Cartographies

Cartographies projects

The individual cartographic projects shown in this section were made by each member of geopoliphonies, following an individual concern but a group methodology. The task was to produce a cartography out of an individual exploration of an urban space. We departed from the idea that on the one hand, maps are used to fix certain realities but on the other hand, mapping has the power to unfold certain realities and to contrast stability with instability. Each of us selected an area of interest, based on a previous theoretical research, and mapped, un-mapped or re-mapped the space, according to what we experienced through fieldwork, what we performed as urban explorers and what was being performed in the space we chose. The projects consist on an individual essay that accompanies theoretically the produced cartography.

Map construction of the Houses of Parliament in London organised against a scale of conceived, perceived and lived experience of time and space.
Shama Khanna

In this essay I contrast Bruno Latour’s notion of a map as an ‘immutable mobile’ with Tim Ingold’s conception of a map as a ‘vista’. The aim of this comparison was to produce a parallax view of different scales of time and space and combinations of the two. Foregrounding the notion of a partial or cinematic vista against the view-from-nowhere of orthodox cartography, I explore ideas of containment as well as the potential unboundedness of maps in helping to foster emergent subjectivities.

Download full text: The Cinematic Vista as a Model for Mapping the Milieu

Dalston Junction 2
Caroline Stevenson

This is a sonic cartography of Dalston Junction in Hackney, a site undergoing rapid transition into a new London Overground Station, pedestrian walkway, shopping arcade and high-rise residential accommodation. I was interested in capturing the day-to-day activity of the site happening alongside the proposed building plans and organised use of the space.

The mapping is in a series of progressive parts that stem from a sound recording of the various layers of movement through the space, which can be first be reformed as a spatial device by playing back the recording and therefore establishing a spatial experience of the site. From the recording, the specific tones of the sounds were identified and extracted and then transposed into a musical score. Next, the most common single tone was determined as both a description of the site and as a potential for plotting against sounds of other sites. The last part of the mapping is an instruction to play the musical score in another space, setting up the potential for mobility and interconnectedness with other places through de-territorialisation and de-personalisation.

This project aims to valorise individual experience, community histories and hidden narratives that are otherwise in the process of being emptied out through the regeneration of the area and instead proposes a transitive, nomadic and interconnected spatial representation of urban experience.

Antiterrorism cartographic project
Marimar Suarez

Considering that maps don’t represent reality but create it and that they are social constructions used by its authors to produce the world they want its users to believe in, I created this map as an extension of the security paradigm on which the State legitimates and consolidates its existence.

My objectives are to make evident the level of surveillance that takes place in three different areas of London, chosen for being all touristic but very differently inhabited (around Liverpool Street Station, around Kings Cross Station, and around the Exhibition Road); to present an ironic image of security playing with security signs that, in my opinion, contribute to construct a paranoiac society, in order to suggest that the security strategy followed by Nation States, in particular the United Kingdom, is based not on the real necessity of protecting the society against terror but on the necessity of justifying its existence, when the State is based on the Monopoly on the use of force.

I am proposing this map as another tool for the State to use in its strategy for convincing the society that terror is out there and that surveillance is needed to preserve order and security, to make evident that in the same way that the maps operate, a reality of terror is being created through the security signs campaign.

The map proposes an ironic reading of the security campaign and its correspondent paranoiac society, where the use of signs and warning notices is needed both to discipline and to convince the people that the State is required. This is the mechanism through which terrorism as a permanent menace in contemporary London could be read as the tool to produce normality and guarantee stability.

December 2008, Athens
Lena Theodoropoulou

In December 2008 there were some major riots in Athens. For almost ten days the city was in flames and the situation was out of control, while the whole period of instability lasted for about a month. Everything started when a sixteen-year-old boy was shot dead by a policeman of the Special Forces. There are many facts that could place this event in the sphere of predictability. First of all, the extreme exercise of violence from the part of the police had been an issue for many years. There have been many cases of walloping - especially during demonstrations - and in all those cases the policemen remained unpunished. In addition to that, the majority of the citizens that have happened to confront the Special Forces or the riot police are very well aware of the fact that the political convictions of the people that constitute these forces are quite close to the discourse of totalitarian States. Finally, this same policeman that provoked the event had declared to his colleagues that he would not tolerate any “young anarchists” making fun of him and he would rather shoot them. In spite of all these facts, the event was regarded as unexpected.

