Mapping Urbanities

Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities

Kim Dovey, Elek Pafka, Mirjana Ristic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315309156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

What is the capacity of mapping to reveal the forces at play in shaping urban form and space? How can mapping extend the urban imagination and therefore the possibilities for urban transformation?

With a focus on urban scales, Mapping Urbanities explores the potency of mapping as a research method that opens new horizons in our exploration of complex urban environments. A primary focus is on investigating urban morphologies and flows within a framework of assemblage thinking – an understanding of cities that is focused on relations between places rather than on places in themselves; on transformations more than fixed forms; and on multi-scale relations from 10m to 100km.

With cases drawn from 30 cities across the global north and south, Mapping Urbanities analyses the mapping of place identities, political conflict, transport flows, streetlife, functional mix and informal settlements. Mapping is presented as a production of spatial knowledge embodying a diagrammatic logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived, revealing capacities for urban transformation – the city as a space of possibility.

1Mapping as Spatial Knowledge

Kim Dovey, Mirjana Ristic and Elek Pafka

This book explores the role that urban mapping can play in showing how cities ‘tick’. What is the capacity of mapping to reveal the forces at play in shaping urban form and space? How can maps gear spatial analysis to planning and designing? How can mapping extend the urban imagination and therefore the possibilities for urban transformation? Beyond the visualisation of data and with a focus on urban scales, this book explores the potency of mapping as a research method that opens new horizons in our exploration of complex urban environments. While GIS and other digital technologies have long transformed the capacities for representation of urban data, here we explore the capacity of mapping to produce new ways of seeing, understanding, planning and designing the city. Our primary focus is on investigating urban morphologies and flows within a framework of assemblage thinking (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). With cases drawn from urban design research, the book variously analyses the mapping of place identities, political conflict, transport flows, streetlife, functional mix and informal settlements. We argue that urban mapping is a form of spatial knowledge production that is often diagrammatic, embodying a spatial logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived; and it can reveal capacities for urban transformation – the city as a space of possibility.

A map is a graphic representation of the spatial arrangement and distribution of a territory; a lens through which we see the city. We use maps as tools to navigate, control, understand, imagine and transform the territory of the city. Navigational maps are wayfinding devices that we use to become oriented, to move and interact in urban space. Maps are also rhetorical: they construct places as they represent them (Wood 2010). They involve selecting, omitting and coding data, which can frame spatial narratives and construct mythologies that shape our worldview. Tourist maps become incorporated into marketing, particularly in orienting the tourist gaze and constructing place identities. Maps can be hegemonic discourses that shape authorised ways of seeing the city and sustain conventional political ideologies and conceptions of place (Harley 1989; Wood 2010). They can operate as part of what Foucault (1980) terms a power/knowledge regime wherein subjectivities and spatial practices are produced through disciplinary technologies. The codified and standardised knowledge embedded in maps regulates, normalises and disciplines relations of people to place. Maps are at once social products and also tools for the social construction of cities. They mediate state power over territories and populations through the ways they define spatial boundaries or set urban regulations and limitations (Wood 2010). Spatial data can be manipulated to justify political conflict or to naturalise social exclusion by omitting places identified with the ‘other’ (Peluso 1995). Digital mapping technologies are forms of military intelligence crucial for both establishing and stabilising state power (Adey et al. 2013; Weizman 2003).

Conversely, maps can also operate as empowering counter-images that expose conditions of violence, poverty, pollution and inequity. Counter-maps are forms of alternative cartography that expose what official maps have camouflaged or omitted. Their significance lies in the way in which they frame a contested version of knowledge, asking the subject to look at the existing world anew (Wood 2010: 115). Counter-maps can be used as a resource for intervening in urban development processes or contesting dominant representations of place, ideologies and power relations. Situationist mapping was a reaction against modernist urban plans; psychogeographic mapping incorporates street-level perceptions and experiences of urban space (Sadler 1999). Weizman (2003) has shown how Palestinian maps can uncover an Israeli geopolitical strategy of territorial fragmentation. Counter-mapping thus becomes a tool of empowerment – often using a top-down technique to reveal a bottom-up reality.

