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Mapping, Memory and the City
School of Architecture, University of Liverpool
24-26 February 2010
ABSTRACTS
Locative Contours and Documentary Fields
Tina Bastajian (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
The impulse of mapping in locative media practices has seen a concerted shift to
subjective, participatory, collaborative or generative mapping. These open-sourced
mapping tactics suggest an approach echoed by Deleuze & Guattari, which form
multiple entryways. However in our epoch of geo-abundance, on-the-ground
encounters are compressed into data, compromised and rendered, gestured but not
articulated--still traceable yet invisible.
I will draw upon a sampling of locative media projects I have participated,
observed or initiated, such as my currently in-progress locative media project, Coffee
Deposits: Siting Maps in Cups, (Istanbul/Amsterdam in collaboration with artist Seda
Manavoğlu). I will explore tendencies that underscore and operate within the
interstices of locative media from a multi-sited position of artist, researcher and
documentarist. Coffee Deposits had been initiated as a hybrid locative media project
to construct a collaborative urban map framed around mobile and improvised
encounters and the making of Turkish/Armenian coffee (et al). Within this format, it
also attempted to fuse a combination of GPS tracking and Geo-Cache tactics in which
to document and augment the one-on-one encounters on sidewalks, balconies and city
streets, with artists, researchers and passersby.
However in praxis, public/urban space is inevitably prone to unpredictable
conditions (i.e. cultural codes, etc,) that can only be navigated in situ, similar to the in
the field encounters in documentary film/video practices. Yet the negotiations within
such cross-media technologies are informed by another logic of capture, which can
both engage and convolute the process and output, and are often predisposed towards
result-oriented trajectories while unfolding in the present.
I will illustrate a sampling of the projects locative diversions (Istanbul), such
as with the ambulatory junk/object recyclers (eskiçi), who move idiosyncratically
through the city. These walks and pauses gave further insights into seeing the tracks
as a rudimentary spine in which to embody the projects deviations and divergences,
and how these tangential offshoots (narrative, illustrative, statistical) can be seen as
nuanced locative epistles, place-based diary forms and first-person plural poetics.
Mental Maps of a Contested Territory: Spatial Perceptions of Palestinian Arabs
and Jews in Israel
Efrat Ben-Ze'ev (Ruppin Academic Centre, Israel)
Background: Our understanding of any given conflict is associated with our
subjective perceptions of the landscape; the way we imagine its size, boundaries,

carrying capacity or inhabitants. These indicate our inclinations and fabrications.
Henri Lefebvre wrote in the Production of Space: “How many maps, in the
descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given
space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents? It is doubtful whether a
finite number can ever be given in answer to this sort of question" ([1974] 1991:85).
People who belong to the same social group will produce similar maps, reflecting
common upbringing. These can be defined as collective mental maps. My study
examines the product of these educational processes.
Methodology: The study examines the mental maps of Jewish-Israeli and
Palestinian/Arab-Israeli students. The first step was to collect map-drawings of
Israel/Palestine from 200 students and trace characteristic partialities. Then, a sample
of students was interviewed and focus groups were conducted to discuss the meaning
of the maps that were drawn. The study had begun on January 2009 and will continue
throughout 2010.
Initial findings: Among Jewish Israeli students (not associated with the
settlement project), there was lack of knowledge of Israel's borders and the Occupied
Territories and the country was often drawn as a floating entity, with no link (and no
knowledge) of the neighboring countries. Among the Palestinian-Arabs, the Occupied
Territories and its boundaries were known and there was good knowledge of one's
place of birth and locale. The questioners and interviews revealed that while Israeli-
Jews are often unaware of Palestinian Arabs and their landscape, Palestinian-Arabs
are more aware of the Jews and express stronger rejection towards them.
London in Focus: Place-making in Youth Filmmaking Projects
Alicia Blum-Ross (University of Oxford, UK)
Drawn from two years of anthropological fieldwork with filmmaking projects for
‘disadvantaged’ young people in London, this paper explores the ways in which
collaborative video allows for the re-imagination of space and place in London. In
the ethnographic examples cited here, young people are invited to use the use the
sensory and technological processes of participatory and collaborative filmmaking as
a method of ‘focusing in’ to tune their sensory and perceptive faculties into the
experience of creating place.
In this paper, I use ethnographic material to understand young people’s
relationship to their physical surroundings, and the ways in which filmmaking
projects intercede in or reinforce a sense of belonging or engagement. These projects,
funded by state sources, are often conceived in response to the positioning of young
peoples’ spatial relationships in terms of deviance. From reports on ‘territoriality’ to
fear of ‘post-code gangs,’ young peoples’ movements are prescribed by visible and
invisible boundaries which are self-proclaimed, media-fostered and legally enforced,
and have inherent consequences for perceptions of safety.
To illustrate, I use the example of the ‘Lea Valley’ project, which was initiated
by a filmmaker in 2007. The project took a group of 12-14 year olds into areas of
East London where they had never been, though relatively short distances from their
homes, teaching them camera and sound-recording skills to create two short films.
Yet, while their experiences of place in London were relatively circumscribed, many
of the young people retained connections to family overseas, and as such the ‘village
mentality’ of London is contrasted with the international traveling of these young

‘cosmopolitans’. In this sense, the process of creating a historically informed
collaborative video imbued generalized space with a set of meanings and experiences
that informed the young peoples’ own senses of both place and self. Here, video is
seen as an experiential mapping device, creating a sensory record of engagement.
Projective Mapping; Using Collected Subjectivity to Depict Future Memory
Marc Boumeester, Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
Starting in 2004, a long term research and educational programme was set up by the
Delft School of Design, faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology
in the Netherlands, to investigate if and how videography could play an additional
role in the exploration, registration and understanding of urban environments. This
paper will briefly summarize this programme , in which intensive self-evolving
experimental projects have been undertaken to test various cinematic mapping
techniques. These projects clarified how to apply moving images in - urban -
mapping, and show why it is helpful to start with the notion of "collected subjectivity"
as a guideline in this quest. It will take the trajectory which has been created by
research, meandering through in between stages like structuring, gridding, zoning,
collecting and sensing in cinematic mapping.
It will be clear that the results of this research form the starting point from
which many new directions can be reached, a process which will be addressed in the
second part of the paper. New outlines for future research have been drawn in which
the use of moving image in relation to the problematique of mapping still plays a
central role. But unlike the previous research we are not only focussing on mapping
existing environments, but also try to depict future conditions. Not in a way a
designer or a planner does, but as an archaeologist of conditions still to come. For this
we should enter the level where the notions of what is happening "in the screen" and
that of what is happening "on the screen" not only distinct the different approaches
towards the theme, but also can coincide and thus form a connecting element in which
production and representation appear simultaneous. In this state we could argue that
the continuous shaping and reshaping of the mental models involved in the perception
of the creation of such circumstances affect the socio-economic paradigm shifts which
underlie these changes in our urban settings. Applying the notion of "collected
subjectivity" to this investigation would enable us to reach a form of "projective
mapping".
Mapping the sound of the city: artistic counter practice in Hamburg’s
regeneration areas
Dagmar Brunow (Halmstad University, Sweden)
This paper explores contemporary art practice in Hamburg as a way to counter current
trends of regeneration in different areas of the city. While officials promote the
concept of “the growing city”, artists have employed various strategies of resistance.
For a couple of years now, artists, urban anthropologists or filmmakers have
been mapping the city from different perspectives (urban, audio, post-colonial). The
paper presents the case study of an artistic intervention organised by the independent

