Mapped Ground
At its most primal level, a map is a cartographic instrument used to codify and convey territories, forces and flows. The art of map making is thus concerned with visually communicating unseen (or not easily seen) forces of demarcation. By nature, territories are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, a political exercise.
The approaches presented in this exhibit offer urban design a long-overdue lens in the depiction of the contemporary city. They link urban design with the geological and geographic, the regional and the territorial, to engage unseen dynamics of cities. The mapped grounds of these cities provide current design and planning practice with an analytical and projective, precise yet speculative symbolic language to describe existing and imagined cities and the issues at hand.
The line, which is often use to delimit territory is used to describe interfaces between open space and built space in projects of different time periods or between urban design projects as they weave formerly conflicted areas together.
Contour lines from early European bathymetry are used projectively in cities to identify and multiply available grounds or determine where previously underserved growth areas are or may occur. The stratigraphic column is the means to create vibrantly colored geological maps and, by extension, to depict any subsurface condition in Kathmandu and water saturation levels in Rotterdam. The roots of the power of section developed by Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt in 1802 that fostered the development of techniques dictate how the physical characteristics of the surface materials influence botany and in the Caracas the section of physical and economic investment is represented.
Taken together these maps and their techniques question established modes of representation and their underlining assumptions about human habitation. Without standards in mapping there are logics and techniques that allow for ground to be mapped and transcend scale and material.
These maps serve as provocative understandings of cities and the unseen forces that govern them. This collection begins to demonstrate that map making and city making are in fact inseparable and visionary.
Who was involved?
Curated by Dr. Shelagh McCartney with contributions by graduate students in the School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) at Toronto Metropolitan University, ‘Mapped Grounds’ was exhibited at the Urbanspace Gallery and supported by Centre for City Ecology.
