"How can we understand the city in times of globalisation and explosion of scale? Do we lose control in these quantities or can we file its components and manipulate them? Let us imagine a city that is only based upon data. A city, that wants to be described only by information. A city, that doesn't know any topography, no context, purely huge, only data..."
The Personal - 'Mapping the Credit Crunch' - BBC Radio 4. Maptube Engine.
The Absurd - 'Global McDonalds Big Mac Prices, 2007' - Maptube Engine.
"Geography is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance and one that is becoming known as 'Neogeography'...a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in a manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of Neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and/or/ artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of 'real' geographic techniques."
Hudson.Smith et.al (2008). The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), London.
In the discussion of a public sphere, Alan Mckee (2006) debunks the Modernist notion of the term 'public sphere' as a singular, progressive, and consolidated representation of a common culture/interest among all people. Commonality, according to the modernist doctrine, is the glue holding the elements of the public sphere together.
In reality, the fragmentation that have always existed in the public sphere are becoming more visible to each other; - beginning from the extension of voting rights to the rise of broadcast culture. What is once the homogeneous 'official public sphere' is now challenged by distinct interpretation of places based on personal and affiliated memory. If we discuss the issue of heritage in this light, we may ask what is important to people;- is it an iconic monumental building of 'cultural' significance, scribed by years of official documents and media as an object of historic relevance? Or is it a visually indistinct, un-noticeable, perhaps run-down building that is associated with an aggregate of intimate memories and experiences concerning the neighborhood in question?
Left: Place (official, iconic, civic, progressive) - Customs House Library, Circular Quay.
Right: Place (fragmented, memonic, negotiated) - Former Community Language School, Auburn.
On the other hand, an increasing amount of information we now consume digitally is user created, and the distinction between the professional and the amateur in broadcast culture is increasingly blurred thanks to the availability of content making and airing tools/techniques at little or no cost. Broadcasting has been transformed from a read-only to a read-write culture. What kind of representation of geography can we draw in light of this, keeping in mind on one hand the rise of user generated information and on the other the imperative to account for an indeterminate, fragmented, and negotiated nature of a 'public sphere.'
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