Mapping can also become an artistic practice – a form of spatial imagination detached from the functional representation of a particular territory. The map as art is a field in which the graphic representation of a territory is deployed as a mode of aesthetic production. Rather than representing an existing world, the map becomes a window to an imaginary world while drawing on our understanding of the territory for its potency. Such vision becomes relatively detached from any logic of objectivity or practical use for navigation, design or planning – the map as a means of navigation or knowledge production is replaced by the map as an end in itself. The potency of such aesthetic production lies in the capacity to challenge existing conceptions of a territory and to open new ways of seeing and imagining (Gandelsonas 1991; Harmon and Clemans 2009). While ultimately it is difficult to draw a clear line between the map as a form of art and/or knowledge, the map as art primarily works to produce desire rather than spatial knowledge.

Research Mapping

The focus of this book is on mapping as a tool for urban research – as a practice through which researchers and built environment professionals gain a deeper understanding of how the city works and how it might be transformed through urban planning and design. The increasing availability of spatial surveying, data processing and visualisation tools in recent years has led to a remarkable proliferation of diverse types of research maps that are used to analyse and rethink various aspects of urban space. These include maps as tools for comparative morphological analysis (Jenkins 2008; Firley and Stahl 2009; Graves 2009; Mueller-Haagen et al. 2014; Wolfrum 2015; Mantho 2015). The ubiquity of colour visualisation has opened new prospects, enabling a far greater nuance and potency of visual representation and understanding. The difficult distinctions between various hatching patterns in the works of the urban morphologists of the 20th century (Conzen 1981; Muratori 1960; Moudon 1986) are now easily overcome with the use of colour.

A major transformation in professional mapping has long been underway through the emergence and development of GIS – digital technologies designed to harvest, manipulate and display complex spatial datasets (Tomlinson 2013). Here the cartographic interface is utilised to extract and juxtapose diverse layers of spatial data – material, social, environmental, economic and political. GIS enables an active engagement with a broader range of objective and reliable data for gaining a deeper understanding of the current performance of the city and its future transformation (Maguire et al. 2005). A key potential of computer-aided mapping technologies lies in the capacity to develop a better understanding of cities as complex adaptive systems (Batty 2013; Hillier 1996; Portugali 2000). However, as the name (geographic information system) suggests, GIS deals primarily with data at a geographic scale and less commonly with morphological urban design data.

Assemblage Thinking

Our investigation of the role of mapping in understanding complex relations between the spatiality and sociality of the city is grounded in a way of thinking about the city that can be termed assemblage thinking, primarily developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in the book A Thousand Plateaus. Assemblage thinking is a practice of looking for relationships rather than simply looking at things; seeking to understand how urban alliances, synergies and symbioses work. It has been developed as theory by DeLanda (2006; 2016); Dovey (2016); Farias and Bender (2010); McFarlane (2011); McGuirk et al. (2016); Müller (2015); Rankin (2011); Sendra (2015); Simone (2011); and Wood (2009). It has been variously identified with ‘relational’ (Jacobs 2012), ‘material’ (Rydin 2014) and ‘non-representational’ (Anderson and Harrison 2010) turns in social theory. Assemblage is a means of engagement with the world more than a formal theoretical discourse. One of its lessons is that a focus on theory as the end rather than the means of urban engagement can inhibit one’s thinking.

