the inverted panopticon

De Certeau begins with asking 'what is the thrill of experiencing the "totalizing eye"?': a privileged view of a cityscape that is itself a representation, a fiction of the real thing. (I think of our view of San Francisco from the 8th floor of Wurster--more clearly a fiction by all the fog that obscures it, a view that is different every time I see it). He declares the panopticon as fallacy, unable to see beneath the layer of the simulacrum, where the real identit(ies) of the city are played out. He then proceeds to unpack the semantics of walking, philosophizing upon what was laid out so poetically by Careri. He digs all the way back to the origin of our separation from the "maternal object", and thus the initiation of ability to observe as a completely detached point occupying no space (since as a child we still identify ourselves with the mother). Let's leave Freud behind and talk about what this means for our ambulatory investigations.

Our challenge, and I think it is a significant one, is to elevate ourselves from the realm of "urban practitioners", loosely defined by de Certeau as people who "write but do not read" the fabric of the city. We wish to elevate because we want not only the view but a glimpse of the governing order, to see the tropisms that make people move. The risk is that if we separate ourselves too far from the thickness of experience, the localizing forces that de Certeau argues are the actual space producing agents of the City will disappear. We risk becoming too much like the planner or cartographer who is concerned with norms and the homogeneous. It's our job to uncover Corner's "latent possibilities", and so how do we find them?

A walker generates possibilities, finds unseen shortcuts and writes space where none existed before (if you define space not as a totality but rather as an amalgam of everyone's perception of it). I agree with de Certeau here, and I think it is our object in this class, that by walking we can explore "unlimited diversity", question certainties, and trespass upon laws. The walker "defies the graphic trail", a trail which only represents the absence of something having passed by. This begs the question, what can the planner really know about the "practitioners" in a traffic diagram? By extension, what does the architect know about the occupant around which she fixes walls to make a space, placing windows here or doors there? That space is itself a myth, and only becomes real by the walker, in the present, who creates the space by moving across it. This is like Careri's 'territory of going', in which the citizen never 'enters' the city but only occupies a transitory space that occupies its voids.

While these ideas are fancy and inspiring, I still feel a little paralyzed about where the designer may begin. If we become ourselves the "walkers", we may see clearly for ourselves what latent possibilities exist for a site, drawing our own subjective relationships to the city, and we end up with a highly unique (and stylized?) concretization of an individual, highly localized truth. And we know too well the other, polar alternative. So what is the in-between plan of action, how shall we take our maps and our observations that we will get on the ground into an idea about building space?

p.s. I loved the metaphor of a worn coin to a place-name, that its value is lost but its ability to signify meanings far beyond its original intention persists. Perhaps there is some meat in there to satisfy my question...

On Top of It All (Certau)

Within the supposed form of proper meaning delineated by architects and urbanists, the act of distinguishing self by distinguishing that there are no distinctions is found. However, this may be a pretense, in that their mostly panoptic considerations of urban manipulation are almost always not misrepresentative of an attempt to explain or justify totalitarian control.

Furthermore, synecdoche and asyndeton explain that the running of a thousand shoes might impact the urban walkspace, but without linkages. But is this fragmented theory of representation the fundamental center of Walking in the City, or, for that matter, walking in the city? No. This is because these two phenomenons are in opposition, thinning and thickening simultaneously. Therefore they cannot form a coherent thesis together.

Therefore I posit that Certau suggests that opposing signifiers turn the city into a desert which is simultaneously disorienting and spelling out significations. The walkers follow these, even though in the end they are devoid of meaning. This is because functionalist totalitarianism attacks superstitions, exterminating any special places. Walking is the substitute for these legends (read as a widely distributed untruth, not a signifier).

In the end, the salvageable comprehension of the literary conflation of word and page is only the representation of a system of walking that comprises a (spatial) system for the city. The panoramic overview is an illusion. It is the trace of walking that becomes the imprint on the map. However, it is and is not permanent. On the one hand to be forgotten on the other leaving an indelible memory, much like the relationship of speech to conversation, where no trace but memory remains. This process can make or break a space based on a decision, but the palimpsest always remains.

Go Bears!