adio station FSK collaborating with a dozen artists and researchers in a workshop. In
a “futurist search for traces” a mapping of disappearing city sounds forms the first
part of the project. In a second step these soundfiles are archived on the website of
radio aporee (http://aporee.org/maps/). Here the sites and sounds can be accessed by
GPS-enabled mobile devices. Aporee thus forms an expanding archive which enables
us to trace changes in urban space, e.g. in the course of gentrification. The paper
analyses the politics of disappearance as a counter strategy and critically examines
archival practices to rescue oppositional experiences.
Mapping in progress: Semiotics and Cartography of self through a specific casestudy.
Gaspare Caliri and Elena Lorenzetto (University of Bologna, Italy)
In the last years, new ways of thinking and producing maps have been developed. A
relevant sign is the shift from the expression “cartography” to the expression
“mapping”, that implies semantic and cultural effects. While “cartography” conveys a
text as a stand-alone object, “mapping” refers to a practice. Mapping does not focus
anymore on the final result, but on the process of cartographic production. We refer to
mapping as an approach that spreads from Psychogeography experiments to recent
Christian Nold’s maps. Moreover mapping has become a common way of
representing various types of phenomena, both individual (experiences, uses) and
collective (political waves, medical trends) used by different disciplines.
The subject has entered into the cartography. The individual dimension too. So
this requires a reevaluation of methods and categories. Indeed it produces a very
interesting consequence: it asserts to be a production tool, not only a representation.
Not only a project of a map, but an active process that never really ends.
We aim to discuss these issues through a specific case-study of mapping, that
we are working on, focused on a gender-oriented community in an Italian city,
Bologna. This mapping explores the individual uses and relations towards the city. It
will have as a result a web-based map that shows the community’s urban practices.
The data-mining is based on an emblematic value that cannot be measured by
quantitative survey: the pleasure, with its variables, from the sex to the leisure. So the
map will be based on sensorial experiences and attitudes.
This research involves two levels of interest. At first, the map is for the
gender-oriented community a way of self-representation in relation/conflict with its
city and its accessibility. At a second level, at a meta-level, it represents a crucial
device, in order to question the semiotic implications of cartographic activity.
The paper will illustrate the creative and theoretical active process of this
mapping, based on qualitative methods of survey, that involves many questions.
District 6 / Salford 7. The Destruction of Memory and the Politics of Visibility.
Lawrence Cassidy (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
In the North of England, urban communities are undergoing mass housing clearance
programmes as a result of market orientated regeneration. Successive waves of
demolition over the past forty years has contributed to a loss of collective identity and

to long term social and spatial segregation. Recent academic research has described
the current regeneration process as a “violation of a way of being towards housing”
(Allen, 2008:198). The ongoing destruction of homes has also involved human rights
violations. The issues at the root of recent housing demolitions are comparable to past
land clearances in Scotland, Ireland and Africa.
The research utilises the material remnants of demolished urban communities,
such as large scale interactive street maps, salvaged street signs, oral histories, family
photographs and home movies in art installations. These exhibitions explore place as
a groups sense of identity, unearthing history and rootedness, meanings and
experience and memories of home (Casey, 2000, Herbert and Matthews, 2004). The
exhibitions are interventions into museum sites and alternative spaces in the city. The
maps aim to re-trace former occupants of city streets, who have been relocated. Exresidents
are invited to exhibitions, to discuss the maps, streets and the intricate
details of community life, revealing multi layered stories about residents lives.
Therefore, the maps act as a catalyst of artefactual memory (Urry, 2002), as they are
exhibited in existing spaces of memory. Archives of the former and current addresses
of visitors are kept and used to provide a more accurate overview of how and where
fragmented communities were relocated to and what their experience has been like
since, as they were often moved from the centre to the periphery of the city.
I researched related international museums that used maps in art installations
as claims to land ownership. The District 6 Museum, Cape Town, was built to
commemorate the District 6 area, inhabited over five generations by extended family
networks. The area was a central part of the identity of the “coloured” community
(Western, 1996). However, it was also associated with a slum district and was linked
to negative preconceptions of racial and working class groups. The factors behind the
clearance of District 6 and the spatial marginalisation produced by it, have been
compared to Toxteth, Liverpool and other U.K. cities (Coombes, 2003).The District 6
Museum recently used mental maps, (Gould and White, 1974), family snaps and oral
histories in installations within the legal process of land restitution, implemented by
the ANC after 1994. This resulted in some residents being relocated to their former
district, after being cleared under the Group Areas Act of the 1950s. These
installations inspired related communities in the Western Cape to claim the right to
return. Maps were a central feature of the legal process of land claims and are also a
central feature of the current permanent installation at the museum. Residents are
encouraged to write on their former place of residence when visiting.
The research asks to what extent can installations using maps, oral histories,
street signs and related objects be used in a political, legal and social networking
context? Can projects of this kind challenge museum curatorial policy, given the
absence of effective engagement in city histories? (Kavanagh,1999; Macdonald,
1999; Bennett, 1995). Can links be established, using comparable maps, family snaps
and material artefacts between cultures? (Hirsch, 2002; Coombes, 2003). Clearly, a
methodology has been recently used in South Africa, yet is it applicable to different
regions of England?
Sales appeal of wealth and poverty. The role of visual images in shaping of
geographic knowledge in Czechoslovakia in 1930s
Lucie Cesalkova (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)

In this paper I would like to focus on the ways of visual mapping of preferred
Czechoslovak tourist resorts in the 1930s. Analysing maps, travel-guides, visual
teaching tools (slide, wall-hung images, textbooks), specialized tourist-promotional
brochures or supplements of magazines and newspaper I will draw my attention to
strategies of structuring geographical knowledge about preferred towns and regions in
the interwar period. Promotion of these areas I would like to explain as a part of
governmental project of improvement of the overall infrastructure and services in the
after war period.
The paper will thus explore the practices of mapping of recommended tourist
attractions (mainly spa-towns) with an accent on the construction of geographical
imagination. In the description of the practices of production, circulation and display
of visual images of particular places I will uncover the network of power relations
shaping the officially distributed knowledge (and memory). The process of filling
blank spaces in spectator’s imagination through visual media I will contextualize in
the period of first years of Czechoslovak independence from Austro-Hungarian
monarchy as one of the catalysers of state propaganda.
Doing this, I will draw my attention mainly on the relation between the place,
the media (and its potential to shape geographical knowledge) and the audience. I
want to highlight the ways in which photographic as well as cinema images and
tourism function as machines of knowledge with reference to my research on
circulation of visual images of tourist areas in popular and educative media.
A Building Unfolds: Dancing Across Time in Russian Ark
Simone Shu-Yeng Chung (University of Cambridge, UK)
Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (2002) which takes the form of a semi-documentary is
one of few films that have managed to recognise the prerogative of architecture as
instrumental in dictating the film’s narrative. Whilst the invisible Russian narrator and
his historical European counterpart traverse the Winter Palace (now part of the
Hermitage State Museum) in one continuous shot, the cinema audience revisit St.
Petersburg’s past through their eyes. The paper proposes that a coherent
understanding of the film is to be read through the buildings of the Hermitage,
grounded in the museum experience as its narrative medium. The notion of time and
space, being firmly entrenched in museology, allows the film to explore the effects of
historical traces in the temporal dimension and the spatial qualities experienced
through the senses of sight and touch.
The importance of the Winter Palace in Russian history and cinema is
redoubled by the film’s reference to Eisenstein’s October 1917, imploring for both
films to be read as a syzygy. Itself an architectural palimpsest, the building is also a
seamless patchwork of architectural styles. Continual extensions and remodelling is
reflected in temporal disjunctions that pervade the internal and external skin of the
museum itself. It complements the film’s narrative which unfolds through fluctuating
temporal arcs mediated within the stable physical spatial geography of the building.
Memories of critical events that helped shape the city of St. Petersburg are distilled
into distinct historically located story arcs and are accessed as points in the fabric of
time similar to Bergson’s idea of ‘sheets of past’. Transitional building elements –
doors, staircases and colonnades – are employed as the devices that facilitate this
experiential transition. Although the narrative structure of the film emerges from a

