mapping | urban routes by troels steenholdt heiredal
walking drawing remembering writing locating
the aarhus drawing
I walk anywhere I get to - I walk
different parts have different personalities. There are parts of the city I like, parts I frequent a lot, there are parts I only go to if I have business there. Some I only pass through to get from one part to another. Some parts I don’t like, and some parts I have to be in. My knowledge of Aarhus is arranged according to these relationships. We build our understanding of the city; our minds rearrange the spaces to build a personal geography within ourselves. The relationship between the places we visit and the spaces between them, guides the construction of this inner geography we all carry with us. To investigate the relationship I have with the city, I shall draw the city as I remember it. Three years on, I think more carefully about the role of walking through the city, through the landscape; sensing the environment. As we use inner speech to define ourselves, we have inner geographies – a space where we are able to take in the world, to deal with it, to build our understanding of it. As David Gersten says, we build space, as space builds us; we are interdependent. We move through the cities as the cities move through us; and in that exchange we construct each other. The hippocampus is responsible for ttransforming short term memory into long term memory; it also converts two- dimensional map information into a physical walk – a path in three dimensions. Memory and space live side by side and interact – inner speech and inner geographies. Our relationship to the world and the city can’t be objective, it can only be subjective: it’s a relationship. Explaining it will only
wherever I am - I walk a lot
to feel the city the urban landscape allow for it to affect me start a conversation with it inside me
I sat at my drafting table in Copenhagen and started to draw a very large plan drawing of Aarhus, the city where I had lived and studied architecture for three years. The drawing was informed by the memory Aarhus had built within me. It is three years since I did the Aarhus drawing. I wrote then: I was late, as usual, on my bike heading towards Aarhus Central station. My sister called me, “Where are you? The train leaves in a few minutes, you know that right? Hurry up.” “I’m coming, I’m coming; I’m biking as fast as I possibly can...” As I was biking through the streets of Aarhus, a thought hit me – was I even biking the best route to the station? I feel I know my way in the city, I have a relationship with the city, but I have no idea how the city manifests itself within my mind. I have a strong feeling that this is the fastest way to get from the school to the station due to the basic layout of the streets as they appear in my mind, but I could be wrong. Has my mind reshaped the geography of Aarhus to fit with my habits and my conviction of what the city is like? As we move through the city the city moves through us. We engage with it, we continuously develop our relationship with it. The city is both physical built structure and a mental construct; cities have personality, and within the city the
R J: The connection between inner geography and inner monologue reminds me of the way that habitual walks are treated in literature as stream of consciousness, how they tend to become hyper-subjective passages. The explicit geography and visual aspects of the scene, the space and setting, disappear into the character. It’s not that the city is there in an individual way as much as a feeling that familiarity creates absences. This is all very de Certeau, this synecdoche of urban space, this elliptical construction of a geography around points of interest or affect that seem to be connected by blank spaces that stand for our most common routes between them.
of memory merely distort the map of the city? Would memory render an uneven level of detail in a drawing, the way a pen and ink sketch records different details than a photograph? I’m struggling to see where this drawing of Aarhus deviates from a conventional projection. What kinds of tools are available to someone mapping cities from memory? Were not all explorer’s maps drawn from memory? A O’C: I think the use of the map, or plan, is strong here for precisely the reason that maps are typically rational and static, ubiquitous drawings that represent a familiar plan. Of course there are many details that don’t get shown through this representation, but
The maps themselves made me think of Mike Kelley’s architectural models, created from memory, which also use a minimalist aesthetic language (the models are all white) to understand the gaps you find when you try to remember spaces. For the grid as an ideal of individual identity, see Paul Auster, specifically City of Glass. The grid, especially in New York, is no sure guard against disorientation. Jameson and his discussion of disorientation in Jersey City and Kevin Lynch’s study of that same gridded metropolitan sameness offer an interesting challenge to assumptions, built on analyses of capital cities, about urbanism’s deterministic effect on
individuals.
M H: There is a disconnect between the use of the plan view and the more visceral experience of walking or biking through the city. Troels points out that one’s relationship to the city is subjective and constantly reshaped, yet a plan is typically a rational, static document. Conventions for drafting plans do not account for experiential qualities like the decaying edge of the curb, the weeds in the cracks, the street vendors that inhabit them, the dancing shadows — things that come to my mind at the thought of a bike ride through a city. Can a plan convey personal experience, or the modifications of personal memory? Do the distortions
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