Mapping Connections

Stan Allen said “Traditional representation (of a city) presumes stable objects and fixed subjects. But the contemporary city is not reducible to an artifact. The city today is a place where visible and invisible streams of information, capital and subjects interact in complex notations”… “In order to sustain its own relevance, architecture needs to address to social and political implications of the shift from (technology as an) artifact to an effect”

Mass communication and information has changed the situation of the city. We need to find new ways of mapping to document and understand the constantly changing world we live in.

The heart and soul of a city is not its physical state, but the social, political and cultural actions of its inhabitants.

Aureli said “The reduction of the city to an abstract background also serves to indicate its susceptibility to change, to transformation, to technical adaptation, to the becoming of urban space, as opposed to the fixity of the architectural form.”

It is the things moving and happening that create a city. It is these properties of the city that need to be considered and understood by architects. I’m particularly interested in human relationships within a place.

Thinking about place is interesting when considering how technology has made the world a lot closer and accessible. Our messages can arrive at almost any place instantaneously, in a sense removing all relevance of distance and time. As Pascucci said “there is now a greater accessibility by many publics to a variety of places because of a fluidity between physical and virtual architectures”

The internet not only connects us to other places, it is also creates a sense of place itself.

Wortham-Galvin writes that the internet is as much a place as any physical place. “Place are both real and imagine: they depend on mental association as well as physical shape and character”…“Because places are defined by the imagination of many, they occupy a realm that cannot be properly judged in terms of authenticity”…“Should place making be about the purity of a space, or about the relationship people have with, within, through and beyond it?”… “Contrary to high culture, belief, television and the internet is not less authentic, less public of any less of a place than physical forms and spaces”

Pascussi said “space is not an ‘absolute precondition for authentic public life” or placemaking”

These invisible means of communication are creating a new sense of place. It makes physical space only one of the places we can be at any one time. This must have some effect on architecture; the solid becomes permeable, walls no longer form a barrier to where we wish to connect. We can go shopping and be in a shop without physically being there. How far will this develop?

Chris Speeds talks about this in his thesis for his PHD, and discusses how architecture hasn’t really kept up with developing social systems, and that it needs to be associated with these if it wants to continue to develop with the internet.

I am interested in mapping the various places people are connected to through invisible means of communication, and what effect the ability to make these connections has on human relations.

I plan to map where connections are made through the use of internet and cell phones, and the relationship with the contact.

Weelden wrote that “Mapping the internet poses numerous problems. The challenge is not just that it contains a staggering amount of extremely complex, rapidly changing information, but also that is exists nowhere and yet operates simultaneously in the physical world “

The internet has a “loose and flexible relationship to the physical world”
So I like the idea of mapping connections made between two people to introduce something ‘real’ (real plans are made or real emotions are felt) to the project.

I hope that this mapping project will start to investigate the increasing accessibility to different places in Auckland, New Zealand, and the World. I also hope it will start to demonstrate the effect (positive or negative) it is having on our personal relationships. What will happen as more and more human relationships become invisible. What will this mean for architecture and urban design? A disfiguring of the physical world?

Wortham-Galvin wrote “As the world becomes more mediated by the ubiquity of the scrims of digital visual communication, place making will depend ever more on the interdependence of the physical and the mental – of the made and the imagined”