series of periodic jumps across time’s landscape, spatial linearity is adhered by
mapping the protagonists’ movement in the actual space of the museum complex
itself.
Such violation in the chronology of linear time is in essence the very nature of
all museum artefacts. Being evidentiary remains of a previous event, they are as much
in the past as it is in the present, now separated by the museum from the flow of time.
Within a museum space, the imperative to protect the artefacts prohibits direct
physical contact by visitors. Similarly, as if to preserve the conditions that generated
the live experience, events pertaining to Russia’s interface with the world are
portrayed in this film from an internalised perspective, archived within the confines of
the museum’s rooms. Historical events are thus showcased like meticulously arranged
exhibits from Peter the Great’s Kunsthammer museum – the original ‘cabinet of
curiosities’. Together with the caesura from history, this further reinforces the
‘encased’ incidents with a graver sense of monumentality.
As in classical museum spaces, visitors are expected to move around and view
the exhibits in a specific order. The presence of visible power in museum curatorship,
termed the ‘exhibitory complex’, is applied to the film’s diegesis by introducing
austere museum ushers that dictate the route of the frustrated protagonists. The
organisational quality shared by the cinematic medium and discipline of museology is
used here to illuminate the temporal co-presence of the past with the present and
distils from the visual and haptic senses the qualities of the museum space itself to be
preserved in the two-dimensional space of the cinema. Reliving moments from
Russian history as interpreted by Sokurov not only illicit a more compelling
embodied experience, it also establishes within the internal landscape of the
Hermitage buildings a sense of place and time past.
Literary Cartography: The Textual Map-Making of Sean Borodale
David Cooper (University of Lancaster, UK)
The spatial turn in literary studies has led to considerable discussion of both writerly
and readerly mappings: spatial critics habitually identify ways in which creative
writers ‘map’ geographical space within their texts; at the same time, a dominant
critical trope is the use of mapping metaphors to describe the process of reading this
geo-specific literature. This paper will argue, however, that there is also a need for
literary critics to engage more fully with actual, as well as metaphorical, forms of
map-making. More particularly, it will argue that a shift from literary ‘mapping’ to
‘cartography’ needs to be informed by a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to
creative texts: an approach which draws upon contemporary developments in the field
of critical cartography. These theoretical issues will be explored by focusing on the
work of Sean Borodale: a contemporary writer/artist whose generically-hybrid works
showcase a self-consciously postmodern engagement with the imbricated relationship
between embodied spatial practices and both textual and cartographical
representations of space.
The paper will first focus on Walking to Paradise (1999): a work in which
Borodale retraces the walking tour of the Lake District undertaken by Wordsworth
and Coleridge in the winter of 1799. As Borodale walks across this intertextual
landscape, he endeavours to document the multi-sensory experience of being-in-theworld;
and these environmental notes are then transferred onto a series of Ordnance

Survey-style textual maps. The resultant work – first displayed within the seemingly
bounded space of the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, in 1999 – raises questions
about the relationship between the phenomenological experience and graphic (both
textual and cartographical) representation of geographical space. The paper will then
move on to consider Notes for an Atlas (2003): a work in which Borodale transplants
this methodology of environmental note-taking into the metropolitan setting of central
London. Described by Robert Macfarlane as a ‘370-page poem [which] rings with
sadness, haphazardness and utterly modern beauty’, Notes for an Atlas offers a
portrait of the city. At the same time, however, the text also invites the reader to
reflect, conceptually, upon the nature of writerly map-making. What is more, the
work also opens up further thinking regarding the imaginative possibilities and
problems associated with reader-response to both literary and cartographic
representations of urban space.
The paper will end by suggesting that Borodale’s hybridist representational
practices might be described as examples of literary cartography: a strand of creative
writing which is preoccupied by actual, as well as figurative, forms of mapping. The
paper will also conclude by gesturing towards a holistic model of literary cartography
in which the spatial critic similarly functions as a map-maker through the use of GIS
technology.
Maps, Memories and Manchester: The Cartographic Imagination of the Hidden
Networks of the Hydraulic City
Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins (University of Manchester, UK)
The largely unseen channelling, culverting and controlling of water into, through and
out of cities is the focus of our cartographic interpretation. This paper draws on
empirical material depicting hydraulic infrastructure underlying the growth of
Manchester in mapped form. Focusing, in particular, on the c19th burst of large-scale
hydraulic engineering, which supplied vastly increased amounts of clean water,
controlled unruly rivers to eliminate flooding, and safely removed sewage, this paper
explores the contribution of mapping to the making of a more sanitary city, and
towards bold civic minded urban intervention. These infrastructures from Victorian
and Edwardian Manchester are now taken-for- granted but remain essential for urban
life. The maps, plans and diagrams of hydraulic Manchester fixed particular forms of
elite knowledge (around planning foresight, topographical precision, civil engineering
and sanitary science) but also facilitated and freed flows of water around the city.
The survival of these maps and plans in libraries, technical books and obscure
reports allows the changing cultural work of water to be explored and evokes a range
of socially specific memories of a hidden city. Our aetiology of hydraulic
cartographics is conducted using ideas from STS, semiology, aesthetics, visualization,
and critical cartography with the goal of revealing how they work as virtual witnesses
to an unseen city, dramatizing engineering prowess and envisioning complex and
messy materiality into a logical, holistic and fluid network underpinning the urban
machine.

The Genealogy of Cities: the study of urban history and urban design through
historic city plans
Charles Graves (Kent State University, Ohio, USA)
One of the primary tools for urban designers is the use of city plans. Historically the
city plan of Imola, Italy 1502, attributed to Leonardo De Vinci, is considered the first
accurately drawn orthogonal city plan. Prior to, and for a number of years after,
drawings of cities assumed a vantage point from an angle, or a bird's eye view, e.g.
Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum published in Cologne in 1572.
The process of mapping cities from an orthogonal vantage point allows for the
urban designer to quickly and accurately understand the relationship between solid
mass and void space. To then understand the process of historic city design one need
only study a series of comparative city plans. These city plans can be found published
throughout history, but since the field of urban design is fairly new, these plans were
commonly not drawn for the designers use, and vary in their style and information.
My research consisted of gathering over 1000 city plans throughout history,
scanning them, and redrawing the plans in a constant drawing format in CAD
software. This then allows the urban designer to extract comparative information for
urban investigations. Examples of resources for some of the primary city plans drawn
were; Beadeker’s travel guides, publication in originating in 1827; Guida d’Italia del
Touring Club Italiano, published circa 1900; and an atlas by the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) published in 1846
At the Mapping, Memory and the City conference I plan to discuss the
following:
o The various historic maps gathered, their sources, information gained, and
the sense of memory they display.
o Examples of the computer drawn maps
o Historic typologies discovered
o Uses for teaching urban history and urban design.
Rebranding the South African City
Louise Green (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
This paper focuses on a single and controversial moment in the representation of
South African cities in film - an advertisement for one of the television channels of
the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The advertisement traces a somewhat
abbreviated day in the life of Johannesburg from the perspective of a township
dweller. It follows his movement as he wakes, walks through the street, and catches a
taxi into the city. It follows his gaze as he looks across the no-mans land between
township and central city and into the wealthy, suburban gardens. It catches him
walking the streets of the city being mistaken for a criminal and finally meeting up
with friends and returning home. What only gradually becomes apparent (because of
the way in which the advertisement is shot) is that all the township dwellers are white
and all the wealthy inhabitants of the city are black. The advertisement was part of
SABC Channel 1’s rebranding of its image in the new millennium. It was aired
mostly in cinemas and provoked strong public responses. This paper reflects on the
ideological work this advertisement attempts to do through its representation of a

familiar yet estranging image of the nation and the city. The evocative visual
rendering of the city through an intense abbreviated juxtaposition of the organized
and disorganized spaces of modern Johannesburg, stacked motorways alongside
informal street life, both references the apartheid past and its particular modernist
obsession with planned and divided space and in a peculiar way supercedes it. What
the advertisement represents is less the real of the new South Africa than an imagined
no place, a conceptual reworking of an idea about the potential intersections of race
and class.
“City of Change and Challenge”: the cine-societies’ response to Liverpool’s
redevelopment in the 1960s.
Julia Hallam (University of Liverpool, UK)
In the early 1960s, Liverpool became the first city in England to enact new
government guidelines on planning policy by commissioning a systematic evaluation
of land use and transportation systems in the central area surrounding the Pier Head
and the waterfront. The city plan became a controversial blueprint for new
development during the decade including demolition of the central market area and
the building of a new road network that included a second tunnel under the river
Mersey. As part of this process, the city council produced three promotional films that
projected Liverpool as a 'city of change and challenge', emphasising the cultural life
of the city and its thriving manufacturing sector in order to attract new businesses and
investment. In contrast, the thriving amateur cine sector created an unofficial account
of the way in which these changes altered the lives of the communities living and
working in the area. Drawing on the ‘Pleasures Past’ series of films about Liverpool
and the private archives of filmmaker and collector Angus Tilston, this chapter
explores how the activities of the cine-clubs responded to the planned modernisation
of the city. These films, with their insistence on mapping what Guiliano Bruno has
called ‘time as it was being lived’ (2002:259), project an emotional response to
modernisation as the known city becomes another place, a response to redevelopment
that insists on the value of personal and collective memory.
From Alienation to the Zigzag: rethinking the significance of the London A to Z
Richard Hornsey (University of the West of England, UK)
In 1936, the Geographers Map Co. published the first edition of their A to Z Atlas and
Guide to London and Suburbs. The A to Z has since become a major, if contested,
motif within London’s modern mythology. Whilst its reductive cartographic
conventions are often attacked for reifying the city and freezing its rich dynamism
within a network of roads, the atlas also sports its own creation myth through the
figure of ‘Mrs P’ (Phyllis Pearsall), diligently charting its streets for the future benefit
of all. These ambivalent responses, I argue, reflect the conceptual limitations of
contemporary critical map theory. Adhering to a basically Foucauldian framework,
theorists have neglected the temporal life of the A to Z and obscured the irrational
romance beneath its rational abstractions. Maps are much more than static
visualisations of spatial knowledge; they are technologies that actively orchestrate our