Needs Salt (Tufte)

In dealing with data representation, the Tufte piece makes strong points about mapping methodology and technique. He argues that the data maps are best when they are concise. He supports the idea that the focus should be content, not methodology or technique. His criticisms primarily relate to the lack of normalized data in the maps. In his discussion of the John Snow cholera map, he suggests the importance of discovery, and in the galaxy map discusses the possibilities that have been opened by mapping.

The maps he uses to illustrate his points attempt to display data in an unbiased manner, and Tufte seems to praise the effort. The flaws he identifies deal with statistical or representational inaccuracies. However, as we have discussed (but perhaps not agreed), no map is completely factual or unbiased. I also believe that calling attention to methodology and technique is an interesting way to open up a dataset or map, or statistic for that matter, to alternative interpretations.

BladeRunning (Careri)

Earlier notions of the periphery and collage, such as those defined by Joel Garreau or Colin Rowe, provided well defined characterizations of urban space, even though they broke with the standard definitions of 'urban'. It is interesting that the next step in this evolution is the nomadic space which is defined, or discovered, in various histories by visits, deambulation, drifting, and ‘zonzo’. The nomadic spaces discussed here are most compelling in that they no longer follow rules, and they appear, shift and disappear before they can be defined and cataloged. They are freespace, unconstrained, chaotic. On some level I’m reminded of our discussion last week about Nueromancer and other literature & film within the genre such as Blade Runner.

While these spaces are of great interest to me, I often find myself wondering if these are the type of places that should be celebrated. They often contain (as much as a nomadic space can ‘contain’) the darker side of the urban condition. While we may enjoy that this is the “last place we can feel we are beyond surveillance and control”, it is for this reason that criminal activity and human depravity can be dominant features. Do we embrace this? Try to change it? Could we even if we wanted to? According to Careri ‘nomadism’ is not anti-architecture. But we need to adapt, perhaps moving beyond conventional notions of site, program, and building (see standard thesis prep documentation). We would at least become part-time wanderers. Then there may be a place for us. If not, we could always just start writing about it.

Colors

I have talked with a some of you about the color situation, and I was wondering how everyone felt about trying out the black and white scenario as opposed to the CMYK. A few people agreed that it would be an interesting challenge. Votes?

pure CMYK colors

Folks, some of you may have figured out how to get the pure CMYK colors (so that our maps will POP out so much Nicholas will have to run and hide!), but here is how to do it:

When you are selecting a color (for any symbol or whatever, it doesn't matter), choose More Colors..., then there is a little black arrow at the top right. Click on that, and change the sliders to CMYK sliders. Then you can maximize each hue and, this is important, SAVE the color by clicking on the arrow again. Now when you go to choose colors, you will have your new saved colors in the top left.

keyboard customization in arcmap

Has anyone tried yet to customize gis commands on the keyboard?

If you go to Tools>Customize, then Commands tab, then click on Keyboard..., it gives you the option to add shortcut keys. However, I have only been able to add ctrl + __ and alt + __ commands. It would be nice to have commands as in rhino or cad where you just enter a letter. There is a command line though it doesn't seem to work as easily as in CAD.

happy mapping.

good thoughts on careri so far.

and I meant to post these images last week, saul steinberg's view of the world from ninth avenue and maira kalman's newyorkistan - the latter relevant to the hazards and delights of the neighbourhood designation!

anti-aesthetic

Careri has confused me, so perhaps others can focus on this and clarify it for me. Bear with my forensics.

Just before the section "Toward a new expansion of the field," he describes transurbance/walking as pre-architecture.
In "toward...," he does the following:

-describes walking as an "aesthetic form." I assume that these words are being used as "pleasurable" or "inducing pleasure" and line (or possibly space, but he calls the path an "architectural object"). This sounds good so far. I think I might enjoy walking in splines rather than polylines, but I'd like to walkshare with someone who's more vertexically inclined. (For a digression, check out this diagramming of this idea: http://www.pedestrianlevitation.net/process.html )

-Then he writes that the path has "led to the pursuit of the historical foundations of anti-architecture in nomadism." Does that mean that nomadism is anti-architecture? I can understand that. If architecture is the built, and nomads wander, then they have no need for architecture, and might even be anti-architecture....though that doesn't necessarily seem like a logical leap. Just because nomads are pro-wandering doesn't make them anti-architecture. Architecture has tried to learn from nomadism (e.g. Ito's Nomad projects in 1985/1986) and apparently Deleuze discussed the nomad as extra-national or extra-societal around the same time. What's the rest of the background here? And what about "pursuit of historical foundations"?

