PhD Thesis, year 1/3

Throughout the centuries cities have been constantly changing, together with their image, their imageability, therefore their graphic representations is beeing constantly adapted to those changes too.
Classic cartography deals with the topographic aspects of the cities, without representing what happens inside them, describing their elements, whereas recent technological approaches are using the city as a data to analyse, elaborating flows, activities, habits, offering new images of it, without showing cultural aspects of the city.

Nowadays thanks to the GIS technologies the territor can be easily represented in details; thanks to sensors and mobile phones datas all the activities carried out by citizens can be analyzed and visualized, giving the opportunity to give a portrait of a real-time city.

During the middle age, cartography was a way of conveying sense, maps were not so closely linked to the territory, they were most likely a tool for understanding a vision of the world. Some city maps were only a symbolical artifact, people didn’t use them to find their bearings; sometimes map-makers hardly knew the mapped city itself. They were conscious of the meaning of the city, that was enough. It seems like this perspective of looking at of the city has been slightely discarded in recent times’ map-making.

My PhD research aims to identify new ways of looking at the city, in order to find a graphic visualization that can show cultural aspects, telling different stories about the city, showing its sense, its values, its history. The direction of my research is the same of Christian Nold’s Emotional Cartography, but the dimension of my analysis is not going to be neither the ‘real time city’, nor the ‘future city’, but the city as a result of many elements: the past mingled with the present, the complexity of a city in all its cultural, social and historical features, together for the sake of finding ‘the sense of the city’, and making it visible. That’s why I called this approach “archeology of sense“. Through this eyes, the visualisation of the city can lead to a different understanding of it, or even to take action inside it.

I would like to explore how particular urban spaces and places have meant for the citizens, what is the meaning of a place in the construction of identity or alterity, trying to visualize these factors.

With this task I’d love to focus my research on the representation of the Old City of Jerusalem: in the history of cartography Jerusalem has always played a big role, being “the city”, mainly the center of all graphic representations. Then again, the cultural complexity of the modern Jerusalem, a crowd of different cultures, stories, people, makes it a big challenge for a visualisation which aims to show the ‘sense’ of the city.
I’d love to find a design-answer to some questions, such as how to record the different layers of sense of a city? Is it possible to define an artifact which can reveal the ‘sense of a city’? How can graphic design face the complexity of the changing cities, in order to give a complete representation of them?

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Bibliography // ongoing