I am down in Plymouth today at University to give a lecture at the School of Architecture, Design and Environment with the title Narrative and Time. I have put together elements of my current research work to explore the aspects of the narrative as a specific aspect of time as well as an tool to visualise time. The idea of the story plays an increasing importance in my work. It came up through the tracking project UrbanDiary and now plays an important role in the latest work on Twitter and the Tweet-O-Meter, where the stories old start the spatial investigation.
With this presentation the focus is on the everyday, the ordinary and how we are involve or selves in daily stories as we navigate the passage of time in space. The second part of the presentation focuses on examples of how a narrative can directly be employed for a project. The simpler the story the better and the more powerful the pictures painted. Examples are Senones, a revitalisation project for a small former industrial ‘city’ in France. Where three character played the lead role to explain and illustrate four future scenarios for the valley. Also the Nearness clip, as an interpretation of the ‘Ein Lauf der Dinge’ by Fischli und Weiss. Or there is also the BluDot chair tracking project, furniture stories in New York.
I am down in Plymouth today at University to give a lecture at the School of Architecture, Design and Environment with the title Narrative and Time. I have put together elements of my current research work to explore the aspects of the narrative as a specific aspect of time as well as an tool to visualise time. The idea of the story plays an increasing importance in my work. It came up through the tracking project UrbanDiary and now plays an important role in the latest work on Twitter and the Tweet-O-Meter, where the stories old start the spatial investigation.
With this presentation the focus is on the everyday, the ordinary and how we are involve or selves in daily stories as we navigate the passage of time in space. The second part of the presentation focuses on examples of how a narrative can directly be employed for a project. The simpler the story the better and the more powerful the pictures painted. Examples are Senones, a revitalisation project for a small former industrial ‘city’ in France. Where three character played the lead role to explain and illustrate four future scenarios for the valley. Also the Nearness clip, as an interpretation of the ‘Ein Lauf der Dinge’ by Fischli und Weiss. Or there is also the BluDot chair tracking project, furniture stories in New York.
The mapping workshop down in Plymouth was structured roughly into four sections. The first three in the beginning were to explore the topic of urban stories and the fourth to actually invent an urbanNarrative.
The first part was about lost and found objects. The participants where asked to bring in an object they had found on the familiar commute between home and university. I had do be something small enough to bring to university and something that obviously did not belong to the surrounding it was found, an objet trouvé.
Everyone brought in something, wondering what we might do with this. Even though they did not know what I had in mind everyone had already formed some kind of relationship with the object. Already the fact that it was found on the familiar, individual commute created a sense of ownership supported by a curiosity.
We got together and put all the objects in the middle and I asked them to speak about the found object and explain where it was found, speculate about who might have lost it and what its value is. This quickly got out of hand. The stories became lively and very creative. They even started to interlink as people quickly realized that the area the objects were found in is rather small and invented characters could have met on another. There where stories about lost shopping baskets, lottery tickets, loafs of bread, bits of wood and many more.
Whit out intending we spent a good hour talking about Plymouth as a city and the everyday life. The main characteristics started to come through, such as the relationship to the water with the story of the lost lottery ticket combined with the sailor who was connected to the wooden plank. Or the aspect of university life and students in Plymouth as a love stories over a bracelet, alcohol and a brick wedged under a railing. But also the social problems involving different classes and characterizing areas played an important role around the Marks and Spencer bottle.
Image by urbanTick / selection of objet trouve.
We continued by drawing and sketching the commute, introducing mental maps. While discussing the sketches, again participants realized that they actually described similar section of the city and started comparing their personal perception with some one else’s description of the same space. Differences in time and mode of transport where identified.
After discussing Kevin Lynches Image of the City we quickly mapped Plymouth as a whole using Lynches five elements of path, node, edge, district and landmark.
Image / Mental map of skating between home and university
The third elements was directly aimed at the real body experience, to actually go to the city and physically experience it. The Plymouth After Life tour was perfect for this. I took the students on a walk through the car parks of the city centre.
Image by urbanTick for JLF-urbanresearch – Plymouth After Life tour
The design of the urban plan by Abercrombie is intended to welcome the visitors and residents with the big axis, either north south or east west. But in reality everyone sneaks in through a little back door from the car park inside a block into the shopping street. We walked up and down raw concrete staircases, across large decks of car parking and through long tunnels or bridges. Because these service spaces are normally not experienced in sequence it generated a strong impression. This divide between back and front of the “modern“ layout became apparent and discussion sparked among the way.
For the urban Narrative part of the afternoon the participants were sent of in groups to find the location of their story with the help of a GPS device. In a visualized short story they had to revile the location. The story was made up of the objects from the morning and the invented characters.
It was a great day and good fun. I was myself surprised by the power of stories once more. This playful approach to describing and mapping the spatial aspects of the environment proofed valuable in many ways. Not only in the aspect of character, body and location, but also in terms of time, atmosphere and sequence.
Read MoreTo day we’ll be mapping Plymouth. Well Plymouth ha been mapped before, but I think it is a great location for this sort of exercise. It has such a complicated history with twists and beds and its identity is still strong. A large part of this identity is directly derived from its residents self image. Plymouth has always been a very strong-minded region and it still is. This has also something cheeky and irrationals, which results in, a weird place with lovely people.
It is the end of the world, though, geographically, also economically and fashionably. I have to stress that this is not only to be understood in a negative sense. There are some very beautiful aspects to it. Take the great 60ies, 70ies, and 80ies buildings. These ugly grey monsters in the identity-lacking city, it makes a great collection. Or take the hopeless reinvention of Plymouth with the Abercrombie Plan, a great piece of late modernist urban planning that was already dated, but has never really arrived at it’s location. Plymouth is still trying to implement it, although by now it has lost its head, its arms, its legs … But most of all you have to be there and feel for your self. The atmosphere is incredible, it is one of the places with the most spatial misunderstandings and the result is literally breath taking.
I am looking forward to the results.
Below the input slides to summarize the topics we will be working on.
Read MoreI am invited for a workshop at University of Plymouth, Faculty of Art, School of Architecture. The topic is mapping and the aim is to introduce the students in a one-day workshop to various techniques. We are a team of four guest tutors; the series is organized by Bob Brown, Master of Architecture Program Leader.
My contribution is under the subject of the narrative in the city and entitled the “Mapping the Everyday – The Spatial Extension of Routines“. This workshop provides an opportunity to test the ideas and concepts in the context of the UrbanDiary project. One of the key concepts developed from the UD tracking project is the idea of individual space creation resulting in a continuous, spatial narrative. Through the movement and experience of the body one creates a story, which in turn is creating memory and identity, not on only for the individual, but for the city as a collective.
As an introduction I will be giving a short presentation about the research work I have been doing over the past year.
I gave a talk today at ARUP London about my research on cycles and rhythms in the city.
The talk was titled Shaping Cities, from the body rhythm to urban morphology. With this title, it brings together the different aspects of scale in the research, ranging from natural body functions to patterns of movement in the city.
Along this key terms such as memory, identity, time and orientation are explored and visualized with examples from the work featuring on this blog, ranging from PLY365 to UrbanDiary.
Read More
Today I have finally got round to install and try the software GeoTime on my computer here. Oculous kindly offered a license to run some trials on with my data.
It installed all very smoothly and the process is straight forward. I had to click through a few pages of the tutorial files to get the data to appear in GeoTime, but here it is.
Image by urbanTick – data Plymouth365 – full extend (I should use a cleaned up data set, those GPS errors pop out too much…)

