critically, there has been very little development of new operational techniques for actualizing them. In other words, the difficulty today is less a crisis of what to do than of how to do anything at all. It is precisely at the strategic and rhetorical level of operation, then, that mappings hold great value.

What inspired this investigation?

As a theoretical framework, the project drew from Guy Debord’s concept of Psychogeography, how it was explored by the Situationists of the 1960s, and how it could be reconsidered at the beginning of the 21st century. The project also draws from tenets linked with the Surrealist movement, which was not simply an artistic avant-garde but a sub-cultural movement that sought to express pure psychic automatism, by any means necessary, regardless of moral or aesthetic preoccupations. The modern city transcends the design of any single author. We are only part of larger systems, and a part can never control the whole. It is architectures responsibility to understand the constant play of contrasts, diverging paths and infinite futures that comprise the city, and to celebrate this uncertainty as the very essence of life. The subtext of this proposed investigation is its capacity to change lives. Only after one has seen beyond the official representation of modernity—the spectacle—can the individual discover the authentic life of the city teeming beneath its facade.