experiences via the particular rhythms prescribed within their use. Indeed, it is often
more productive to approach a map as a type of musical score - to listen to the tempos
and dynamics through which it commands to be used - rather than analysing its visual
representations.
Returning to the London of the mid-1930s, this paper enquires further into the
A to Z’s lasting popularity. Published whilst London’s pedestrians were experiencing
novel forms of bureaucratic management, the A to Z provided a resistant countervision
that celebrated individual autonomy and decentred community. Opposing the
cybernetic beats of the pedestrian crossing and the automated traffic light, the A to Z
inserted walkers into a responsive syncopation, and a performance of imagined
community more aligned with Victorian social theory than emergent interwar
modernism. Attending to the temporal specifics of the A to Z’s typography thus
reveals the full force of its covert romanticism.
Lund, Open City? Community Communication in Neutral Sweden 1945
Mats Jönsson (University of Lund, Sweden)
Almost half a century ago, Raymond Williams concluded his insightful observations
about relations between communication and communities as follows: “since our way
of seeing things is literally our ways of living, the process of communication is in fact
the process of community…”. Together with two concepts normally employed in
studies of how nations situate, relate to and represent past and present identities –
Pierre Nora’s memory sites and Michael Billig’s banal nationalism – Williams’
statement will guide this paper’s analysis of audiovisual communication in and about
the small Swedish town Lund during the Second World War. At the very end of the
war, many Swedish cities began to host refugees from German concentration camps
and Lund was no exception. For a short while it hosted no fewer than 3,171 refugees
within its borders, a considerable figure at the time amounting to more than ten per
cent of the total number of citizens. On 7 May, one of Lund’s citizens – amateur
filmmaker Rudolf Ahlander – had his 8mm-camera ready when people from his
hometown celebrated the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany together with
foreign students and female Polish refugees. The municipal arena chosen was one of
Lund’s most frequently used memory sites, the University Place, conveniently
situated just outside the university’s gymnasium building where 194 of the Polish
refugees had been given temporary shelter. Moreover, this site only lies about one
hundred metres from the city’s famous cathedral. This paper analyzes Ahlander’s
two-and-a-half minute long sequence from historiographical, aesthetic and
communicative perspectives. An opening discussion about the recorded sites chosen
is followed by analyses of the activities taken place in front of the camera. Finally, I
will present some tentative suggestions of how to use this kind of historical source
material in studies of local and localizing media.
Walking the reel streets of Wonderful London: Harry B. Parkinson’s London
travelogue series Wonderful London (1924) and the walking tour
Karolina Kendall-Bush (University College London, UK)

This paper studies and compares two ways of mapping London: walking tours and
cinematic representations. Cinema and walking tours both allow the public to traverse
urban terrains. Analysing a series of London travelogues directed by Harry B.
Parkinson in the course of 1924 under the title Wonderful London, I will examine how
this series of thematised cinematic excursions parallels and sometimes converges with
the walking tours that guide tourists through the city today. Analysing films from the
series, such as Barging through London, Cosmopolitan London and London’s
Contrasts that take the spectator on exhaustive tours through London’s most wellknown
and obscure sights and curiosities, I will map diverse geographies of the city
around the films’ thematic concerns noting how and when these cinematic excursions
repeat themselves in the walking tours that criss-cross the capital.
Sergei Eisenstein’s essay ‘Montage and Architecture’ draws parallels between
the effect of cinematic montage on the immobile viewer and the ‘montage’ created by
our legs as we walk through architectural space. Taking her cues from Eisenstein, film
theorist Giuliana Bruno goes further and suggests that the cinematic spectator is not a
voyeur but a voyageur moving through cinematic space. Looking at walking tours and
cinematic travelogues of London side-by-side, this paper will test and add to these
theorisations of cinematic spectatorship by exploring the ways in which the direction
and construction involved in walking tours that map a thematised London mirror the
cinematic apparatus of the filmic travelogue. In this way, this paper will theorise the
Wonderful London series as a succession of walking tours that allow an embodied
cinematic spectator to phantasmatically walk London’s streets.
Budapest, Identity and Facades: Remapping memory through documentary
filmmaking
Pedro Lange and László Munteán (University of San Francisco, USA)
This paper will consist of the screening of a fragment from “Identity and Facades”
(dir. Pedro Lange, Budapest, 2007), a documentary that features the urban
archeological work of László Munteán in Budapest’s Seventh District (Jewish
Quarter); and Prof. Munteán’s presentation of the urban archeological research
featured in the film, as well as Prof. Lange’s discussion of the wider context in which
this fragment functions and the interplay of film and memory.
The Seventh District in Budapest hosts one of Europe’s most significant
examples of architectural heritage, but it remains unprotected from the onslaught of
globalization, tourism and the flow of capital that generally calls for gentrification and
re-urbanization projects. When preservation attempts are successful, they are usually
centered on official historic buildings whose facades are meticulously preserved while
the interior configurations are radically modernized by real estate developers, turning
the buildings into “shells” devoid of their historical content, memories, social
realities and connection to the community. These practices bespeak the mapping or
re-mapping of collective memory and identity in the Hungarian capital. As with any
mapping, there are blind spots that run against the grain of the spatial conceptions of
real-estate developers.
The film, in many ways sheds light on these blind spots, as László Munteán
shares his evocative readings of dilapidated buildings and palimpsest-ridden facades
in the Hungarian capital, interweaving collective and personal memory in a way that
is illustrative of the Lefebvrean “right to the city” and his notion of “lived space.” At

a juncture in the documentary, for instance, the restoration of an entrance gate is
discussed by tenants, neighbors and Munteán himself, thus hinting at the dialogic
alliances that could emerge in the spirit of preservation of heritage.
Listening for the sounds of place and memory in popular music heritage
Paul Long and Jez Collins (Birmingham School of Media, UK)
The relationship of popular music, space and memory has emerged in explicit and
implicit fashion in a range of heritage-related projects in a variety of locations. Civic
ventures – plaques, statues, and archives - designed to explore and enhance local
identity have become a feature of US cities such as Chicago, New Orleans and
Memphis. These initiatives are aided by commercial ventures – tour trails,
recreations, souvenirs -in attracting tourist dollars though the advertisement of the
rich associations of such places with the musical forms of the last century. The appeal
then is to natives and visitors both and the urban associations of popular music
practices are apparent in the recognition and celebration of, variously, the birthplace
of artists, performance venues and clubs, studios as well as sites from the mise-enscene
of song lyrics in terms of streets, areas and the cities themselves.
Across the UK a wealth of projects echo these well-established counterparts
from the US. Liverpool has its various Beatles-related experiences as well as the
recent ‘The Beat Goes On’ exhibition while nearby rival is served by Manchester
District Music Archive and various commercial enterprises.
Our focus in this paper concerns a range of related activity focussed on the
City of Birmingham. Alongside a myriad of individual blogs and nostalgia events, as
well as entrepreneurial tourist experiences, are projects such as Birmingham Music
Archive (http://birminghammusicarchive.co.uk/); Birmingham Music Heritage
(http://www.birminghammusicheritage.org.uk/) and ‘Home of Metal’
(http://www.homeofmetal.com/). With large-scale ambitions, these projects have
various levels of official support and financial backing and a crucial relationship with
the long-project to reinvent the city as a cultural space.
Such projects and their practices invite various questions that we explore in
this paper. These concern the nature of memory invoked around popular music and, in
the context of this conference, the role and manner of mapping the identity of this
place. Given the wealth of stories and perspectives involved across popular music
practice there are also political considerations to take on board in listening for the
historical echoes of the sound of the city.
Cinematic Mapping: Visualizing Urban Movements for Urban Design
Andong Lu (University of Cambridge, UK)
There are paralleling and contrasting perspectives on urban space: an aerial view that
schematizes urban space as spatial organization versus a grounded view that narrates
space as concrete places and episodes. Contemporary cities are often conceived from
above but consumed from below. Cinematic mapping reveals the lived order of urban
space in several respects: it maintains the diachronic dimension of human experience
and hence its narrative nature; it brings forth a haptics of space and thereby addresses

