Speakers
Description
As much as environmental conditions define the state of cities, cities in turn transform environmental conditions. Through this reciprocal influence, urban settlements become indistinguishable from the climates they generate. The distinction between natural and human-generated environmental conditions further sculpt climatic patterns at local and global scales, breaking down cities progressively. In this breakdown, climatic nuances are hidden in urban cracks. As the climate clock ticks, these cracks are accentuated and made evident with the business-as-usual politics of urbanization, the growing domination of nature by technocratic advances, and the resulting impervious urban landscapes. Against this background, this paper focuses on an ongoing cartographic study that adopts the notion of the crack as a fragment or a segment within a larger entity, that is, a minority stance with no predetermined scale. While recognizing the multifaceted connotations of the term, the study particularly addresses the spatial dimensions of urban cracks to explore the representations of anthropocentric production and the unexpected potential ruptures that humans contribute yet are overlooked. This perspective provides an alternative visual narrative, in other words, a re-representation through the available media representations, of the relationship between urbanization and climatic breakdown. As the research approach, re-representation is framed by the concepts of cartography (D’ignazio, 2020), mapping (Newman, 2010), and re-representation (Oxman, 1997).
This re-representation departs from a proposed matrix of cracks which consists of three main layers: [1] Crack as leading to climatic breakdown, [2] Crack as rising out of climatic breakdown, and [3] Crack as healing climatic breakdown. Each layer is accompanied by respective sub-layers - that is [1.1] territories, [2.1] scales, and [3.1] nature-based solutions. By selecting a diverse array of urban case studies through globally renowned design media platforms, including Dezeen and Archdaily, these main and sub-layers are traced in a non-linear manner across the satellite images belonging to projects. The media that is analyzed in this study involves a systematic decomposition of the aerial and satellite photographs that belong to the selected case studies. This systematic approach is based on the six principles developed by Tufte (1990), which are [1] Escaping Flatland, [2] Micro/Macro readings, [3] Layering and Separation, [4] Small Multiples, [5] Color and Information, and [6] Narrative Space and Time. Building on these principles enables the re-representation of urban media proposed by this research’s matrix by visiting the overlaps, relations, and juxtapositions between decomposed images. Re-representation in this context becomes a critical cartographic act, that further evaluates the architectural media to explore architecture's deep entanglement with climatic breakdown.
References
D’ignazio, C. (2020). Art and Cartography. International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), 189−207.
Newman, M. (2010). Networks: An Introduction. OUP Oxford.
Oxman, R. (1997). Design by re-representation: A model of visual reasoning in design. Design Studies. 18 (4): 329-34. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(97)00005-7
Tufte, E. (1990). Envisioning Information. Graphics Press, Cheshire.
| Keywords | climatic breakdown; urban cracks; critical cartographies |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
