Urban Drifting: An Approach to City Comprehension and Mapping (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: ‘Travelling the Urban Space’
New Readings, 2000
n recent years literary critics have paid as much attention to the City as to travelling. By bringing together these two themes, this volume seeks to avoid the restrictions of both historicity and spatiality. For this reason, the papers of the seminar series 1998-99 cover a variety of urban spaces, travelled at different times. The cities visited range from New York to Rome, from London to Berlin, from Paris to Montreal and Salt Lake City. The times of travelling span the late nineteenth century to the 1920s and 1930s and the immediate postwar years to the 1970s. The papers highlight diversity by taking their examples from literature in English, French, German and Italian. At the same time, they share a concern with the historical construction of space-whether analysing fascist or decadent, naturalist or realist, modernist or feminist texts. Charles Burdett's paper analyses some of the numerous texts written during the Fascist period on the United States by authors such as Ciarlantini, Mario Soldati, Margherita Sarfatti and Emilio Cecchi and demonstrates the different connections such texts have with the politics of the time.
Cultural Geographies, 2005
This paper addresses ways in which artists and cultural practitioners have recently been using forms of urban exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities. It takes its cues from recent events on the streets of New York that involved exploring urban spaces through artistic practices. Walks, games, investigations and mappings are discussed as manifestations of a form of ‘psychogeography’, and are set in the context of recent increasing international interest in practices associated with this term, following its earlier use by the situationists. The paper argues that experimental modes of exploration can play a vital role in the development of critical approaches to the cultural geographies of cities. In particular, discussion centres on the political significance of these spatial practices, drawing out what they have to say about two interconnected themes: ‘rights to the city’ and ‘writing the city’. Through addressing recent cases of psychogeographical experimentation in terms of these themes, the paper raises broad questions about artistic practices and urban exploration to introduce this theme issue on ‘Arts of urban exploration’ and to lead into the specific discussions in the papers that follow.
2013
All sort of comprehensions and reflections about the city have been getting nourished from a diverse set of artistic practices that involve the presence of the artist in the street; one of the prime examples might be the relation between the poet Charles Baudelaire and the philosopher Walter Benjamin, in regard to Paris in the XIX century. Later on, this dynamic relation between Art, Urbanism and Architecture could be observed significantly in the contributions from diverse expressions: Dada, Surrealism, Lettrist International, Situationist International, Land Art, Minimal Art. All of them having in common the presence of the artist in the public space who acts, either as catalyzer in charge of inciting processes of transformation, or as collector in charge of documenting them. These registries, through the light of history, would multiply and reveal all sorts of meanings. This relation between artistic practice and urban reflection might be located in what Heidegger describes as th...
Lea Valley Drift: paths, objects and the creation of urban narratives
Architectural Research Quarterly, 2014
This article considers the legacies of place revealed by critical walking journeys through the city and the potential for transforming their interpretation through the distribution of new forms of map. As Francesco Careri implies in Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, walking pre-dates the city and nomadism is the original condition of civilised living. Put simply, settlement is the process of civilisation becoming static.
Unorthodox Ways to Think the City (Representations, Constructions, Dynamics)
Routledge, 2018
This book argues that architecture and the city and their processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and urban cultural context. It performs an open intellectual reading that traverses architecture and architectural theory, but also art theory and history, cartography, philosophy, literature and cultural studies, to unfold a series of ‘figures’ that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in architecture and the city. The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Paradigm: Notes For a Definition of Architecture as Paradigm 3. Island: The Possibility of the City as an Island 4. Map: From Description to Making 5. Model: from object to process 6. Dust: From Form to Transformation
Walking with light and the discontinuous experience of urban change
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2020
This paper is concerned with the affective power of light, darkness, and illumination and their role in exposing and obscuring processes of rapid urban change. Little academic attention has focused on how lighting informs multiple, overlapping, and intersecting urban temporalities and mediates our experience of an ever-changing city. This paper foregrounds a walk through the illuminated city at night as an epistemic opportunity to develop an embodied account of material and temporal change in ways that disrupt the aesthetic organisation of the sensible world at night. By detailing the discontinuous experience of walking through differently lit spaces, the paper develops novel ways of conceptualising the experience of urban change that unsettle common understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and the city. The paper draws on a single night's walk from Canning Town to Canary Wharf in east Londonan area that has recently undergone rapid change, including the erection of enclaves of high-rise development. By accentuating the shared experiences of walking with light, we reveal the affective capacities of light and dark to conceal and expose wider material, embodied, and temporal urban changes but also how we might challenge the organisation of the nocturnal field of the sensible.
Mis-Guided Exploration of Cities: an ambulant investigation of participative politics of place
2007
That which changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than that which changes our way of seeing paintings ... (Debord 1957, 1 07) The politics of place and walking as an arts practice form the core concerns of my research. The research is being conducted with particular reference to the ongoing Mis-Guide projects, conceived and produced by the site-specific arts company, Wrights & Sites, of which I am a member. Our apparent rejection of performance-making for an audience has led to walking with spectators as collaborators in the work, and has made the physical journeys and verbal exchanges along the way an integral part of the practice. Through this work, which revolves around place, site-specific arts and urban walking, I am harnessing existing knowledge about cities as spectacle in the footsteps of the Flaneur, the Dadaist, and the Situationist and in recognition of contemporary works by artists who use journey and place as the text, reference points and resources tha...
Imaging and Imagining the City
2008
Our recent work has focused on the city as a site of interaction and, in particular, how emerging technological infrastructures provide an opportunity to re-encounter urban space. One of the starting points for this work has been a reconsideration of the forms of representation of urban space that typically support work in urban computing, what we might dub “cartographic realism”–a focus on traditional cartographic representations as a basis for mapping information resources, even when those extend beyond the visual.