multiple human involvements with space (voyeuristic, vicarious and visceral); it
makes intelligible various movements — urban dynamics — that give direct
expression of different spatial cultures. Based on these understandings, this paper will
examine a recent case study of Xiejiekou urban block in Nanjing, China. This study
uses moving image to record typical movements through the urban block, and
employs these videos to analyze the view, outline and interface of the streets. In doing
so, it cases light on how cinema may provide a new start point for urban design.
Mapping the Sonic City
Daniel Makagon (DePaul University, Chicago, USA)
The OpenStreetMap project has raised global awareness about the exciting
possibilities for citizen cartography while encouraging individuals to explore their
cities in new and unique ways. This cartographic project has been paralleled by the
production of audio soundwalks and sonic maps by a variety of audio
documentarians, radio producers, and sound artists, who often take do-it-yourself
(DIY) approaches to urban production and representation while opening up
opportunities for community connection among participants in the sound recordings
and listeners. This paper charts some of these sound recording projects in an effort to
critically examine the important role of sound in the production of urban space.
Ethnographer Paul Stoller argues that researchers have failed miserably when
it comes to accounting for senses other than sight. Soundswalks and sonic maps
provide an important alternative to sight-centric modes of research, offering unique
ways to consider the complexity of sensory experience in the city. My presentation
will include recordings I have made that mirror some of the 77 community areas
presented in the well-known Chicago neighborhood map developed by the Social
Science Research Committee at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. Additionally,
I will discuss (and play excerpts from) community and commercial soundwalks that
both foreground and gloss over a range of important local histories and urban
experiences. Ultimately, I suggest some ways in which these sound recordings map
the city, offering local citizens and tourists an important way to hear and understand
unique histories of the metropolis while facilitating participation in contemporary
urban life.
The Ghetto Unmapped
Alan Marcus (University of Aberdeen, UK)
As part of the In Time of Place research project (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/timeofplace/),
which examines sites associated with Jewish identity, the Shoah and the Diaspora,
this paper will explore how the film, The Ghetto (Marcus, 2009), frustrates efforts to
transparently map an iconic and heavily touristed urban space. The 30-minute film,
which operates without narration or interviews, adopts a contemporary inquiry into a
transfigured sense of place in the area of Venice known as the Ghetto Vecchio and
Ghetto Nuovissimo. Commonly referred to as the locale where the word ‘ghetto’ is
derived from, the film offers a medley of engagements with different users of the site,
including tourists, locals and both Jewish and non-Jewish participants. The paper will

consider to what extent the film presents an observational pastiche of site-specific
urban activity, or whether it ultimately foregrounds a subtle and potentially
unmappable counterpoint to excavate real and metaphorical cultural and architectural
juxtapositions. Point to point lines of displayed activity emerge, while hinting at
traces of displacement. In this regard, I will probe the way the film and its use of
montage positions a creative narrative mix of touristic crossings, recent Jewish
reappropriation, and traumatic inferences of a society once enclosed and later
subjected to deportations. Questions are posed about what is unveiled as pilgrimage,
packaging and performance.
Film. Stadt. Wien: A transdisciplinary exploration of Vienna as a Cinematic City
Siegfried Mattl, Vrääth Öhner
While the relationship between film and city receives increasing attention in the
theorization of fictional films – supported by the context of allegorical figures of
modernism – the same cannot be said of the ‘raw’ image of the city in amateur films
and related ephemeral genres. The interdisciplinary research project Film. Stadt.
Wien. tries to bridge this gap by exploring the intimate relationship of urban space and
ephemeral or orphaned film from a historical perspective. It is not the canonical
(though equally challenging) “Vienna films” that are at the center of this exploration,
but a convolute of more than 300 films from the Austrian Film Museum’s collection,
which are, in part, fragmentary actualities, news reels, sponsored films, avant-garde
and amateur films.
What do these films tell us about the city in which they were made, or which
they show more or less conspicuously? This question seems simple at first, but to
answer it a number of detours are required. First, it is, of course, possible to treat
these films as historical sources, as documents and traces of things passed. But apart
from the fact that the empirical data basis is too narrow to reconstruct the history of
the city in the 20 th century -- even in the slightest -- using solely the historical method
would precisely embezzle the specific qualities of these films and filmic fragments.
Qualities, which only become apparent once you analyze the films as building blocks
of what Michel Foucault (using an archaeological methodology) described as a
positive ‘Architecture of Knowledge’.
Our presentation will focus on only one of those ‘Architectures of
Knowledge’, yet a central one: the discourse on realism of the filmic image and the
issue of film as memory; a discourse that has itself become historic in film studies
already. In this context, we would tentatively like to quote André Bazin who said
neither photography nor film raise the claim to eternity, but photography merely
embalms time. Particularly when drafting the history of a city as a history of film, the
question still seems vital: does embalming time mean the rescue of essence through
appearances, or just the safe-keeping of appearances as such?
We will take a closer look at 3 extraordinary films from the vast collection of
unknown orphaned films of the Austrian Film Museum to further examine this
question: “Ein Film vom Wäschewaschen” (A Film on Doing One’s Laundry), a
sponsored film, 1932; “Wien März/April 1938” (Vienna March/April 1938), an
amateur film, scenes from 1937 and 1938; as well as “Ein Tag im Ringturm” (A day
at the Ringturm tower), by an amateur film collective, 1962.

Besides exploring filmic realism and memory, we are interested in the relation
of these films to the atmospheric and culturally coded cityscape of fictional Vienna
films; what qualities they add to the imagined city space of historiography and arts,
how they deviate from collective memory and which dimension they develop beyond
the iconic and symbolic representation of the city.
Simple interface / complex interaction: Using basic materials for a collaborative
mapping methodology
Sam Meech (Re-Dock, Liverpool, UK)
Artist collective Re-Dock will discuss and demonstrate their approach to community
engagement through the collective symbolic mapping of memories and ideas in 'real'
physical spaces.
In the context of digital-media art practice, where audience is co-creator, Re-
Dock use simple material props to transfer personal impressions onto physical spaces
through bespoke collaborative mapping activities. Shopping centres, libraries, social
clubs and green spaces are transformed into information environments using
cardboard cut-outs, sports equipment, old rope and balloons.
Key to their methodology is the use of simple tangible props allowing
individuals to interface with a shared symbolic space and opening-up an environment
for more in-depth discussion.
Re-Dock will discuss their ongoing work in relation to the Leeds - Liverpool
Canal, ‘Canal&’ which was developed in collaboration with artist Alan Dunn and
funded by Liverpool Biennial.
Different communities mapped out new visions of the canal reflecting their
collective experience of the space and suggesting creative ideas for the future.
The Canal& research has since been fed-back to communities and has also
informed a number of subsequent dialogues and public art commissions.
Re-Dock’s developing methodology of participatory mapping encourages an
opening up of discussion, role-playing negotiations and can facilitate crosscommunity
dialogues. This talk will use images and video to present a process posing
questions about the psychological ownership of spaces – how are spaces lost and how
can they be reclaimed.
The presentation will explore the use of simple materials, and look at the map
as flexible tool and metaphor for the collection, creation, and re-creation of ideas and
memories.
Established 2008, Re-Dock is led by artists and filmmakers Sam Meech, Tim
Brunsden, Neil Winterburn and John O’Shea. Their interest is in combining areas of
digital media, interface design, participatory mapping and storytelling in a researchled
arts practice that engages with communities. Over a variety of education,
engagement and consultation projects, Re-Dock have facilitated individuals in
building collaborative maps and models of psychological and emotional space.
Through this process, memories, perspectives and ideas are made tangible, visible
and negotiable. www.re-dock.org

