Bieke Cattoor

Designerly mapping practices at the crossroads of cartography and urbanism: a processual account of three re-cartographies of southwest Flanders

Re-cartography is a designerly mapping practice that aims to challenge dominant spatial epistemologies while expanding the scope of our spatial imagination. Particularly relevant to contemporary complex spatial problematics, and emerging within the context of urbanism, re-cartography is an intrinsically projective practice that is orientated towards a (re)shaping of the environment. This paper presents a short processual account of three re-cartographies of southwest Flanders. These three cases represent an ongoing attempt to reimagine the region in contemporary terms. Taken together, they remap the area in terms of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and hybridity, and reimagine the territory as a dynamic layering of different historical processes and relationships. To this end, the maps rethink common cartographic strategies and procedures—such as element selection, categorization, and symbolization, periodization, layering, scaling, and atlas composition—and recombine them in novel ways. They also demonstrate the relevance of re-cartography as an urban design tool: as a practice with the capacity to incorporate various perspectives, both context and potential, re-cartography is able to suggest a universe of latent possiblities within a given site. Of interest to cartographic theory is the observation that re-cartography treats both the territory and the map as ongoing processes. In this sense, the cases reflect the almost pragmatic coexistence of two seemingly contradictory cartographic ontologies at the heart of urbanism: the consideration of the map as a (partial) workable mirror and a concomitant engagement with the postrepresentational quality of the map as a project.

Re-cartographies of Landscape: New Narratives in Architectural Atlases

Abstract This paper explores the potential of a different kind of counter-mapping. It focuses upon a critical reading of five different architectural atlases and argues that their construction and design reveals how ‘re-cartographies’ can narrate novel stories about places. The narrative power of these atlases is traced back to a focus upon relations between phenomena, and a careful consideration of how to map the mutability and dynamism of the built and natural environment. They offer new kinds of selection, classification and symbolisation; deploy hybrid forms to destabilize taken for granted binary distinctions between nature and culture; use montage and juxtaposition to reveal scalar linkages; re-imagine figure–ground relationships to reveal functional city forms and processes; and explore the potential of meta-structures in the relations between different maps in an atlas layout. Taken together, they show how the cartographic imagination can escape from standard and accepted orthodoxies. They also reveal the importance of a situated and historicized narrative approach to all mapping, and offer a kind of counter-mapping from an academic field, which might allow more creative professional engagement with the making of places.

A relational and processual re-cartography of infrastructure: E17 Motorway Landscapes

ABSTRACT E17 Motorway Landscapes proposes a relational and processual re-mapping of the E17 as it crosses the south of West Flanders in Belgium. Motorways are usually conceived, perceived and most often mapped as alien elements superimposed on the territory. To be able – at least partially – to break free from this settled cartographic orthodoxy, the re-mapping of the motorway follows three specific strategies of cartographic exploration. First of all, the motorway landscape is cartographically de- and recomposed according to a relational rather than to a topographical logic, thereby revealing alternative measures of rhythm and contextual reinterpretations of scale. Second, the motorway landscape is mapped as a process by incorporating the previous state of the selected elements into the maps and by furthermore stressing their transformations in relation to the E17. Lastly, the motorway landscape is reimagined as a thick, albeit fragmented body, by means of a content-specific symbolization scheme, designed to reflect attunement and relationality between different object categories.

A look into the vibrant lives of a residual building: Ocupação Hotel Cambridge, Avenida 9 de Julho, 216, São Paulo

While São Paulo experiences persistent urban growth, its historic core paradoxically accumulates vacancy. Ever since the 1970s, real estate investment seems to favor new centralities. This leaves many of the city’s central properties, even some of its most iconic buildings, prey to decay and abandonment. Since 1997, social movements have systematically been occupying vacant buildings as a response to the city’s housing crisis and as a protest action against political deficiency. Evidently, these occupations are strongly contested, accommodating people in often precarious conditions while constantly risking violent eviction. Nevertheless, they could also be acknowledged as spatialized practices of insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2009), as a form of insurgent urbanism and as such, the germs of a radically different form of urban renewal. Beside tagging the façade as an act of appropriation, adaptations to these occupied buildings are mostly limited to the interior. Hence, this emergent, but also ephemeral practice of urban renewal leaves little trace on a conventional figure ground. The conceptual section unfolds Hotel Cambridge and its occupation. The section as a frame almost prefigures the inclusive and plural urbanism that the social movements are inducing within the city, through the reuse of its residual building stock. Starting with the hotel’s construction at the bottom, time progresses to the top of the section, illustrating how the building is transformed to house the most various lives and events, reflecting a rich diversity of identities over the course of only a few decades. Time is not conceived as an exact, proportional metric: depending on the degree of adaptation, certain phases in the transformation process are given more prominence in the section.