Thanks Deirdre for bringing your situationalist map to the discussion, I found an image of it on the web and thought it worth posting.
The linearity of the routes reflects the french love of axes and in particular Hausmann's reconfiguration of Paris between 1848 and 1871. These were both revolutionary years, and the streets of Paris were ripped up to make barricades. Hausmann's scheme was designed to make it easier for the police to control the streets by having straight wide boulevards that they could sweep down and overcome.
The linearity of the routes reflects the french love of axes and in particular Hausmann's reconfiguration of Paris between 1848 and 1871. These were both revolutionary years, and the streets of Paris were ripped up to make barricades. Hausmann's scheme was designed to make it easier for the police to control the streets by having straight wide boulevards that they could sweep down and overcome.The situationalists loved the older parts of the city that had escaped reconfigeration and took great pleasure in their gothic street structure and ambience. Guy Debord produced a very famous artpiece/map called the 'Naked City' which gave a different description of Paris:
Debord was trying to capture the experience of the place rather than just the spatial functionality.
The situationalists has roots in the art group CoBrA which included Aldo Van Eyck amoung it's members and through Van Eyck had links to Team X and the Independent Group (The Smithsons, Reyner Banham etc..) in London. The Smithsons were interested in essences of places but rather disappointingly proposed replacing places with clusters which were designed to capture these essences. Robin Hood Gardens in East London is one of their housing schemes:
The Situationalists fundamentally disagreed with the Independent Group over this approach however traces of it can be detected in situationalist architect Constant's project for a city called 'New Babylon' (fragment below):
An interesting TED talk www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_the_art_of_roughness.html
ReplyDelete“Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules repeated without end”
Benoit mandelbrot
He is interested in fractals which deal with scale, boundary/ edge ,patterns and complex geometry of apparent chaotic systems which are in fact governed by simple generative rules.
It ties in closely with ways of seeing or looking at permanence and temporality where, in this case, the context is not space but time and there is also a relevance to mapping in terms of finding the governing rules as opposed to imaging the resultant of the system.
When looked at from a distance, in time, the apparent static nature of some systems (mountains, coastlines) are actually dynamic and the converse is also true in that systems which look chaotic and dynamic (patterns of movement in the city ) are actually cyclic, largely unchanging and predictable when looked at over longer time spans.
So we might say that everything is static at near finite time scales and ,at the same time, everything is dynamic at the other end of the scale, what happens in the middle I’m not sure but it seems to follow that neither the permanent nor the temporal are binary in nature but located on a scale wherein various stages of being exist.
I see the relevance of all this to new ground in that we can think of the city operating on a multitude of scales, both physically and temporally and maybe it is the intersection of these that we could think of a strategy for urban living where stasis and dynamism not only coexist but are co-dependent and actually different stages of the same thing.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
ReplyDeleteAn interesting link I stumbled on. It's kind of a cross between wikipedia and google maps. Contributers can change and edit maps, creating a "subjective" map. I was also looking at Debord and his idea of psychogeography and this could almost be seen as a contemporary version of debord's psychogeographic map.