Image by urbanTick – Data Plymouth365, zoomed in to the city, very colour full
It is the same data set used in visualizations earlier, as in Plymouth aquarium.
The data was imported using excel and following some advice from the tutorial pages. GeoTime seems to be very picky with the kml files. I didn’t get one of those to show. Exporting to kmz works fine and looks good in Google Earth. The exported file is truly time tagged, this means the time feature can be used and the data can be replayed. 
Image by UrbanTick – GeoTime export to Google Earth
Some analysis functions sound really interesting. I finally got the meeting analysis function to work. This would be very interesting, have to work on this.
Great are the isolating features, where it is possible to only display data with certain characteristics, for example a time frame.

Image by urbanTick – data Plymouth365

Image by urbanTick
There is more to come, this will occupy the next weeks to work trough my data with this new tool.
Read MorePlymouth city centre is a very specific area. It has a very distinct character arising from the strong postwar design by Patrick Abercrombie. It has a truly mono functional use, it is a shopping centre in the most literal sense of the word possible. There are no offices, no restaurants, no pubs or bars, no housing, just shops and on the first or second floors storage space for the shops.
The shops open at 10h00 am and close at 18h00. These hours then basically determine the “opening” of the city centre. Outside of those the centre is dead, again literally. There is a very special phenomenon attached to this. Although the opening hours are as described above, shoppers vanish around 17h00. So approximately one hour before closing the shops are already empty and so is the center. Being in HMV at half five is like a scene out of “I am Legend” – hello is there someone? (I have written a longer article about this topic on JLF urban research.)
To my surprise this pattern shows up dramatically in my records. Although I was aware of this pattern and could have behaved differently, but I didn’t. There is no reason to walk through this area, as there is nothing happening and on top of this it becomes rather scary to be on your own in this vast outdoor shopping centre at night.
This short clip shows the activities within 24h. It is zoomed right into Plymouth center. The activities start around 10h00 and end exactly at 17h00. There is the odd crossing outside of these hours, but the characteristic shows clearly.
plymouth365_plyCentre from urbanTick on Vimeo.
To illustrate this in a bit more context, the following images include the city centre of Plymouth but cover also bits of outside area. What this shows is, that even after 17h00 the track record shows still a high number of activities, but they all exclude magically the centre.

