This document provides an overview of topics to be covered in a class on cities, everyday life, and space as relationships. The topics include: - Why cities are important in today's world with most people living in cities - Studying cities and everyday life through various academic lenses - How space is a social and political construction that reproduces power dynamics - Different practices of mapping space, from traditional to more creative/experiential approaches - Analyzing cities through film and how film has both represented and shaped perspectives of urban areas - An assignment involving collaborative group work to cognitively map an area through non-traditional means.

1. 2|SPACE | POWER | CINE-CITY
SM3138 | Sem B, 2015 | School of Creative Media |Prof SHANNON WALSH

2. THIS WEEK
We will move through a number of topics today:
• Why are cities important?
• Cities, Everyday life and Space as Relation(s)
• Cognitive Mapping Practices
• “Site-Seeing & the Cine-City”
• Film: “Los Angeles Plays itself”
• Group Discussion

3. 1| THE CITY & EVERYDAY LIFE
Why are cities important?
For the first time in human history a majority of the world live in cities.
• 70% of people on the planet live in cities
• 3.5 billion people live in cities, rising to 6.4 billion in the next 40-50
years

4. Studying Cities & Everyday Life….
Whilst initially rooted in human geography, the inquiry posed by
everyday life and the spaces of social reproduction, have
gathered diverse kinds of theorizing touching on anthropology,
economics, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, urban planning,
etc.

5. Studying Cities
Urban studies scholars from Jane Jacobs to Bruno LaTour, and
human geographers, such as David Harvey and Neil Smith, have
tackled questions around the city as a site where contestations
and antagonisms around existing social inequalities operate, and
the effects emanating from scale.
Exploring questions of globalization and political economy,
theorists have also grappled with the effects across and between
scale, territory and capital (Saskia Sassen, Anthony Gidden,
Manuel Castells, Amartya Sen).
In cultural studies, theorists have challenged ideas around
representation and cultural production in lived spaces of the city
globally (Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttal).

6. Hong Kong's sky slums highlight wealth gap
In the same city: $640,000 Parking Space & Slums created on top of high-
rise buildings
Survival strategies used by marginalized populations as weapons of
resistance and adaptation (Rao 1991, Scott 1989, Deleuze & Guattari 1987).

7. Space is a Relation
As Henri Lefebvre argued (1971), social and spatial relations are interdependent,
and often reproduce the existing system of power relations.
The way in which people use space, then, becomes a political and social
question, as usage forms a circulation of affects on a given territory.
A territory is not just a collection of people and objects, but it is constructed
through practices that are suitable to a society's particular historic needs
(Lefebvre 1971).
These practices are often managed and reproduced by those holding power,
and also exploded by those who resist (Harvey 2006; Scott 1985).
Space, then, is a key terrain in which people construct themselves and their life-
worlds, describing what various scholars have terms ‘habitus’ or forms-of-life
(Bourdieu 1990; Agamben 1998).

9. Space as Relation
Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant detention
(Tings Chak, 2014)

12. Everyday Practices
Space, then, is bounded and defined by the ways in which people
experience and use it. (deCerteau 1984; Vaneigem 2006)
Attention must be paid to situating knowledge in the struggles and
contestations of marginal, indigenous, and others who’s voices are
often excluded from dominant narratives. This is done through
attention to narratives and practices that emerge in space, and in
sites of contestation. (Bourdieau 1990, Spivak 1987; Said 1978)

13. Meanings & Attachments
Going further, other scholars looked at how space is created
by the ‘fields of care’ or the meaning and emotional
attachment imbued into it through the affective bonds and
associations made by people living there (Tuan 1977; Thrift
2008).
But spaces should not be considered as a blank slate for
affective desires; they are also the sites of institutional and
structural oppressions and the political, social and economic
relations that animate them (Massey 1994).

