Mapping complexity

It is really impressive how some old past ideas are still currently powerful as to feed research subjects.

Guy Debord's Naked City mapping: mapping fellings in 1957

Intelligent agent Vol. 6 No. 2 brought the article by Alison Sant entitled “Redefining the Basemap”. She discusses how new approaches about urban mapping, considering the city as a space of events could provide alternative mapping strategies. To do so, she starts focusing on the limitations of the base map models, which have not arrived in Brazil yet, as GPS-global positioning systems and mobile technologies to augmented space.

As a matter of fact, those technologies have already evolved to a use that considers a location-sensing process to create shared interpretation of urban space, escaping the margins of tourist guidebooks and visitor maps, enabling a collective and embedded memory through the representation of space by ordinary citizens. To understand this, for instance, think at Google map as a sort of resource which could be implemented by collecting information of denizens of a place, and including it as a resource to be consulted and used. But Alison comments that the Cartesian maps should be surpassed as common reference, layering collectively defined concepts of space, including emotions, itineraries and memories linked. Despite this, maps keep going as purely geographic categorization of urban space.

The cartographic conventions of the base map are expressions of a notion of urban space that favours the street over the route, the static over the temporal, and the formal over the subjective. The research in the field, however, focus nowadays on how to move beyond the grid of such representation, and to enlighten it, Mirjam ask some questions:

• Firstly, can we consider mapping the city through its use patterns, rather than illustrating it as an assembly of static landmarks?
• Is it possible to invert our notion of the city to foreground the fluctuating patterns of occupation and abandonment?
• Is it possible to repopulate the map to emphasize the rhythms of urban life rather than just the spaces in which they occur?
• Can we use wireless technologies to reflect back on themselves, revealing the emerging hybrid landscape of the material[ as WiFi nodes are installed, wireless devices deployed, and adhoc networks formed?
• Finally, how should we associate the ephemeral events of the city in order to understand them as an evolving set of relationships?

Alison concludes that there is still the need of very much challenging cartographic assumptions in mapping the city, in order to create a tool to help amplifying the urban life and permitting strategies to represent temporal variables.