-Then he mentions Rosalind Krauss and "anti-art."

-Then he mentions "the field" and how landart and architecture both expanded into landscape.

-Then "in this direction we also find the crossing of space, seen not as a manifestation of anti-art but as an aesthetic form that has achieved the status of an autonomous discipline." First of all, what is "this direction"? I haven't read the 1985 compilation "The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture", but Rosalind Krauss' piece is in there, so my next question is: how do anti-aesthetic, aesthetic, and anti-art come together, and what happened between 1985 and 2005 (when Careri's book was published)? Is Careri being post-postmodernist? Post-critical? (Walk, don't talk.)

-Then he writes: "Today architecture could expand into the field of path without encountering the pitfalls of anti-architecture." He seems to use "field" as "discipline" rather than planimetric space. So it was just timing that led to anti-architecture? Did the walkers feel that architecture was poaching before?

-Then "space of encounter" gets used. This is three years after Libeskind's book was published. Mere coincidence?

-"Aesthetic tool" is mentioned once more, and there's a great spelling error in the same line. "Nature" becomes "uatnre." I had to read it a few times, because that misspelling just looked so great and distracted me. I even looked up the misspelling, hoping that it was some new and fantastic word.

-Then he uses "mutations." That implies a lot that I hope is intentional, but there seems to be a looseness to this writing that disturbs me. Are we getting lost in the translation from Spanish to English?

-Finally, he writes that "today, architecture can transform the path from anti-architecture into a resource, expanding the field..." So we're beyond avoiding pitfalls. It's actually time to claim the path.

One last unrelated thing, since I've driven you all mad:
Look at the original castellano for "that global Happy Valley" (p180): "aquella Paperopólis Global".

Buena transurbancia. Hasta mañana.

ambulations on Careri

From one who enjoys exploring the trapezoidal concrete drainage channels (er, rivers) of Southern California and tracing "lost" streams, those channelized or even buried waterways, I found the reading enjoyable and illuminating.

Walking for Careri, like mapping for Corner, is "the first aesthetic act" (p.20). Careri links walking and thus generation of the path to the first human intervention with a landscape, the menhirs. In this way walking is pre-architecture, it is the generation of an idea about a place before any physical intervention occurs. And for us, I hope walking about these unaccepted streets will itself be a generative act, a way to discover natural, intuitive ways about moving across space before we imagine something built.

Walking is action from our creative unconscious. Moreover, the tracings of our ambulations is a background to the foreground of restful spaces, which Careri argues has been too much the focus of urban history. With the expanding periphery of cities, we have now pockets of space within which is fertile ground for walking as a way to explore the under-belly of our metropolis. He is promoting the act of walking to reveal Smithson's "forgotten futures", the tracings of what-could-have-been (though not lamenting the lost potential, but extracting from those vestiges what-might-still-be).

The notion of walking as "simultaneous reading and writing of space" (p.26) draws the most clear connections between walking and mapping. In mapping, as per Corner, we are writing even as we record data; we are participants in the generation of the map, and thus of reality. With walking, we are enacting Smithson's entropy, and creating the badass idea of New Babylon, the nomadic city. When we walk, as when we map, we are recording an irreversible pattern, scattering the black and white sand until it is gray. In a map, our perception of reality is forever altered by its representation of reality.

And here's where the reading became really interesting , when Smithson talks about filming the child in the sandbox (p.12 in the pdf), then playing it in reverse as an attempt to reverse the chaos, but that entropy will eventually consume the film material itself. All simulation will eventually break down, and all that will be left is a forgotten future.

To escape from this paralysis, we have this other notion of transurbance. The creation of voids within city fabric from the rapid expansion of the periphery, which is, while entropic, not actually destructive. "Voids are the protagonist" (p.180), made up of many actors whom we may know as "diffusion dwellers". (I wonder what sort of "diffusion dwellers" we will find on the unaccepted streets--maybe we will become them!)

