City Thoughts

The ultimate City and Festival class blog

Please sign and date your entries!. Happy blogging. Omur, 1/26/07 1:05pm.

Reading Invisible cities, Tuesday February 6th. Some sections are revealing.

"This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classification, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world's most leaned men are those who have memorized Zora" (Zora : Cities& Memory 4).

Spatial narratives, discourses of the city, I would say, are embedded in the urban fabric, the material cityscape, but the city space also acts as a repository of random memories of serendipitous events. When coherent and memori(ali)zed in the collective imagination: it can become a nightmare. It must be fluid and every evolving. Otherwise it disappears. (Good message to historic preservationists here!)

"...just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one."

Maurilia, Cities & Memory 5.

Omur. Tue Feb 6th, 11:22 pm.

Where does the "accuracy" of a map of a city come from?

LARGE AND ACCURATE MAP OF THE CITY OF LONDON. Ichnographically describing all the Streets, Lanes, Alleys, Courts, Yards, Churches, Halls and Houses, &c. Date: 1677. Engraving by cartographers John Ogilby and William Morgan. London British Library.

A recent visitor to the British Library describes his experience of encountering this map as such: "When I visited the exhibition, on a busy Saturday afternoon, the most popular map in the "London Reborn, 1666-1800" section was undoubtedly Ogilby and Morgan's "Large and Accurate Map of the City of London Distinct from Westminster and Southwark" of 1676 ("the first accurate and detailed map of London, with all the buildings represented in plan rather than as bird's eye views"), admittedly a deserved success among the visitors of all ages, who tried to locate present-day addresses, leaving countless finger-marks on the protective glass – but a success which created "traffic-jams" in the area and made it totally impossible to approach the map in spite of its size." (Prof. Dr. Antoine Capet, University of Rouen, "Visit London: A Life in Maps. British Library, London 24 November 2006 – 4 March 2007. Appeared as a review in H-Museum. (Thanks for the reference Ian).

Compare this to Calvino, who speaks of the impossibility of the representations of the city, that they are all utopias, assumptions (32-33). Omur. Wed Feb 7th, 9:30 am.

Posted at Feb 09/2007 01:25PM:
Bochay: The standard map, in all of it's accuracy about the outward forms of things, is essentially for the tourist. Even if one is a tourist to unfamiliar quarters of one's own city, there is a noticeable diffference between foolwing a map and following the guidance of a living person.

I was poking around my del.icio.us account this morning and found a new post on one of my favorite blogs. http://bloglikeyougiveadamn.blogspot.com/2007/01/homeless-in-miami.html This article describes the formation of a shantytown in Miami and its relation to the "real" and "official" city. Since we've been discussing the delimiting of cities and the process of inhabitation, inside/outside of cities, thought y'all might be interested. Other good things I found this morning are in Pruned, a landscape architecture blog at http://pruned.blogspot.com/ Poke around. BLDGBLG is pretty nice as well. Marlisa

At the end of class on Wednesday, I recieved a request to list some of the articles and books I looked at in the urban visual analysis course I took last semester in Copenhagen. Here are a few of those sources:

J. Gehl and L. Gemzøe: Public Spaces Public Life;
Gordon Cullen: The Concise Townscape;
Steen Eiler Rasmussen: Cities and Buildings and Experiencing Architecture;
Giovanni La Varra: Post-It City--the Other European Public Spaces;
Jan Gehl: Life Between Buildings;
Charles Moore and Gerald Allen: Dimensions;
Milos Bobic: Between the Edges;
Rob Krier: Elements of Architecture

These are largely focused on the built environment, on plazas and buildings and the spaces between these, in a city. Additionally, they focus on European cities, but I think that there are definately some themes that are relevant to this class (and if not, they are interesting just the same). Personally I enjoyed the La Varra piece and the Rasmussen pieces. I hope that these are helpful! --Michelle, 2/18/2007

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View30 Seconds City: Providence. January 2007. Cold winter. Omur. Posted Thue Feb 22, 2007: 3:15 pm.

Posted at Feb 25/2007 10:41PM:
Bochay: I dont know if anyone else has been wondering what 'bitumen' is, but here is a link to some western asian historical perspectives about it, as well as clay brickmaking techniques, and other ancient uses of bitumen: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198406/bitumen.-.a.history.htm

Posted at Mar 18/2007 02:24PM:
Bochay: Check out my exploration of the Public blog: http://departmentofpublicaddress.blogspot.com/