The mirage of the metropolis: city imaging in the age of digital chorography

Abstract

Even as cities evolved geographically, the basis of city imaging (as codified by Kevin Lynch) remained relatively stable for over half a century. More recently, digitally driven transformations in urban life challenge the continued relevance of established city-imaging paradigms. Although digital navigation and mapping devices are readily at hand to neutralize any disorienting predicaments, the ability to image cognitively the wider urban environment remains integral to the construction of a meaningful sense of place. Towards the objective of reconciling city imaging with the place-making challenges of the contemporary metropolis, this paper explores the potential for innovating modes of urban mapping and representation. Specifically, the digital re-envisioning of the historical mapping practice of ‘chorography’ is positioned within Fredric Jameson’s challenge for a new aesthetic of cognitive mapping that enables the situational representation of the individual within the vaster totality. In doing so, the paper contributes to the wider adaptation of urban discourse to digitally propelled shifts in urban life.

Notes

1. Lynch is likely to have been influenced by Kenneth Boulding’s account of experiential image formation (Boulding 1956).

2. Lynch was actually distrustful of the nascent discipline of urban design, viewing it as a project-based architectural activity (Lynch 1984c).

3. The actions and artworks of the avant-garde Situationist International movement epitomize this type of mapping (Sadler 1998).

4. This disjunction is memorably explored in Michel De Certeau’s juxtaposition of the tactically immersed Manhattan pedestrian against the strategic “Concept-city” as witnessed from the 110th floor of Two World Trade Center (De Certeau 1984).

5. Georeferenced orthorectified oblique aerial photography includes Bing Bird’s Eye™ and Google Maps 45°™.

6. Roughly equating to ‘place-mapping’, chorography is often confused with the more common word choreography, which from the Greek root choreia roughly equates to ‘dance-mapping’. The unintentional conflation of chorography and choreography is not without basis, since the two words are connected through the Greek root chôros, which refers to a ‘place of dance’.