I think the thing for us to remember when we visit these sites is that empty is not actually empty, that "these urban amnesias are not only waiting to be filled with things, they are living spaces to be filled with meanings". (p.183)

The end of the reading, while quite enjoyable and poetic, breaks down a little bit for me in content. Careri expands a little on the "New Babylon" within the city, voids shifting like desert sands, navigating the seas and all that. It's interesting, and so is the idea about a person never actually "entering" the city but only occupying the "territory of going". However, this is contradictory to the notion of walking as a way of (paradoxically) rooting oneself in a place: finding orientation, contemplating where things have come from and where they are going, and what sort of habitation belongs to a place, which is where Careri begins. In conclusion, a little bit of rest and stableness can be a good thing too.

Back to the Blocks

Like some of the other blog entries, I am interested in how an analysis like this would apply to architects. Other than the map on poverty policy since 1900, the study does not go into detail as to what crimes/policies were influential in the crimes. I feel that one way of arriving at something upon which we can act, at least with regard to social values, is to look map crimes as they relate to specific policies and who they have sent/kept individuals in prison. The upward trend in incarceration rates since 1970 is very compelling, and seems to be the direct result of policy changes. Perhaps at the very core we should be asking ourselves the larger questions about how our milieu shapes our value systems unconsciously and, often times, without our very knowledge. An analysis that somehow places all these variables in relationship with one another may uncover the realities that mapping claims are largely unseen or unimagined. And iff, as Corner says, mapping is to "engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live", then we need to be looking at the complex network of forces that shape our predilections, sense of awareness, etc. that manifest themselves in very concrete ways.

Walkscapes

When reading Careri's aim to debunk the notion of an anti-architectural image of nomadism, I am led to think about the itinerant world of the gypsy, whose motions, I feel, constitute a "space of going". Through their ability to "dream dwellings" (Daniel Willis), they are able to make anywhere home. It seems that in order to do this their wanderings would have to have what DeBord calls a psychogeographic awareness, as well as aesthetic act. What's interesting to me is that their walking seems to have both an element of survival, as well as symbolic form. That being said, I do however think there is a fine line between walking as art and one in virtue of your milieu.

I imagine that James Corner would have appreciated the political and policy discussions generated from the compellation of maps in the Million Dollar Block project. While the ensuing policy discussions were probably informative, I am certain that the Spatial Information Design Lab falls short in where they “lay the blame” for the current situation in Brooklyn that they have mapped.

Is it a coincidence that the 4.1 million dollar block (p 13) appears to have been developed as a large-scale housing block?

The group of buildings on the block shown on page 13 is very reminiscent of projects from the 1960s, when city planners decided that they best way to build low-income housing was to create “utopias” where the residents would have modernized conveniences and housing costs proportional to their income, all while conveniently “tucked away” from the rest of the community.

Jane Jacobs was a fervent believer that short blocks, walkable alleys, and the constant presence of people and “eyes on the street” made an area of a city desirable and safe. The “utopian” affordable housing projects lacked all of these and – not surprisingly – became the breeding grounds for crime and drug use.

I’ve provided two links below that describe Sursum Corda, a project in Washington, DC, sure to be a “million dollar block” for the capital. From the map, you can see how the through streets were stopped to preserve the mega-block “utopia” for the project when it was designed in 1967, and not surprisingly, it is one of the most crime-ridden areas of the city, despite it’s central location (only a few blocks from Union Station).

I would put money on the fact that probably a large proportion of the most expensive blocks in this Million Dollar Block project lack a basic infrastructure of buildings that have a direct relationship to the street and alleys and streets that cut through the entire block. Perhaps the Spatial Information Design Lab should not have cast all responsibility back to the policy makers, and instead, acknowledged that it is also the responsibility of today’s urban planners and architects to correct our own design mistakes from the past.

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sursum corda map and aerial

article on sursum corda

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BTW, the city’s “fix” for Sursum Corda is to completely demolish it, reconnect the road system through the site, and then build anew at a much higher density (The projects new name will be Northwest One). Current residents will be given a percentage of the profits from the sale, as well as $80,000 to either take and leave, or reinvest in a new affordable property within Northwest One, where market-rate one-bedroom apartments will start in the 400’s.

