James Corner Field Operations

Mapping and Diagramming the City:

Rethinking cities in the 21st century: in the wake of chaotic growth and universal expansion of cities and megacities around the world.

We need to become experimental by playing with different ‘models’ and methods of studying the city

Mapping and diagramming are two methods of exploring the open-ended complexity that is descriptive of the contemporary urban terrain.

But what is a map and what is a diagram? How is information represented?

Diagrams: visualization can play a key role in the processes of understanding that take place before form-making begins. [Diagrams” Visible Language 26, 3 & 4 (Summer/Autumn, 1993): 451 – 73. Vijay K. Sivasankaran and Charles L. Owen, “Data Exploration: Transition Operation in Dynamic ]

Tufte made Minard’s “Figuration Map famous in his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It shows the successive losses of men in the French army during the Russian Campaign 1812 – 1813. It took him a long time to assemble the data: city data, temperature data, the army data [survival, direction of movement, group] simplifying all events; utilize thickness of lines to represent overall troop size therefore correlating troop movements with temperature, and survival rates as well as direction of advance or retreat.

Flowchart: It was John von Neumann (1903 – 57) who identified the key components of the computer as an information processor. (central processing unit, memory to store information, and an input/output device for bringing information into and out of the machine)

He also developed the ‘flow diagram’ that charts the course of information transfers and operations

Flow charts are dynamic and narrative: they describe an actively pursued process with a clear beginning and -- a sequential progression towards a specified goal.

In a directed graph the relations between points, the flows of energy or the circulation of things between points is the issue: be they goods, people, vehicles, soldiers, or flows of water, energy, messages and information.

Mapping the Urban Network:

The Tabula Peutingeriana or Peutinger Map is a thirteenth-century reproduction of one of the wonders of Roman geographical scholarship, a map showing the world from Morocco, Spain and Thule (?) in the West to India and Sri Lanka in the East. The most remarkable part is the depiction of the main roads of the empire

One of the oldest flow charts is the Peutingeriana map laying out roads between cities --- depicting a Roman postal system. Rome was the axis of this entire system of intersections. Only one level needed since no other system intersected this one

Harry Beck’s map depicts stations, straight line segments connecting them, and the River Thames; lines ran only vertically, horizontally, or on 45 degree diagonals. To make the map clearer and to emphasize connections, Beck differentiated between ordinary stations (marked with tick marks) and interchanges (marked with diamonds). The Underground was initially skeptical of his proposal — it was an uncommissioned spare-time project, and it was tentatively introduced to the public in a small pamphlet in 1933The basic design concepts have been widely adopted for other network maps around the world, especially that of mapping topologically rather than geographically.

Rome of Sixtus V (1585 – 1590)

Medieval Rome was a place of pilgrimage – not a large city but a city of disorderly streets and meanderings ways. Sixtus V ploughed straight new streets through old neighborhoods and open countryside to provide links between the major sections of the city where the major basilicas lay: to facilitate the movement of pilgrims between the major religious sites and to accommodate the new mode of travel by coach, and to allow goods and services to flow more freely through and about the city,

In the Renaissance mathematics begins to rule the figuration of the city – linear perspective and the grid effect of cartography control the accuracy of the view in this ideal city c 1470 [National Gallery Urbino]

-A perspectival grid and outlines of buildings in minute detail with bilateral symmetry--A utopian view: an urban order ruled by the principles of linear perspective based on horizontal lines, vanishing and distance point and the resulting grid of orthogonals and horizontals.--the urban environment is given center stage: considered utopian because the idea of implementation was an unreal expectation, it was merely visionary of what might happen one day, when perfection could be attained.

Leonardo da Vinci’s 1502 Map of Imola: based on the use of a horizontal surveying disk which allowed for accurate measuring of spatial dimensions of land and its objects. One of the first scaled and accurately measured maps from the Renaissance.

It is a mathematical abstraction of spatial reality.

Called ichnographic city plan from Greek “iknos” meaning tracing or outlining and “graphein” to write.

Isotropic space; uniform and continuous in all directions – utilizing a plurality of hypothetical viewpoints all drawn perpendicular to the surface of the map. The city plan becomes the mode of cartographic documentation for the subsequent representation of European cities.

Kleanthes and Schaubert’s First plan of Athens 1833

Charles Booth’s London Map (1899) color-coding of social classes in London -- yellow is upper middle and upper classes, red is middle and well-to-do class, pink is fairly comfortable , good earners, and blue is poor…. Black is ‘criminal class’ of slum dwellers

These maps accompanied Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London (1899) the first systematic a block by block investigation.

