In the Lynch-ian tradition we have formerly ascribed mental maps of our city as an abstract reduction of its physical and visual properties. That the city can be read as an abstraction and re-organisation of its physical composition into five key elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks) remains the primary design research methodology of your typical site work. The problem is, whilst it is noted that these mental images are subject based and doesn’t sustain a overall reading of an urban context, we are still stuck in a Gehl-like tradition of putting a star on a landmark, coloring in an open space, draw lots of dots along a street edge, and finding the next darkest (but not too dark) marker to mark out a border around a collection of streets and lots. And if you want to claim that something different is experienced within that border you have just drawn, then you would hatch it in one of the brightest hatch-work available. We then make a bold claim that this representation - this abstraction - truly reflects what the whole population regards of the site. This, you say, is experienced by everybody, everyday, and in all situations.
Five elements: Paths, Edge, District, Node, Landmark. From: Kevin Lynch. Image of the City
In the mobile city, can we still represent mental maps on the premise of Physical Separation, Bounded-ness, Hierarchy, Presence, and Linkages that we scribe out on a scaled map background taken from Google Earth? Thanks to mobile communications technology, these have ceded in favor of subject based hyper-coordination and micro-coordination, which in turn makes all the concerns mentioned above more pressing. Nowadays, way-finding and sequencing are now replaced by temporal spatial orderings that is accomplished between users, the "where are you?" and "what are you doing now?" of wireless communications. Do things have to appear as what they are?
Above: Temporal distortion of Parramatta "The mobile phone enables their users to call and be called instantly and directly, making a 'real-time lifestyle' or 'just-in-time' lifestyle where the old schedule of minutes, hours, days and weeks becomes shattered into a constant stream of negotiations, reconfiguration, and rescheduling...By virtue of the cellular phone, meeting places have become indeterminate, fluid territories, rather than precise spots. As such, time space co-ordinates according to which mobile users move, meet each other and get together in urban space always remain uncertain, changeable, fluid and floating." From Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorella De Cindio. Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City.
What does it mean for boundary, distance and displacement when you can do things remotely, accessing multiple locations by one activity or by doing several functions on the same location. A recent experiment into peoples usage patterns on public Wi-Fi reveals that users do not perceive the technology in terms of its reach in space but as having presence only when they could access it. It is not visualized in a visuo-spatial image but more similar to notions of social network with strong and weak ties. The perception of the Wi-Fi bounded zone is not one of graduated change but more like the flicking of a switch, when the connection is lost.
Above: Geographic representation of location of Public WiFi zones in Parramatta and perceived reach (left) and reduction of these to 0 distance (right) "A person is thus perceived as being separated from another only by a switch to a network connection, not a physical distance in space." Katharine S. Willis. Places, Situations, and Connections.
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