Loop city workshop

Bill Hillier at University College London describes cities as movement economies, the structure of a city is the pattern of people moving through it. The workshop took this as the starting point and spent two days walking that idea across related fields: spatial organisation, relative space, time-space, taxicab geometry, mental mapping, text maps.

Notes from the Loop City workshop at the Outside In symposium in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 2004. The workshop was led by Dietmar Offenhuber and Sara Hodges with participants from the symposium, working across geography, architecture, mapping and locative media. Raw notes below.

Bill Hillier: cities are movement economies

• spacesyntax.com

In the city there are

• Space explorers: children, homeless, vendors, skateboarders
• Space utilisers: commuters, workers

Two ways of looking at the city

• Exocentric: external, connected
• Egocentric: centred, point of view

Spatial organisation

• Large, diverse research field
• Abler, Ronald Adams: Spatial Organization: The Geographer’s View of the World

Relative space

• Expressing thematic data through spatial differentiation

Scaling areas according to non-geographic data

• Political maps based on size of army
• Map of USA based on Elvis concerts

Time space

• Irina Vasiliev: Design Issues for Mapping Time
• Time as a way of measuring space (one conclusion: the world is shrinking)

Taxicab geography

• Grid systems make diagonal movement problematic
• There is study of movement in grid spaces showing multiple optimum routes: a big L-shape is the same distance as a zig-zag
• The grid is no longer in Euclidean space

Social space

• Philip Thiel: Spatial annotation methods

John S. Adams

• Human geographer
• Mapped human interaction over one day
• Vertical axis: time; horizontal axis: distance
• Made 3D diagrams of this multi-dimensional space, showing relative distances travelled and communicated with over one day
• Social network maps

Mental mapping

• Spatial representations of the brain or memory
• In some ways the analysis by Lynch and others has failed, because they focused on trying to know everything about people’s mental maps of the city
• Richard Long: walking project

Imagined cities

• Norman Klein: The History of Forgetting
• Fictional writers form mental models of cities
• Calvino

Text maps

• Dietmar Offenhuber recreated the shape of LA by phoning people and asking directions
• PML maps

Single-parameter mapping

• Boylan Heights maps: Denis Wood
• Maps of Halloween lanterns in an area

Multiple-parameter mapping

• Correlating space
• Chernoff faces: iconographic representations of faces, with expressions that map to different social conditions
• Eugene Turner
• Correlating socio-economic factors is common

Mapping as a game

• Raoul Bunschoten

Narrowed the analysis of space down to very simple procedures

• Erasure
• Origination
• Transformation
• Migration
• Mapped results as a synthesis?

Photographic / media mapping

• Tokyo Nobody
• Images with text removed, replaced with a textmap
• Text / image project… ?
• Graffiti archaeology project
• Time-lapse as a tool: mapping crowds
• Threshold linear key as a tool: RCA project…

Diagrammatic / information mapping

• Tufte
• Information diagrams representing time, space, actions, events, people, cause/effect

Collaborative mapping

• Multiple authorship over shared themes

Sarah

• Presented her NY Green Space project, in which access to green space is correlated with socio-economic factors. See Social Design Notes weblog.

Some ideas for mapping

• Children’s tactile book: sandpaper for asphalt, felt for grass
• Litter, sky cover, text, colours, people, edges, boundaries, nodes
• Use GPS and digital camera. Use a compass to always orient the camera to north, or a relevant reference. Then map the space with textures or sky cover (down or up). Could make a great map.
• A method for collaborative presentation might be to use a projector to trace physical space onto a wall or large open space, then to layer drawn annotations. A public presentation could be achieved by projecting digital data (photos, textures, movement) onto this annotated area, for interesting layered correlations.
• Everyone has their own agenda when approaching a space: personal ways of looking, awareness, attractions and unattractions. Could try to map what a space makes you think instantly, from one vantage point, or multiple correlated vantage points.
• Bluetooth mapping of devices. Our personal ‘auras’ are becoming public and this might be useful for mapping.

What kind of data can we collect about the city and its usage, that is really reliable and plentiful?

The audioscrobbler mapping example shows how really simple data can be mapped into extraordinarily useful spatial representations, just because it’s high-quality and plentiful.

• Geographic data is potentially plentiful, because a lot of effort is put into mapping space
• What other things are mapped with effort, or easily?