Mapping film exhibition in Flanders (1920-1990):A diachronic analysis of
cinema culture combined with demographic and geographic data
Philippe Meers (University of Antwerp, Belgium)and Daniel Biltereyst (Ghent
University, Belgium)
Over the past ten years, an emerging international trend in cinema history has focused
not on films but on questions of the circulation and consumption of cinema –film
distribution and exhibition – and on writing the histories of cinema’s specific local
audiences. This new cinema history (Richard Maltby) pursues quantitative data on the
uses of cinema, using the digital technologies of e.g. databases and GIS to compile
new information about the history of cinema exhibition.
In this paper we rely on data and insights from a major research project on the
history of film exhibition and cinema-going in the Dutch-language part of Belgium
(Flanders). This Enlightened City project integrated various research strands,
including a longitudinal database on film exhibition structures, a large-scale database
on film programming in various cities and towns, as well as an oral history project on
cinema experiences.
We mainly focus on the first phase of the project: the construction of an
extended inventory of existing and historical cinemas in Flanders with attention for
the geographical distribution and the relations between the commercial and the
‘pillarised’ circuit. We briefly sketch the context of film exhibition and cinema going
in Flanders and report on findings from the database. The database allows for
analyses of major tendencies and changes in film exhibition in the 20 th century. Long
term tendencies such as the rise of cinemas in rural and urban environments, the boom
of cinema going, the decay and closure of many (provincial and neighbourhood)
cinemas and the rise of multiplexes are illustrated through empirical data.
Furthermore we focus on the tensions between commercial and/or ‘pillarised’ film
exhibition, between urban and rural areas, and between provinces and regions. We
combine these analyses with demographic and geographic data on Flanders.
Population density (allowing for a typology of rural, urbanised, urban metropolitan
areas) for instance proves to be an efficient frame of analysis.
Cities, Location Shooting and Meaning in Post-World War II British Crime
Cinema
Jacqui Miller, Liverpool Hope University (UK)
It is a popular misconception that urban location shooting began in earnest with the
French Nouvelle Vague in the late 1950s, and was taken up in America by New
Hollywood directors such as William Friedkin (The French Connection, 1971) and
Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, 1973). In fact, location shooting was a striking
characteristic of post-World War II British crime cinema. This paper will explore the
textual meaning given by authentic city centre location shooting in films such as Hell
is a city (1959, Manchester), Payroll (1961, Newcastle) and The Good Die Young
(1954, London). Particular analysis will be made of post-war films set in Liverpool
(The Clouded Yellow, 1951; The Magnet, 1950) with reference to the cultural
resonance of bomb sites and the literal and metaphorical gaps they create in the
landscape, both for original and contemporary audiences. Central to my thesis is the
notion of historical relativism; the present re-interprets the past in the light of its own

times. Whereas for post-war audiences, these sites would resonate with recent losses
and continued austerity, arguably, for the contemporary spectator these gaps are a
space that is filled with nostalgia and a 'false' memory of a lost 'golden age'.
Mapping Rohmer: A Research Journey Through Paris
Richard Misek (University of Bristol, UK)
In his Passagenwerk, Walter Benjamin hypothesised making a film of the city plan of
Paris. Unsurprisingly, his idea remains unrealised. It has, however, found fulfilment
indirectly in the films of Eric Rohmer. In over twenty films made by Rohmer between
the late 1950s and mid-2000s, characters journey through Paris on foot, by train, and
by car. As a result, the city plan appears as an implied presence, as filmed journeys
through city streets and on commuter railway lines.
This talk takes the form of two journeys mapped onto each other: a journey
through the psychogeography of Rohmer’s Paris, and a journey through my own
research into it. My research journey has initially involved reversing Benjamin’s
hypothesis, and making a city map of locations used in Rohmer’s films. The path
traced by Rohmer’s camera over fifty years moves across unconnected
arrondissements at discontinuous times, it stops and starts, loops and repeats. But, as
François Penz notes, within each film, Rohmer maintains spatial continuity – shot by
shot, his characters stick to the map, and travel through contiguous locations. As a
result, Rohmer’s films provide an illuminating test case for the contradictions
between city and film that Benjamin theorised.
My journey has subsequently extended into practice-as-research. By creating
montage sequences using footage from Rohmer’s films, I have started to create new
spatiotemporal configurations. My goal in ‘remapping’ Rohmer’s films is to respond
to Benjamin’s challenge, and find a way to make a film of the city plan of Paris. The
talk concludes with examples of my progress towards this (perhaps impossible) goal.
Kolkata in films: mythic space and the urban structure
Tapas Mitra and Sheuli Mitra (Manipal Institute of Technology, India)
The city of Kolkata has more often than not, become the principal subject, rather than
merely a backdrop for the films based on its citizens and their tales. The real city, thus
becomes a huge, almost an unbound mythical space for depicting the wonders of the
boy who is lost in the city in the initial quest for it and rediscovers it in its urban folk
magic. Ritwik Ghatak’s portrayal of this mythic wondrous space transforms itself, as
it were, into a brothel of tragic revelry in the melodrama and epic climax of
Subarnarekha. The woman of the 60’s who came out of her kitchen to work in the big
city in Mahanagar still remains the symbol of emancipation. The close up of the
overhead wires of the tram at the end of the film, continues to represent the maze and
the turbulence.
These imageries thus form a city map across time. Structures consolidate in
their mythico-real spaces. The paper explores this aspect of the city in its myths and
realities of its films on one hand, and on the other, deals with the transformations in

city morphology, identifying real neighborhoods and dwelling types which feature in
its urban mythology. The 1903 ‘Smart map’ (a survey map in 1:600, done in1903) of
the city would be used as a source material and subsequent updating of the map with
contemporary images and primary surveys of the identified sites, would help
document and interpret the transformations .
Personal Mapping in New York: classroom / street / studio.
Simonetta Moro (Eugene Lang College, New School University, New York, USA)
In this paper I will introduce the work I have been making in the last five years
around the issue of psychogeography and alternative ways to experience the urban
environment. This work has provided the springboard to develop a course and a series
of extra-curricular activities at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal
Studies, a small progressive college in the heart of New York City.
The Peripatetic Box is a portable tool that contains a series of questions and
“triggers” for the user to create his or her own guide through the city. It can be used in
any city, and the results will depend on the particular environment and the mood that
it elicits on the user. The Peripatetic Box is part architectural utopian model, part
toolbox, and is meant to be experienced on a visual and tactile level as well as on a
conceptual level (for photos and description please visit the link:
http://confluxfestival.org/conflux2008/rent-a-box-peripatetic-tour-of-the-city/)
In my “Personal Mapping in New York City”, an undergraduate course I
developed for Eugene Lang College/The New School for Liberal Studies in New
York, students explore 20th century European and American practices of mapmaking,
walking as an aesthetic form, and the psychogeographic disciplines. The city
is the site for wanderings and explorations, an outdoor laboratory stimulating
drawing, painting, photography, video, and narrative. Students work as a group and
individually to produce a map/book and a final exhibition. Readings include
Francesco Careri's Walkscapes, and excerpts from Benjamin, Lippard, Lynch, the
Situationist International, Grosz and Bruno. In the past, student work was exhibited at
Conflux 2004, Provflux 2005, and Flux Factory, 2007. This course has proven the
benefit of exploring the city in unconventional ways, for students to develop
participatory attitudes in their environment and a higher awareness of their role in
society.
The Geography of Film Production in the Italian Peninsula
Elisa Ravazzoli (University of Bologna, Italy)
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in using more actively spatial
tools and GIS application for the study of film and film industry. Although substantial
researches have been made on the geography of film production, very little attention
has been paid to the Italian movie system, where no researches could be traced. This
work aims at filling the gap. The object of this work is to study the “event” of
shooting and its geographical conformation in order to understand its dynamics in the
Italian context and explain visible implications on the cultural common imaginary.
Using data from the Internet Movie Database (IMBd) and from Annuario del Cinema