There appears to be a relative amount of mixing of classes across the city with poverty concentrated near the river Thames and great wealth towards the West End of London.

London appeared to be unreadable, everything mixed up.

Maps determine the manner in which we perceive reality and hence influence actions.

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Airocean World Map of 1943: cuts the earth into triangular facets that are then unfolded as a flat polyhedron. Both northern and southern poles are presented frontally and with little distortion. The map can be unfolding and re-oriented in a number of different ways, Different places and regions are seen in different sets of relationships [James Corner]

Joaquin Torres Garcia Inverted Map of South America 1943. Places the south at the top of the map inverting the convention of map making established during the Age of Discovery, when the center of the earth shifted from the Mediterranean and the Holy Lands to the Atlantic ocean.

This map upsets normal view of the world map from a Euro-centric viewpoint.

The map of Paris, entitled “The Naked City” published summer of 1957, the creation of Guy Debord just before the Situationist International was formed. His concerns: how is space constructed and how does space affect the perception of users of urban space?

The Map: 19 cut-out sections of a map of Paris, printed in black and white ink with directional arrows painted in red. It subverts the image of a map, destroys the omnipresent view from nowhere – instead it tries to spatialize movement, actions around certain psychological hubs.

Illustration of psychogeographical turntables: describes the function of the red arrows by comparing them to a railroad turntable --- the arrows representing the spontaneous turns of direction taken by a person moving through ‘different atmospheres of Paris’, or any other city, in disregard to the normal connections that ordinarily govern one’s conduct. The railroad can only run on fixed tacks, so too the subject under the reign of capitalism, but turning tables or the turntable is also a pun on playing tricks.

Each segment of the map is a ‘unity of atmosphere’ , a place of special attractions --- The title in red letters is an appropriation of American film noir 1948 set in New York City and filmed in documentary style [director Jules Dassin] it starred the landmark streets and buildings so too the map’s cut-out segments star Luxembourg Gardens, Les Halles, Gare de Lyon, etc. ]

In 1955 the structure of Paris was an obstacle that offered tiny clues to a future organization of life.

The city map or city plan became an ideogram of how geometry measures and controls our perception of what is the ‘urban’, ‘the world’, the ‘cityscape’. Maps project a power/knowledge.

Now there are revisions to this process of mapping the city as a creative practice: replacing the map as a process that mathematically abstracts from reality with a process that engenders new ways of viewing and mapping reality.

Tracing Summer Jonathan Kline

Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of Mapping in A thousand Plateaus: 12 “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall. Conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.”

They oppose mapping to tracing [i.e. the ichnographic method]: the latter is closed in upon itself, propagating redundancies while a mapping is open-ended , experimental, unfolding. It reformulates what already exists: looking for hidden logics underneath apparent forces [not just topography, rivers, roads, buildings but wind and sun, local stories and historical events, regulatory forces and programmatic structures.”

James Corner states in the “Agency of Mapping” there is a double-sided characteristic of all maps to be both an analogue and an abstraction.

He notes “First, their surfaces are directly analogous to actual ground conditions; as horizontal planes, they record the surface of the earth as direct impressions. …. One can put one’s finger on a map and trace out a particular route or itinerary, the map projecting a mental image into the spatial imagination ….

By contrast, the other side of this analogous characteristic is the inevitable abstractness of maps, the result of selection, omission, isolation, distance and codification. Map devices such as frame, scale, orientation, and projection, indexing and naming reveal artificial geographies that remains unavailable to human eyes.” [Corner “Agency”: 215]

Thus a map is the surface where facts and conditions are collected, sorted, related to each other and explored.

Photo: Darrel Ronald

James Corner: operational structures of mapping

The Field:= a continuous surface, the paper on the table, any analogue equivalent of the actual ground flattened and scaled.

The Graphic System:= the symbols imposed on the field

The Extracts: things and events observed, selected and then drawn on the field

Plotting: drawing out new and latent relationships among the various extracts. “To plot is to track, to trace, to set-in-relation, to find and to found.” [James corner “Agency”: 230.]

FIELD OPERATIONS

Rem Koolhaas indirectly called for a new mode of mapping in the ‘Generic City’. “The stronger the identity [of a city], the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.…“ Koolhaas SMLXL: 1248.

Layering: superimposition of independent layers of information constructs a field/ site – in which notions of centering, bounding, finished product are gone. Instead open-endedness, indeterminacy, complexity allow many different interpretations.