Not My Job

Corner would approve of the Million Dollar Blocks mapping on a few particular levels. It certainly follows the formula that he enumerates in The Agency of Mapping. It takes a field (Brooklyn), analyzes the extracts (criminal data), and generates plottings (the relationship of crime to the location of the criminals, not the incidents). It attempts to “engender the re-shaping of the world we live in” and “uncovers realities previously unseen or unimagined”. This is the concept behind The Agency of Mapping, that data is not neutral, it influences.

On another level, it does not meet all of the thematic practices of drift, layering, game-board and rhizome. But to analyze this too closely might completely miss the point.

More importantly, Corner suggests that designers are “barking up the wrong tree believing that new spatial structure alone would yield new patterns of socialization”. I would think most architects now realize that the burning desire to design buildings as the solution to the world’s problems is an ill conceived idea. The modernists have taught us the pitfalls of faith in architecture and technology as a global panacea. So assuming that the environment needs improving, and that it is still possible for architecture to assist in the process, and that architects are interested in being a part of the solution (many assumptions and a discussion in itself), Million Dollar Blocks / Agency of Mapping could be a step to counter prior errors by looking outside the traditional limitations of architectural practice.

In addition, Corner and others have been investigating so called ‘Landscape Urbanism’, and a movement toward hybrid practice is evident in the work. Landscape Urbanism suggests that information coming from outside the discipline can positively influence architecture. In Terra Fluxus Corner discusses at length the necessity of looking to “capital accumulation, deregulation, globalization, and environmental protection”. A recent Harvard Design Review symposium suggests looking toward “real estate development, flow of populations and activities, construction materials, and time”.

The Million Dollar Blocks piece suggests that the maps “pose difficult ethical and political questions for policy makers and designers”, and “that when linked to other urban, social, and economic indicators of incarceration, they also suggest new strategies for approaching urban design and criminal justice reform together”. This does not suggest that we should take on all of these specialties, but have an understanding of them. It also acknowledges that the map itself is not ultimate solution, but a tool. We may want a mapping project to tell us how to design a building, but perhaps that is what we should bring to the conversation.

what the information is for?

As James corner's article, mapping has so many possibilities. However, in this Million Dollar Blocks, it just showed us the possibilities and doesn’t have any further step.
First of all, the relationship between city structure and criminal activities was interesting. We usually assume there would be something and try to be far away from the prisons and jails. So this mapping process tried to show us through the urban scale diagram activity. However, in my opinion, it just ended as the information.
Anyone can hardly expect what could happen for the next architectural gesture using this mapping. If this mapping stopped in this step, it will be the source for sociology or urban studies not for architecture. I believe architecture is doing for physical things.
As I read the James corner article, I was skeptical that without any efficient evidence, he told mapping could be the basic step of performance. I know mapping is so important to prepare the cooking. However, I think we need to consider how to cook with different and diverse materials and make them harmonious.
I think James corner also want to see the next step of milling dollar blocks. And it could have real meaning for the real output in the city, even though we are not sure every our choice is good.

Purpose of mapping

Corner might think ‘Million dollar block’ developed nice process of ‘field’, ‘extracts’ and ‘plotting’ and operation as well as the topic is also innovational.-“The layers are not mapping of an existing site or context, but of the complexity of the intended programme for the site.- P235: 20.
Yet, I am continuously confusing about the meaning of mapping between finding reality and a tool for creation.

An image as the format of map is definitely having power itself because it looks like representing more accurate information about reality than images and photos. So, I would say mapping is a powerful tool for presentation as well as promotion of architecture and urban planning.
Million dollar block is effective in terms of making issue and showing it to random people. But to me, it is slightly reluctant to accept as information at some point.

Why people are using map? It’s because they believe information on map has objective validity. If it does, how we can use the map as our tool for extending our territory of thought without harming the original pureness of map.
How much can we cook up reality on the white field.

Are we all free from the responsibility mediating reality to people if we want to test and challenge our territory?
Can we say the reason many architects now obsess mapping instead of diagramming is not related with promotional or presentational purpose like Christian mentioned?

Seeing red and real

Like Chris and Beth, I’m not convinced by the Million Dollar Blocks piece, mostly because of its source and its trajectory. It smells like something architects cooked up.

Spatial Information Design Lab: it’s a great name, but is this article any more than pictorial statistics? (If it used to be that statistics could tell any story that you want, is it now true that datamaps can do the same?) Is the real lesson for architects that our spatial and social intelligence will enable us to be the graphic information consultants of the future?