A brief introduction will stress that an assemblage is a whole whose properties emerge from interconnections, interactions, flows and synergies between different parts (DeLanda 2006). The places, buildings, neighbourhoods and identities that are the most visible parts of cities are the emergent effects of these productive processes. Assemblage is a way of understanding the city as produced by multiple desires and at multiple scales – both top-down and bottom-up. The Deleuzian ontology is one that seeks to understand morphogenic processes through which forms come into being. Unlike a ‘system’ that implies hierarchy, assemblage thinking assumes what is often called a ‘flat ontology’ (Marston et al. 2005) – an arrangement, alignment or patterning of interconnected entities without any natural hierarchy. A city is a socio-spatial assemblage of territories that have been produced through underlying morphogenic processes. It follows that urban mapping involves a task of revealing the dynamics from which these actual territories have emerged. Assemblage thinking also involves a key distinction between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘actual’; the city that has been ‘actualised’ is only one version of what is possible. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 12) distinguish between a map and a tracing: tracery is a simple reproduction of the real while a map engages with possibility and capacity. Yet mapping that loses contact with the empirical world also loses potency; maps are formed from a multiplicity of tracings. While urban mapping begins with the territories (buildings, streets, practices) of the actual city, it can involve an excavation of the virtual to expose what DeLanda (2011) calls a ‘space of possibility’.

Assemblage is a theory of power with its roots in the Foucauldian critique of power as embodied in micropractices, as distributed and capillary rather than simply held. The Foucauldian apparatus of the panopticon is a key source and model of an assemblage (Deleuze and Parnet 2007; Deleuze 1988), yet Deleuze and Guattari exploit this revolution in thinking about power for its emancipatory potential as well as its critique of disciplinary control. It is axiomatic to assemblage thinking that power is distributed and embodied in material spatial arrangements as well as human agents. This is not a displacement of human agency but a recognition that power is produced and practised through the materiality and spatiality of the city. Power is slippery and hidden – part of the task of mapping is to expose this to be the case while acknowledging that mapping is also a practice of power.

The seminal work in mapping from an assemblage perspective comes from Corner (1999: 214), who discusses mapping as a creative agency that produces understandings of “the various hidden forces that underlie the workings of a given place”. He proposes forms of rhizomic mapping where even the most un-mappable aspects of a place may be revealed by establishing connections between layers of data. He suggests three key aspects: ‘field’, ‘extract’ and ‘plotting’. The field is the surface or analogic ground on which mapping takes place, the conceptual framework within which projection, scale and orientation are organised. Extracts are the layers of data that are observed, selected and represented. Plotting is the experimental practice of creating new relations between extracts. Using the language of assemblage theory Corner suggests that selected layers of data are deterritorialised through being ‘extracted’ from the actual territory, then reterritorialised within the ‘field’ through the act of ‘plotting’ (Corner 1999: 230). The task of plotting is to “reveal, construct and engender latent sets of possibility” (Corner 1999: 230). While Corner’s critique is crucial and insightful, his published maps are often collages that incorporate photographs and become ambiguous images that slip between spatial knowledge and art/design, between the map as means and as an end in itself (Corner and MacLean 1996).

Diagramming

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987) the map is a partial synonym for the diagram, also known as the ‘abstract machine’. A diagram is not an ideal or model from which the city has been assembled, nor is it a formula that is applied like a design technique. Rather, a diagram is the set of productive relations between forces that is immanent to an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 164). An example here is the dumbbell diagram of two attractors connected by a pedestrian shopping strip that is embedded in the spatial structure of shopping malls to stimulate consumption (Dovey 2008). This diagram, which relates attractions to flows, drives a multiplicity of urban projects from airports to waterfronts. Another example is the diagram of asymmetric visibility that Foucault (1977) identifies as the panoptic disciplinary gaze. This is a diagram of power relations embodied in the spatiality of prisons, hospitals or schools. Diagrammatic thinking meshes well with urban thinking because it can show the ways in which a city works, abstracted from the particularities of singular places yet geared to the sociality, spatiality and temporality of the city (Dovey and Pafka 2016). The work of many seminal urban design theorists, such as Sitte (1889), Cullen (1961), Lynch (1960) and Alexander (1965), is punctu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Mapping as Spatial Knowledge
• Part I Capacities
• Part II Flows
• Part III Territories
• Index