Each layer has a system of organization, an array of overlappings or stacks of these layers creates a series of interactions or amalgam of relationships

Rem Koolhaas Yokohama mapping SMLX

Raoul Bumschoten and “Chora Manifesto” Daidalos 72 (1999): 42 – 51.

1st skin of earth wraps the earth, shaped by geological forces

2nd skin of earth are cities: this skin is so complex that we need a new tool box, a new practice to construct and manage cities. What forces shape the second skin? Need to understand these proto-urban conditions that are likened to emotions in human beings: subliminal conditions that strongly affect physical states and behavior.

“Love, life, weather and seasons ripple the second skin. But new techniques of knowing and moving create different ripples, pulses… The effect is a fluid urbanity hard to express through static models or identities. Increasingly, the city’s only definable form, its only clear identity, can be found in the manner in which its changes evolve.”

The Networked City

“It is not that networks were not around before or that the structure of the brain has changed. It is that network has become a common form that tends to define our ways of understanding the world and acting in it.” [Hardt and Negri, Multitudes]

Rethinking Networks: “Today the Mediterranean is no longer -if ever it was- a large and liquid "lieu de rencontre". It is no longer the generic space of a network of relations that unites distant peoples linked by a common geographical condition; the "cradle" of different yet connected cultures; a mobile and 'soft' area of hybridization, encounter, blending of traditions, cultures and costumes. The Mediterranean is today a hard, solid space, ploughed by precise routes that move from equally defined points: from Valona to Brindisi, from Malta to Portopalo, from Algeria to Marseilles, from Suez to Gibraltar.” [Multiplicities 2002]

Solid Sea and Multiplicity: From: "Stefano boeri" <s.boeri {AT} iol.it> 2002 SOLID SEA Documenta 11 - Kassel - June 8th until September 15th 2002 With “Solid Sea”, multiplicity intends to promote research into the new nature of the Mediterranean, and to draw out an up to date atlas of its landscapes and the turbulence that crosses it. The research on the “Solid Sea” starts introducing at Kassel “Solid Sea case 01 ¯ the Ghost Ship”, the first case of the new research.Multiplicity invites architects, artists, geographers, anthropologists, film makers to propose stories and “phenomena” about the recent conditions of the Mediterranean and to take part to the project.

Dear friends, We would like you to join us for a public seminar where artists, geographers, photographers, thinkers, architects, film makers, photographers, social scientists and curators will discuss at a roundtable the new conditions of the Mediterranean Sea. Taking Case 01- The Ghost Ship (produced on the occasion of Documenta 11) as a starting point, the new geopolitical asset of the Mediterranean Sea will be debated. Multiplicity: Stefano Boeri Maddalena Bregani Francisca Insulza Francesco Jodice Giovanni La Varra John Palmesino Palo Vari Maki Gherzi Giovanni Maria Bellu

Identities

“Today, whoever enters into Mediterranean acquires, even if temporarily, a stable identity: immigrant, fisherman, military, tourist on a cruise, oil derrick worker, seaside tourist ... the

costume will not be abandoned until the end of the journey across the water. Only � �afterwards is it possible to, once again, take up those uncertain, shifting and multiple identities that today characterise the citizens of the globalised world.

Not in the Mediterranean: you are either a tourist, or you are an immigrant; you either transport containers, or use dragnets; routes can cross, overlap, yet rarely blend. And if and when this does occur, it is only by accident: a short circuit that puts the different, yet coexisting, depths of sea into contact one with each other. Unforeseen events that suddenly unite distinct populations and isolated corridors : bombs dropped by NATO fighter planes and recovered by oil derrick � �workers on the floor of the Adriatic Sea; Asiatic mussels attached to the hulls of container ships; clandestine immigrants corpses found in the nets of Sicilian fishermen...�

Only then, does the Sea show itself in its three-dimensional power, in its immense and vague volume. A Sea that is able to cover up tragic stories for years and yet make them reappear by surrendering a small clue.

Today the Mediterranean is a Solid Sea where, with incredible growing density and often at various depths, the planned trajectories of exacerbated identities graze one another. A part of the world that appears to be counter-current.” [http://www.ecn.org/lists/hackit99/200208/msg00133.html]

Research network

In the 19th century “… the network became ‘the entanglement of objects dispersed in lines’ and the term would be applied essentially to railways, roads, and canals as well as the telegraph. Its meaning became fixed around 1849.” [Armand Mattelart]

The modern city is made up of intersecting networks ---[water, gas, electricity, cable, mail, telephone subways, bus lines, road systems, etc.] some transmit information, some energy -- but they all represent forms of information or communication.And there are networks between cities which overlap upon other networks --- railroads. highway systems, and inter- intra-city networks.

