Abstract
Data visualisation has emerged as a key tool for urban design thinking that harnesses the immense power of information communication to illustrate the relationships of meaning, cause and dependency established between citizens and their environments. Technical advancements over the past decade have modified the way we sense, seize, use, plan and build present cities. Besides architecture of stone and space, we should recognise an expanding landscape of invisible networks. atNight project aims to explore, in a transversal manner, the potential of digital cartography to assign geometry and measure these intangible aspects of the reality. Using nightscapes as a paradigm, the research fosters urban planning from another perspective taking advantage of Big Data and its associated representation tools to interpret, intervene and rebuild contemporary and future metropolitan contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett reviews history of people’s bodily experience from ancient Greece nakedness and Roman geometry to the triumph of individualised movement in modern times. According to Sennett, “the spatial relations of human bodies obviously make a great deal of difference in how people react to each other, how they see and hear one another, whether they touch or are distant”. On the other hand, Manuel de Solà Morales acknowledges “that in the surface of the city experienced in its tangible materiality, in its physical sensations, lie the origin and form of any kind of urbanity.” He also introduces the idea of urban things to refer to common landscapes in metropolitan contexts: “a pavement, a glass façade, a wall, a ramp or a distant perspective interrupted by obstacles, a silhouette against the sky and a closed patio, bare, unfinished roads half occupied by provisional furniture […] The city is the table that supports them and that presents them in their pure materiality, as realities identifiable in their differences, their relative position and their mutual reflections.”
- 2.
Augé (1995) coined the term non-place when referring to spaces of circulation, consumption and communication such as airports, railway stations, superstores, motorways and international hotel chains.
- 3.
Senseable City Lab activity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focuses on the representation of real-time city (Cambridge: MIT. URL, January 6, 2014: http://senseable.mit.edu/). CASA, University College of London, uses spatial analysis and GIS systems as basic forms of drawing space-time data (London: The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. URL, January 6, 2014: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa).
- 4.
In the course of our research project, we have used graphical approaches and its associated tools provided by Stamen Design that guarantee the effectiveness and accuracy of results (San Francisco: Stamen Design. URL, January 6, 2014: http://stamen.com).
- 5.
As Nix (Nix 2013) states Local and Tourist project by Eric Fisher is an early example of the use of Social Data (Flickr). The cartographies represent on a single image both the perception of inhabitants and visitors within a city.
- 6.
As part of Urban Sensing European project, the research Geographies of time (Urban Sensing. URL, January 6, 2014: http://urban-sensing.eu), Accurat, erases the changing condition of city boundaries according to time and social streams (Accurat, Milan: Accurate. URL, January 6, 2014: http://www.accurat.it).
- 7.
Straw (2014) has brilliantly synthesised the “state of the art” of the urban night studies in relation to (1) the emergence of a new public culture of the night, (2) the night as a form and territory to be projected with light, (3) the status of urban night within the public policies and (4) the place of artistic practices challenging the day and night division.
- 8.
Throughout this essay, we use the term nightscape to refer to the nocturnal landscape of the city. We have borrowed this expression from Armengaud et al. (2009) who in their seminal book, define nightscape as (1) the mirror of human thought from rational thinking to poetic subject, (2) the infrastructural framework of territorial development and (3) a strategy to address contemporary architecture and landscape projects. However, we apply this concept in a broader sense.
- 9.
Good example of Master Plans provides, at European level, urban lighting strategies both responding to technical and aesthetical complexity as Terzi (2001) in Rome, Antico (2011) in Antwerp and Gant and Narboni (2012) in Paris. However, the majority of European urban areas lack nocturnal planning schemes. Currently, nightscapes are being designed depending on electrical consumption, environmental impact and safety standards.
- 10.
Social media streams and other local data providers have been analysed in the Fall/Winter 2012–2013. Flickr service has been collected since 2006.
- 11.
Link to the project repository code, URL, December 28, 2013: https://github.com/atNightmaps/atNight-py.
- 12.
Tufte (2001) examines in his pioneer works the general principles that have specific visual consequences governing the design, editing, analysis and critique of data representation to enhance dimensionality and density of information. As he suggests “to envision information is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art. The instruments are those of writing and typography, of managing large data sets and statistical analysis, of line and layout and colour”.
- 13.
The complete set of cartographies can be consulted in the Cartographies section of the project website. URL, January 6, 2014: http://www.atNight.ws/cartographies.php.
- 14.
Freire (2009) relates social technologies, collaborative empowerment and new Commons.
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Santamaria-Varas, M., Martínez-Díez, P. (2015). atNight: Nocturnal Landscapes and Invisible Networks. In: Bihanic, D. (eds) New Challenges for Data Design. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6596-5_6
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