 

Images by urbanTick – Time sequence 07h00, 09h00, 11h00, 16h00, 17h00, 19h00 and 22h00 activity in the Plymouth city center. Click for larger view.
What is now possible is to compare three different cities. I have a track record from Plymouth, Basle and London.
The following three screenshots are taken from Google Earth at an altitude of 9km. So they are comparable in scale.
What they all have in common is the fix points. The main structural elements of how my days work in terms of space and time are the same. Leaving home going to the same workplace everyday and returning back home. Between those fix points there build up quite intense tracks lines. This base layer get extended by some secondary points, e.g. location for the weekly shopping, favorite spots, friends location, … The third element are the trips. Journeys that are usually going out of the daily routine to a further destination or just a stroll. They occur characteristically on days off or weekends. Depending on how familiar I am with the surrounding they are more focused or of more explorative nature.
Image by urbanTick – Plymouth
 
Image by urbanTick – Basel

Image by urbanTick – London
Interesting is to compare how I respond to the urban surrounding. The three cities have very distinct urban patterns from one another. Take Plymouth, a city completely planned almost from scratch after it was destroyed in the Second World War. The planner was Patrick Abercrombie who also presented ideas for the reconstruction or better new construction of London after the Blitz. Basel on the other hand is a similar size city in a very different setting with its growth patterns structuring very much its appearance. Or London as the third example, the world city with its single centre core.
To explore how those characteristics influence my interaction with the built environment in terms of routs I choose I overlay my tracks onto maps that capture the characteristics of the three cities.
 
Image by urbanTick – Plymouth Abercrombie Plan with Plymouth 365 track overlay
Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, the tracks redraw quite exactly the characteristics of the Abercrombie Plan.

Image by urbanTick – Basel city center with track overlay
Note area A (dark brown) is the old medieval town surrounded by walls dated ca 1860. Area B (beige) is the extension, ca 1875,but still surrounded by a wall. Area C is the extension of the city ca 1926, but is also mainly the present extend. It is important to know that after the walls have been demolished, the freed up space has been used for major infrastructure placements such as roads, but also as open spaces. This means that additionally to the link roads that from the centre outwards there is also a no of ring roads (on the ground of the former walls) that tie in very well with the rest of the network. Moving radial is quite simply in therefore and the use of it is represented in through the no of tracks. Compared to this in London it’s quite tricky to travel radial as it has a strong centralized structure, roads mainly leading into or out of the city centre.
This then is represented in the London track log. It is strongly linear and this represents exactly this centrality as the line is pointing towards the centre.
So now guess which track log is which city.

Images by urbanTick – track record line drawings
Read MoreI have been playing around with the Plymouth365 data set and managed to produce a collaged GPS file. The track data that was collected over the period of one year is displayed simultaneously.
It is an aquarium again where I recalculated the height according to the time. As time passes the track rises up. This has been done with simple spreadsheet calculation and then re-pasting into the gpx file. The new altitude is now the indication of process.
This image uses the simple transformation of the time into seconds as the height. In this example the altitude is between 32000m and 85000m. It is very difficult to read on the level of everyday Plymouth activities, but it draws nice progress lines from long distance and day trips.
Image by urbanTick – Plymouth 365 aquarium
Image by urbanTick – Plymouth 365 aquarium
The second image here has the height reduced by 50%. Much more detail is visible on smaller scale where long distance trips lose their quality. An interesting feature is the “wall” that emerges between the place where I lived and my work place. Along the path I used to take emerges a vertical mess of lines at all times/heights. I must have used this route pretty much at any time in the day during this one year period.
Although I have tried to “clean” the data today, there are still a large number of error lines showing up. Also seem there to be new error lines occurring because of the method I used to collage the gpx file. The problem is that I pasted it as one track and not as a set of tracks. This would involve some more computing, but it’s probably worth a try. With such a method some more specific queries would be possible.
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