Wowo Ding (Nanjing University, Nanjing, P.R. China)
Mapping Urban Spaces: Montage as the Research method
The city was understood as spatial places surrounded by buildings and other physical objects, which contrasted the surrounding landscape. Since the time cities first evolved, they have been subject to human intervention by planning and building, where we could see that city is an artificial object. The map is the representation of the city by reducing the scale, which helped the people to read city in the sense of form, shape, pattern or structure, but not the space. On the other hand the cinema could describe and picture the urban spaces in the real scale by using the montage.
Both mapping and montage are the techniques for the representation, which were used in the different professional categories. The architects and urban planners are used to work with the maps not only for representation but also for producing the urban space for the reality. Since a map can be fallible – it is merely a visual representation describing only one version of the world (Corner 1999), so there is a great gap between design intensions and the real world. This paper will be focusing in how montage could be used as a tool for the urban design and research, where the misusing methods will show the value.
Key words: Mapping, Urban Space, Moving Picture, Montage
Both mapping and montage are the techniques for the representation, which were used in the different professional categories. The architects and urban planners are used to work with the maps not only for representation but also for producing the urban space for the reality. Since a map can be fallible – it is merely a visual representation describing only one version of the world (Corner 1999), so there is a great gap between design intensions and the real world. This paper will be focusing in how montage could be used as a tool for the urban design and research, where the misusing methods will show the value.
Key words: Mapping, Urban Space, Moving Picture, Montage
