CINEMATIC MAPPING OF CAMBRIDGE

We hope to create a novel and exciting ‘movie-map’ of the city of Cambridge – but something more than a map.

Architectural theorist Kevin Lynch (The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1960) acknowledges the complexity of the urban fabric and our difficulty in grasping the ‘image of the city’, which is not only influenced by direct encounters and personal memories but also mediated through second-hand sources – oral accounts, photographs, paintings, film & television images – as well as the Internet. In other words, today urban sites show an even greater degree of complexity and fragmentation, which raises the question: how can we create a more coherent ‘mental map’ of the city in all its multiplicity and transformations?

The ‘cinematic mapping’ concept is partly an attempt at answering this question. The cinematic mapping notion seeks to reconcile the bird’s eye views of cities – common in cartography and planning representation – with the tactility of the on-the-ground experience typical of movies. Cinema formulates the city from the inside, as perceived by its inhabitants - bringing together the ‘optical with the haptical’. In general, cinema and the moving image provide the ‘soft’ side of the city as coined by Raban (Soft City, 1974): ‘The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture’.

We are geo-referencing the DIGIS archive of 150+ short observations/evocations/ constructions of the city, in moving images, to a map of Cambridge, at the places where they were shot. The archive constitutes a cross-sectional moving-image study, or record, of a particular period in the history of Cambridge - the recent past: we are aiming to create a portrait which essentially charts the passage between two millennia. The DIGIS collection will reveal the city’s topography and its fabric, but also reflect something of its social and cultural context at a particular point in time.

The archive has a strong emphasis on spatial and architectural representation, and we hope to reveal the interest of even the most banal of settings, through the passage between an ‘unconsciously penetrated space’, ‘substituted for a space consciously explored’, as Walter Benjamin expressed it. We hope to illuminate many aspects of the life of the University by giving plenty of space to places - but also people. The University is not a group of buildings, but a group of people who live and work in the colleges, libraries, museums and other areas of the city. Inhabitation is one of the most striking elements the moving image can give to the presentation of architecture and the built environment.