Maybe this is a clever bit of self-promotion. The more architects can co-publish nicely illustrated reports on issues that will require themselves (and/or planners) for new solutions, the less we’ll have to worry about cad monkeying for developers. Someone call the office of eminent domain…we’re going to need some architects to redesign Brownsville after we excise the criminal core of Brooklyn. Or maybe our urban design ambitions should be more ambitious, following the logic that NYC accounts for less than half of NY state’s population, but accounts for roughly 60% of the incarcerated population (1). (Ok, I know the retort: NYC accounts for 65% (2) of the state’s GDP, so we’re covering our criminals even if “million dollar blocks” really are in the red.)

Which brings me to this: if you can’t make it good, make it big, and if you can’t make it big, make it red.

Wow, this New Yorker is off to a great start. Blogging brings out my anonymous best.

And I haven’t even touched on James Corner.

Take 2.

While doing one of the ESRI GIS tutorials, I came across this gem of a line:
“The goal of every GIS user is to represent the world as accurately as possible.”
I think the Spatial Information Design Lab hopes to represent the world accurately, or at least to help policy makers to more accurately understand the information that is already available to them. They did a pretty good job of excavation and extension. Corner might not aim for maps to be used for accurate representation, and might emphasize the abstractive and projective potential of maps. (I think there are a few escape routes in Corner’s piece…after all, if one could really understand what mapping is or could or should do, his piece wouldn’t nearly have the life it’s found.)

It’s on the last page of the Million Dollar Blocks piece that the authors really let on to what’s at stake. They juxtapose the idea of “exostructure” with the more common infrastructure, and suggest that the “Soft Map” is not a statistical analysis, but rather something that is “infinitely scalable, absolutely contingent, and open to vision, and hence, revision.” Maybe the SIDL team has a dog-eared copy of “The Agency of Mapping” kicking around, and they’re in the same boat as Corner, but are they too worried about reality?

(1) http://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/where_ny_2line.html
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City

of maps and meat

fyi re. our discussion on elizabeth's map!

http://www.meatpaper.org/articles/2007/0528_meatropolis.html

Image of the City

Map of Boston

Kevin Lynch's Image of the City

cmd_million dollar blocks

Generally, Corner would be supportive of this mapping, which mines latent extracts from the field to reveal new relationships that may exist through plottings. He would also concur with the sentiment that “There is no such things as raw data,” and that no data collection and mapping (or exclusion) can be neutral or objective.

The plottings generated suggest a discussion about public policy, urban planning and zoning. The key finding, that criminals are more physically concentrated than crime itself, seems plausibly relevant to those fields. It’s less clear to me what the role of the architect would be in interpreting and taking action (operating in Corner’s parlance) with this new information. The planner, policy wonk or geographer would all seem to be respondents. The author acknowledges that the designer is a stakeholder in this, remarking that “The maps pose difficult ethical and political questions for policy makers and designers; they also suggest new strategies for approaching urban design and criminal justice reform together.” It’s unclear what the authors have distilled that would be of use to a designer? Their conclusion -- “The maps are both a picture and a design strategy…build, incrementally, new networks which might inform this crippled urban infrastructure.” (13) – leaves me similarly puzzled. I agree that the mappings have revealed a pertinent yet latent reality. But what precisely is the divined design strategy for the architect or urban designer? And is this a problem which architecture can address?

Of course there is a relationship between physical and social infrastructures, but I wonder if they are being conflated here. How would a designer act differently with knowledge of the maps? Does the morphology of areas with high concentrations of criminals differ significantly from others, which may be even poorer? My sense is that it probably does not; Peabody Terrace uses the same skip-stop organization as Pruitt-Igoe did, to obviously much different ends.

This observation from Corner seems critical: “In addition to geometrical and spatial plotting, taxonomic and genealogical procedures of relating, indexing and naming can often be extremely productive in revealing latent structures. Such techniques may produce insights that have both utility and metaphoricity.” (230) More generally, beyond the Milllion Dollar Block project, is Corner advocating for mapping as a technique to extract knowledge to suggest metaphorical relationships to architectural organizations from the data? Might this address the question (for me) of how data may be aestheticized vis-a-vis architectural form?