Italiano e Audiovisivi two types of GIS analysis were performed. The former aims at
investigating the intensity of “shooting” and individualizing hot spot locations, while
the latter focus on measuring the spatial and structural nature of the Italian film
production and describing changes in the film practices during the last twenty years.
The analysis provides three findings: 1.The structure of the movie production
system hasn’t changed very much during the last ten years and beside a considerable
increase in film production, due to the promotional role of the film commission, the
scenario is chiefly the same. We define the Italian film production structure as made
up of “old main core of production”, “new core of production” and “occasional sites”.
2. The distribution of film industry is not spatially random but firms tend to cluster in
the main production nodes within the country. 3. The main nodes are those where the
Italian creative class lives and where the creative industries cluster. The use of this
free dataset, available online, provides a new spatial dimension whereby it is possible
to understand cinematographic practices and national geographic patterns.
Celestial Cities or Vanity Fairs? Religion and the Making of London and New
York, 1660-1860
Kyle Roberts (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
Looking at space allows historians to refine the narratives they tell about the
development of the modern city. Urban historians have long acknowledged the
centrality of space – as a physical place and an experience – in the definitions they
offer for the city. What most historians, however, have stopped short of doing is
asking how thinking about space can reinforce or challenge causal explanations of the
development of the city.
Over the last few decades, the generative capabilities of space have come to be
more widely accepted. Building on the work of Henry Lefebrve and others, historians
now see that space can both contain and generate references, meaning, and new social
forms. Rather than just being a backdrop for the forces that have long been attributed
with shaping the city – the market, politics – space now needs to be considered as an
agent in its own right, influencing change in the city over time. Technologies built off
geographically integrated science, such as ArcGIS and Google, give scholars a
powerful tool for uncovering and illustrating these processes.
This paper takes as its premise that paying attention to space can reveal the
role that important, but overlooked factors like religion, played in the development of
the modern city. Reconstructing the spiritual and secular landscape of New York and
London through ArcGIS puts the role of religion in this process in a new light. I take
as my starting point the 1660s, a decade of rebuilding for the formerly Dutch
settlement of New Amsterdam and fire-ravaged metropolis of London. Over the next
two centuries, both cities emerged as local, national, and international centers for
various religious movements, most notably evangelicalism. By the 1860s, my end
point, both cities had assumed modern, recognizable forms.
Cinematic Cartography: Towards a Spatial Anthropology of the Moving Image
Les Roberts (University of Liverpool, UK)

Recent research on film has witnessed a growing shift towards the contextualisation
and situatedness of the moving image within socio-economic, historical and spatial
frameworks of production and consumption. While it is perhaps overstating the case
to say that representation has run its course as a focus of critical scrutiny in studies on
film, the shift towards contextualisation nevertheless signals a desire to explore new
and more productive ways of unpacking, interpreting and ‘excavating’ the cinematic
image. One of the many positive upshots of these developments is the opening up of
evermore fruitful dialogues with other disciplinary modes of critical engagement. In
this paper I ‘map’ and critique the much-discussed ‘spatial turn’ in film and cultural
studies, and take this as a starting point to argue the case for ‘cinematic cartography’
as a mode of visual, spatial and ethnographic enquiry. Proposing a five-point typology
by which to examine some of the recent contributions in the field of cinematic
cartography, I examine the extent to which these overlapping frameworks of analysis
might provide the theoretical and methodological foundations for a broader, more
integrated focus of study around place, space and moving image practice.
Drawing in part on geo-historical research on Liverpool’s urban landscape in
film, I explore the scope for the development of critical methodologies centred around
database and archival collations of filmic, spatial and visual information. Utilising
Geographic Information Systems resources, this on-going research seeks to georeference
the representational spaces of Liverpool in film, providing a methodological
framework that grounds these images within the layered spatialities and textualities of
the ‘archive city’ (Roberts & Koeck, 2007): a ‘cine-spatial’ conceptualisation that
brings into critical dialogue the overlapping spatial formations (material,
ethnographic, geographic, filmic, affective) constitutive of what I have termed the
‘spatial anthropology of the moving image.’
Mediating the Local: Amateur Cine Culture and Oral Histories
Ryan Shand (University of Liverpool, UK)
While amateur films of the city often account for the majority of regional film
collections, accompanying materials such as scrapbooks and interview transcripts can
take up more physical space than the archive can reasonably be expected to store in
the long-term. As a result, the thought process behind the making of these productions
can be difficult to discern for the visiting scholar who does not have the local
knowledge required to unlock the significance of the footage. This problem is
compounded by the lack of synchronised sound in many of the amateur productions,
meaning that they have now effectively become silent productions even if an
accompanying soundtrack once existed. In particular, the many non-fiction films that
directly engaged with issues provoked by the passing of time are available to view,
yet their significance often lies outside the boundaries of the frame.
The necessary turn towards local history that results from this problem can be
facilitated by interviews with the amateur filmmakers themselves, a project which is
currently being undertaken by the project ‘Mapping the City in Film’ at the University
of Liverpool. By adding ‘layers of meaning’ (Norris-Nicholson, 2007) to visual
material that has an uncertain status, information that is not available from print
sources can be passed onto future generations. The added benefit of these oral
histories is that they are stored digitally, requiring less physical space in the archive
itself. However, this conjuncture of image and sound raises many difficult issues

about how this material is being re-interpreted by both by today’s scholars and
viewers. Therefore this paper will seek to provide reflections on both the theory and
practice of combining visual and audio material from different eras and how this
activity changes our understanding of the films and their social significance.
Mapping Architectural Appearances, Affects, and Amodality
Amir Soltani (University of Manchester, UK)
Many hidden dimensions of architecture are perceived by mind but usually ignored
during the design process; designers not often consider for instance, sensory and
cognitive modalities as resourceful possibilities and solutions to creativity. How can
we tap into the potentials of the many hidden dimensions of architecture and the city
through various mapping of the senses? One approach is by utilising film as pure
memory material in architecture which can yield multidimensional perceptions
between film and architecture. Virilio suggests that this means filmic techniques
becomes an "open system" where anything is possible and it is no longer a matter of
"depth of field or perspective" rather, that it is field of limitless perceptions and
structures. Film reveals the materiality of architecture in a dynamic or as Benjamin
noted "explosive" rendition; hence, film can be a medium for writing and translation
of architecture’s concealed dynamics and understanding its sensations, myths,
physicality and actions. (Virilio 1991) An amodal mapping proposes mapping ‘degree
zero’ architectural affects through moving image methodologies. This new perception
requires understanding of the organisation of different spatial parameters as being
sensed and perceived.
Amodal Perception and Completion is the spatial organisation of objects in
mind when partially seen or hidden by obstacles; thus, amodality can be a semantic
perception of architectural experience, as in representation of architectural regions as
filmic plane surfaces, mapping between surface form and its meaning; as Massumi
suggests amodal above all is a matter of philosophy which also lies between fusions
with psychology of perception, sensory, and thoughts. In mainstream films the
narrative is the most powerful mode of sensory control—if sound is stopped and
viewed without audio the usual modal senses create interesting amodal perceptions
i.e. the off-the-frame actions and mise en scene become more pronounced. “What lies
transitionally between modes is amodal,” a symbolic representation of sensory
fusions. (Massumi 2003) This paper initially examines theories by Eisenstein,
Barthes, and Virilio demonstrating film as a multidimensional medium for
architectural interfacing. Then a ‘solution’ for architectural sensory dynamics
translation to expressive visual mapping is proposed using dimensions such as amodal
perception, mental map, memory and emotive forms. For instance, we can apply
Barthes degree zero writing to cinematic architecture concepts creating a transparent
form of writing functionless ephemeral architecture, which is dynamic and even real
time. In a spatial analysis amodal works closely with haptic and kinaesthetic modes,
using film to map these sensory fusions will enhance interfacing with a unique
multidimensional perception of architecture.