Manuel Castells has been studying the shift from industrial to postindustrial society--- and the creation of the network society where production depends on the ability to generate, process and apply knowledge based information systems. This mode of production again effects spatial relationships, power relations, and everyday experiences and sets up a new problematic: how to understand and describe the space of flows along a set of interconnected nodes, which results in the network society.

Mapping the flows of goods, people, diseases, and the like between cities and countries has long been an important part of cartography. If you look in any good atlas you will find a range of different flow maps, but what you won't see are maps of the communication flows of the Net. This is because no one really knows, comprehensively and reliably, how much information and communications flows between cities and countries and few people have tried to map these flows.

Look at any map of Europe, the space is divided into states, each clearly delineated by linear boundary lines and blocked out from adjacent areas by separate colors. In such a representation the state is a unified territorial concept, a spatial container of people and political authority. .

A network, on the other hand, configures countries as a flat horizontal field of circulatory movement: lines drawn across the land or through the air, flows of messages, people, or ideas across points in space.

So it is argued networks and processes have replaced older cartographic conventions of location analysis and fixity in place One group that tries to map the space of flows is TeleGeography producing this flow map of the Net based on the volume of international telephone traffic between nations.

Since the mid 19th century communications networks have spun ever larger cities and geographies with ever larger investments of physical capital: infrastructure in roads, bridges, skyscrapers, houses, cities and suburbs--- telegraph system, radio and television transmitters, cable and satellite TV, mainframe computers

Titan City 1920s

Cities and suburbs helped to create the mass media model of communication: spreading fixed costs over larger geographical areas to ever-larger audiences: TV series, recorded music, movies

The Internet radically changes the mass media model of communication --- there are thousands and thousands of independent producers of information, coexisting without knowing each other, yet their distributed unrelated efforts are coordinated --- through Google algorithm or some other algorithm – into a huge question and answer apparatus.

Wikipedia , for example, is a multilingual encyclopedia coauthored by 50,000 volunteers.

How does all this effect geography – or space and time? In the 1990s and the early 2000s, advances in computers and telecommunications, and the spread of the Internet, compounded the idea that distance and location were no longer relevant concepts. The 'end of geography' (O'Brien 1992), or the 'death of distance' (Cairncross 2001; The Economist, 30 September 1995), received front coverage from magazines and books. Cyber-utopianism even predicted the end of the city (Negroponte 1995).

“Mapping has emerged in the information age as a means to make the complex accessible, the hidden visible, the unmappable mappable. As we struggle to steer through the torrent of data unleashed by the Internet, and to situate ourselves in a world in which commerce and community have been redefined in terms of networks, mapping has become a way of making sense of things.” Janet Abrams and Peter Hall Else/Where: Mapping – New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006):

Using the map as an interface to geographic and other data sets – a visual bridge between disparate facts.

Where are you? -- iphone, blackberry, facebook – which space defines your location?

How is time, memory, emotion navigated via mapping?

Overview: “PDPal is an ongoing series of public art projects for the Palm™ PDA, mobile phone and the web. It has pushed at the notion of mapping, attempting to transform your everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. PDPal engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments. Your own city is the city composed of the places you live, play, work, and remember. It is made of the routes and paths through which you make connections. Your city is also about the meanings you ascribe to the places you inhabit, pass through, love or hate. You imagine those places and routes as more than a street address, or directions you may give. These places have vivid, metaphorical meanings and histories that PDPal allows you to capture and visualize imaginatively, effectively writing your imaginary city.”<www.o-matic.com/play/pdpal>

INFO “'Life: a user's manual' is a series of public performances and online mappings that examine the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they intersect with the visible world around us….Private use of wireless internet, cordless phones, Bluetooth and wireless surveillance cameras has turned the average consumer into 'micro-broadcasters' who transmit personal narratives through the airwaves. The culmination of these autonomous and synchronous acts contributes to an invisible, ad-hoc network of media overlaid within the socially codified spaces of urban environments, the café, the home, the apartment building, the office, the store, the bar, the hallway, the entrance, the parking lot and the street. “ <http://www.ubermatic.org/life>

Cinema and the City: the mobile camera, the editing techniques, narrative conventions, representation of space offer cinematic, televisual, video perceptions of the space of the city.

Cinema can be looked at as a mapping process: mediation of place, of spatial complexities, of conflicting information, of hybrid locations.

Maps also appear in most films and a film is a kind of mapping that plots and captures the imagination of the viewer. A film sets up ‘locational imaging’, establishing a fictional territory to explore – it is a cartographic diagram.