14. What do we learn?
Cities create and reproduce many elements of power through
everyday relations:
 Inequalities (class, ethnic, gender, sexuality)
 Migrations and movement
 Conflicting histories & knowledge from above and below

15. 2| Mapping
Langlands and Bell, Air routes of the World by night, 2001

16. Every map is
someone’s way of
getting you to look at
the world his or her
way.
-Lucy Fellowes, Smithsonian
curator, quoted in Henrikson 1994

18. Surveillance Camera Players, 2001 / 2005

19. Bill Bunge – Radical Cartography

20. “Maps attempt to integrate over
time, that is, maps assume an
average span of time. This means
that nothing that moves is mapped,
and therefore property is inherently
preferred over humans…In order to
restore truth to the map it is necessary
to achieve a fiction of accuracy
through an assumption, namely that
the map is drawn at an exact instant
of time. In this case, the time is June
20, 1915 at 2 p.m. on a sunny day.
This fiction freezes the men and
horses on the roads, the strawberry
pickers in the fields, as well as the
crops in rotation and the animals in
pasture. This restores life to the dead
map of property.”
– Bill Bunge, Fitzgerald: Geography of
a Revolution,1971
Bill Bunge

21. Denis Wood
A NARRATIVE ATLAS OF
BOYLAN HEIGHTS
Inspired by Bill Bunge’s radical
cartography in the 1960s and
1970s, the atlas contains
diverse examples of creative,
place-inspired maps, including
maps of night, crime, fences,
graffiti, textures, autumn
leaves, routes, the
underground, lines overhead,
stars, and jack-o-lanterns.

23. MARLENE CREATES:
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS IS MEASURED IN MEORIRES, 1988

24. FILM DIRECTOR DAVID LYNCH’S MAP OF TWIN PEAKS

25. In 1957, sociologist, Paul Henry De Lauwe mapped the movements of a student made over one
year. Her Paris itinerary formed a small triangle with no significant deviations showing the
narrowness of the city in which each individual lives out their lives.

26. Site-Seeing: The Cine City
Along with various scholars, art, film and architecture have been
fundamental to ways of understanding and relating to the city.

27. “A product of the era of the metropolis and its transits, film
expressed an urban viewpoint from its very inception.” (Bruno 18)
“Since the beginning of the twentieth century…the
screen…became the city square” Paul Virilio
• Bird’s eye view, Overhead shots, Panaroma perspectives, The
Phantom train, Street motion of urban strolling
“If the urban landscape is a product of the city’s own mapping, it
is also a creative of its filmic incarnations, for these, too become
part of its geography.” (27)

28. “Film shared much in
common with this
geography of travel
culture…particularly linked
to notions of flanerie, urban
‘streetwalking’…
• Wandering not just
gazing
• The railway passenger,
the urban stroller, the
female spectator…
The Cine City

29. A LABORATORY OF CITY FILMS
• METROPOLIS, Fritz Lang, 1927
• PARIS QUI DORT, Rene Clair 1923
• THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, Dziga Vertov, 1929
• SUNRISE, F.W. Murnau, 1927
“Urban Dream Machine”
“Utopians and dystopias of the machine age uniting the city and film”

30. Metropolis, Fritz Lange, 1927

31. Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987
“The film is…an architectural document of a city that no longer exists;
with the passage of time, it turns ever more into a work of mourning.” 34

32. Chung King Express, Wong Kar-Wai, 1994
“Portraits of a city that turn the screen into a moving canvas”…

33. Thom Anderson, 2004, 169 min
A "city symphony in reverse" (J. Hoberman, Village Voice), Thom Andersen's Los
Angeles Plays Itself dismantles not only popular stereotypes about The City of Angels,
but also its most famous trademark, Hollywood. Packed with clips from nearly 200 films
set in Los Angeles (not L.A., the nickname despised by the film's narrator), Andersen's
immersive cine-essay divides and examines the city threefold: as background,
character and subject. Drawing us into a fanatical, almost secret urban history Los
Angeles Plays Itself is at once a hilarious travelogue and mesmerizing experience.

34. Cognitive & Emotional Mapping
1. Form groups of 5-6.
2. Discuss different ways the campus can be experienced, and generate ideas of how these
experiences can be represented via a map/maps.
3. Try to link your ideas to an emotion or concept (ie. Love, Fear, Trouble, Power, Wonder) or to
a physical reality (sockets, screens, hallways)
4. Spend the next 30 minutes exploring the area, collecting materials for your maps and
prepare to present your ideas to the rest of the group.
5. Record your map – on paper/on your phones/via photographs, or any other way you see fit.
It is up to you how you choose to organise yourselves in your group – however, it is important
that each person has a role!
You may, for example, use or think about:
•found objects
•photographs or filmed footage (on your mobile phones)
•Signs
•Senses and perceptions
•Routes, patterns and forms of navigation