Walking Through Time: Use of Locative Media to Explore Historical Maps
Chris Speed (Edinburgh College of Art)
Smart phones are becoming a standard across creative and consumer communities and
their locative properties are beginning to change the way that we navigate physical
and social spaces. Platforms such as the Apple iPhone and Google Android that
contain GPS (Global Positioning Systems) technology are becoming a powerful
research platform for exploring rural and urban landscapes.
At present the technology tends to provide a series of primary services;
satellite navigation to allow users to travel effectively from one place to the another,
or ‘locative’ services that allow users to find people or places of interest close by
them. However, the systems sustain a technological and temporal determinism to
show users in maps of the present as though they should feel that they are navigating
a simulacrum of ‘actual’ space.
This paper reflects on a creative project funded by JISC to develop a smart
phone based application that allows people to not to be located in the ‘now’, but
instead in the past. Upon launching the phone application, users are able to find
themselves in ‘present’ space, but by selecting from a series of historical maps they
suddenly find themselves in a map of the same area but 150 years earlier (for
example). The software then allows users to follow streets and walk through walls
that have since been transformed through urban re-development.
The paper explores the sense of identification that users have expressed as
they identify themselves as the ‘blue dot’ on the screen that is able to ‘walk’ on a
historical map as though it was laid beneath their feet across ‘present’ space. And the
realisations that occur as they correlate representations of historical space (maps)
with a cities spaces of historical representation (architectures of the past).
Mapping ‘Palestine’
Helga Tawil-Souri (New York University, USA)
How do you map what is lost but still remembered? How do you map what has been
and continues to be contested? How do you map ‘Palestine’? Is there a difference in
mapping the Palestine of memories versus the Palestine that is simultaneously a
territory of enclavization and exile? This paper begins by problematizing these
questions.
Especially since the 1947 UN Partition Plan and the 1948 establishment of
Israel, mapping Palestine has become an acute political and national
authentication/memorialization project. Thus, I first argue that maps are expressions
of ideological and political values, functioning as symbolic elements of landscape that
reflect abstract and concrete national and local sentiments and goals.
Second, I suggest that maps also function as a form of media: copied,
distributed, deconstructed, and (re)negotiated. Here I focus on how mapping,
abstractly and figuratively, has been a central practice of Palestinian memorialization
and existence, manifested in a range of Palestinian cultural artifacts and references.
The analysis of mapping in this section is primarily as a practice and artifact of visual
culture, not simply as a geo-political process. I offer a brief description of the
Palestinian cinematic and internet landscape and history before analyzing the range of

maps and mapping references in Palestinian-made films and websites since the 1990s
- when Palestinian cinema began in earnest and GIT& S mapping technologies
became more wide-spread.
In conclusion, I show how visual practices of mapping Palestine, and
especially the ‘disappeared’ cities, villages, and places since 1948, serve as a means
to contest Israeli geographic and cartographic erasures and maintain a memory of a
Palestine lost and still hoped for. Finally, the specific case of Palestine is used to
discuss theoretical issues at the intersection of cultural studies and geography that
pertain to mapping, memory, and media.
The role of GIS and spatial analyses for understanding historical change in the
post-war film industry: an interdisciplinary case study approach.
Deb Verhoeven, Colin Arrowsmith and Alwyn Davidson (RMIT University,
Melbourne, Australia)
This paper presents a micro-historical, interdisciplinary research project that has been
investigating the operation of cinema venues and distribution circuits throughout
Melbourne from 1946 to 1986 in the context of social, cultural and industrial change
in the film industry. We will present two case studies derived from this project that
illustrate the role of mapping in general, and spatial analyses in particular, in
historical cinema research for a large urban location.
The first study will focus on the role of statistical methods for eliciting spatial
patterns in the Greek diasporic cinema circuit in Melbourne and Sydney. Through the
use of Markov Chains we explore the distribution of films for distinct statistically
significant spatial patterns. The second spatial study investigates the changing nature
of Melbourne cinema venues in the period following the introduction of television, in
particular examining the spatial arrangement of changes to seating capacity, screen
numbers, management and ownership, and primary purpose of venue as well as times
and locations for the opening and closing of venues. Using spatial analyses within
GIS, we have been able to demonstrate through proximity analyses and clustering
techniques, how changes to the various facets of cinema venues have not been
random, and to identify which variables might explain the survival of cinemas in
particular locations.
Our inter-disciplinary approach demonstrates the mutual benefits of
collaborative research for two otherwise disparate fields (cinema studies and geospatial
science). For the film historian, developing methodological principles for
using geo-spatial research techniques to represent cinema history helps make sense of
which historical factors have impinged on venue location and attribution. For the
spatial scientist, this project has provided an excellent application to understand how
changes over time can be incorporated into the analysis of spatial data
using contemporary GIS data structures and for developing appropriate
geovisualisation approaches to best portray temporal changes in geographic space.
Mapping, Marketing and the City: Communicating and Promoting the Urban
Experience
Gary Warnaby (University of Liverpool, UK)

The aim of the proposed paper is to consider the role of maps in urban place
marketing, a key element of which is the commodification and representation of
selected place attributes to promote a positive image of the place as a holistic entity.
This emphasis on image is important, because how a place is represented inevitably
has an impact on its attractiveness to various audiences, including residents. Whilst
place ‘marketing’ is arguably a relatively new phenomenon, place representation is
manifest throughout history - maps have provided a representation of the milieu
(Robinson and Petchenik, 1976), for many purposes, from the earliest of times. Often
this representation went hand-in-hand with power and control - a theme reprised in
the place marketing literature, where specific place elements highlighted in
communications activities may reflect the priorities and perspectives of hegemonic
groups.
In the recent past, place representation through the use of marketing
communications activity (very often incorporating maps) has been a crucial aspect of
place marketing. Maps are frameworks for communication/representation, and as
such, could be regarded as sharing many characteristics with marketing
communications messages. Indeed, many basic frameworks for communication used
in the cartographic literature have resonance with those used in marketing.
Approaches from both disciplines are similar in that meanings are encoded and
decoded in various ways, depending on the individual perspectives of producers and
users (Warnaby, 2008).
Using a number of different cartographic representations of English urban
places, drawn from a variety of promotional sources (town centre guides, economic
development promotional literature, borough/town guides) the paper uses Gilmartin’s
(1985) model of map design influences to analyse the means by which the urban
experience is communicated to the users of towns and cities, and also the factors
which impact upon the process by which this occurs.
Mapping New Hollywood: seventies cinema and the geography of urban
restructuring
Lawrence Webb (Kings College London, UK)
This paper presents some ways in which connections may be drawn between
geographical studies of film production – the economic geography or political
economy of the film industry – and the cinematic “mapping” or representation of the
city enacted by the films themselves. As writers such as Michael Storper and Allen
Scott have established, the reorganization of Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s
is an exemplary case of an industry moving from a Fordist, vertically-integrated massproduction
model towards post-Fordist ‘flexible specialization’. In this paper, I will
argue that one of the key facets of this restructuring was a massive expansion in
location shooting and a radical re-ordering of the geographical coordinates of
American film production. Through a spatial analysis of films produced during the
‘New Hollywood’ period of the 1970s, I will demonstrate that this geographical
dispersal of location shooting can be closely linked to what Ed Soja has called the
‘crisis-generated restructuring processes’ that transformed American cities from the
1970s onwards. A significant number of location shoots occurred in areas of cities
associated with urban decline and deindustrialization, from Philadelphia and Detroit
to Brooklyn and the Bronx. The use of such areas as an infrastructural resource

fundamentally changed the cultural representation of the American city, making
visible the material effects of capitalist development on the built environment. As a
case study, I will present a brief analysis of The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola,
1974), many scenes of which were filmed in and around disused warehouse space in
San Francisco’s South of Market district, then undergoing a major phase of urban
renewal. I will draw links between the production history of the film and its thematic
and formal concerns, suggesting that it can be productively understood in the context
of the restructuring of urban space and the emergence of post-Fordist, “cognitivecultural
capitalism.”
Artistic Investigations of Place and Mapping Technologies
Andrea Wollensak (Conneticut College, USA)
In my site-based artwork, I explore the connections between gesture, memory and
place while also making use of locative technologies in creative and expressive ways.
After presenting a context for my overall goals and methods as an artist, I will
describe two recent works—Transient Spaces (2005) and Listening Sites: Tracking
Stories (2007)—that engage these ideas. Transient Spaces explores the concept of
non-place as articulated by Michel de Certeau and Marc Augé. Listening Sites:
Tracking Stories, one of my community-oriented works, employs bilingual narrative
observations in conjunction with location-based soundscapes as an artistic
phenomenological counterpoint to the spatio-temporal relationship that underlies the
increasingly widespread audiovisual and informational enclave created by personal
media devices.