Download full text: Athens 2008

What is happening down by the canal?
Alice Lobb

Philosophical thought concerning the nature of maps is of tremendous importance because it dictates how we think about, produce and use maps; it shapes our assumptions about how we can know and measure the world, how maps work, their techniques, aesthetics, ideology, what they tell us about the world, the work they do in the world, and our capacity as humans to engage in mapping.1

Traditionally maps have been projected as a 'view from nowhere' produced objectively as a tool for way-finding. Recent cartographic practice and theory has countered this traditional view, demonstrating that maps seek to 'stabilise' the subjective views of the map maker. Read as a text they unfold to communicate the intentions of the map maker and destabilise the certainties the map seeks to project. This theory of map making and the increased accessibility to information in the last twenty years has opened up the process of map making to become a more embodied practice in which counter cartographies are able to challenge the status quo.2

Hackney Wick, Leyton, Bow and Stratford are areas of London at the heart of the capital's plans for the 2012 Olympic Games. The Olympic planning departments have produced numerous papers, studies and maps of plans for the games and its legacy that aim to demonstrate how they will 'enable social cohesion, and social, economic and environmental regeneration in one of the most underdeveloped parts of the UK.'3 As a Hackney resident I have been aware of the anticipation of the Olympics and the support and opposition it has inspired throughout the bid and the beginning of the building process.

As Olympic plans seek to 'stabilise' the area they face opposition from local and national individuals and groups, their grievances expressed in discussion groups, web blogs, websites and press. Within this context this mapping project aims to combine these different viewpoints in order to mediate between them and offer an arena for new possibilities to unfold. The focus of this project is on a section of the canal that runs between the local housing and businesses of Hackney Wick and the new blue fence that marks the border of the Olympic construction site to create a map that brings together different visions for the area.

1 Kitchen, Perkins, Dodge Thinking about maps, 2008 (Unpublished)

2 The stabilising nature of maps is discussed in detail in Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, Guilford Press, 1992. I will come on to discuss some of these details within this text.

3 Full details of the planned legacy at http://www.london2012.com/plans/sustainability/legacy/index.php

The Mapping:
Adam Elias

...interaction leads to the revealing of previously hidden codes. When making connections with instabilities; codes that had mimicked stability through stasis begin to make visible new realities that had not previously become manifest through mere tracings of a site. One need not attempt to seek out meaning in such codes, symbols or values. Moreover, it is imperative to observe their function and interconnectedness with others.

The sphericity of the Earth is flattened out for our convenience, to massage the understand of the plane upon which we sit. Key to mapping is re-presenting the reality that one’s senses absorb, as opposed to merely tracing a map of what one knows to be true. Keenness to practice the sphericity of the Earth should not neglect the ‘I’. Diligent and conscious mapping must become a residue of what the senses see, hear and feel. Tracing does not let one to see; it merely re-presents that which others have discovered.

In the pursuit of plotting pertinent instabilities against the stabilities that have risen from mapping, and to retain and reflect the sphericity of the Earth, a disc is created. In doing so, one begins to see the re-coding of that which has been un-pieced. In order to reflect the sphericity of the world, various discs become pivoted through a central axis.

This axis embodies the ‘I’ within the map, thus cementing its part as central to the mapping process. James Corner reflects that the privileging of actions and effects over representation and meaning;

“...emphasises probing practices of interpretation that extend previous products of culture...towards more diverse and interconnected fields of possibility, their ‘becoming’ bodies-forth through various acts of mapping and relating”

Concern that the mapping process would result solely in a work of fiction subsides here and is replaced by the understanding of how fiction can stage the conditions for new realities that have come about through selection, prioritisation and a careful contextual framing of a map.

New realities become created where the discs of the map dissect each other. Multiple segments create dissections, each with their own horizon line. These new pocket realities are not only self contained and part of a wider (disc) reality, but also provide many entryways and exits coveted by the rhizome. These ‘lines of flight’ allow for many varying readings, uses and effects.