ABSTRACT
This book explores the role that urban mapping can play in showing how cities ‘tick’. What is the capacity of mapping to reveal the forces at play in shaping urban form and space? How can maps gear spatial analysis to planning and designing? How can mapping extend the urban imagination and therefore the possibilities for urban transformation? Beyond the visualisation of data and with a focus on urban scales, this book explores the potency of mapping as a research method that opens new horizons in our exploration of complex urban environments. While GIS and other digital technologies have long transformed the capacities for representation of urban data, here we explore the capacity of mapping to produce new ways of seeing, understanding, planning and designing the city. Our primary focus is on investigating urban morphologies and flows within a framework of assemblage thinking (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). With cases drawn from urban design research, the book variously analyses the mapping of place identities, political conflict, transport flows, streetlife, functional mix and informal settlements. We argue that urban mapping is a form of spatial knowledge production that is often diagrammatic, embodying a spatial logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived; and it can reveal capacities for urban transformation – the city as a space of possibility.
