Abstract
This article discusses digital geographies by tracing, mapping, and revealing a series of spaces bounded by a multiplex digital infrastructure. By proposing ‘descriptivism’ as a complementary approach to digital mapping, this work discloses the city of Antwerp as the intertwining of visible and invisible networks. The ‘Analogue City’ is the title of both a design workshop and of a collective act of mapping that progressively reveals the city of Antwerp as a set of different spaces of information flows. By engaging the notion of mapping as object and practice, this work describes the production of a multi-scale and multi-space representation, as a process of collective and performative cartography. Through the combination of different scales, spaces, and mapping techniques, the city of Antwerp is unfolded as the result of security, mobility, and social networks. As a mapping operation, the ‘Analogue City’ is a threefold object: (a) an interactive, intentionally large map; (b) a series of mapping interventions throughout the city; and ultimately (c) a temporary exhibition.
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the issue “Digital Geographies and the City” edited by Wen Lin (Newcastle University, UK)
This article observes ‘digital geographies’ as physical spaces produced by the digital infrastructure
The workshop was part of the third edition of the ‘International Design Week’ held at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, whose proposed overall theme was that of ‘liminality’: that condition in-between, that space in transition, the time between the ‘preceding’ and the ‘’ (University of Antwerp, 2018). Within this framework and together with the students, we proposed to explore the notion of liminality between virtual and physical space, by documenting the points where the digital infrastructure becomes tangible and visible
Summary
Digital transition is imposing a radical shift in the way architects, urbanists, and designers conceive, produce, and use maps. We share with Rossi the materiality of his ‘Analogous City’: the ‘Analogous City’ is an unusually large object (2 × 2m), a handmade collage produced for an exhibition whose intention was that of reshaping collective imaginaries around the subject of history In this sense, we could argue that the ‘Analogue City’ aims to sensitise the public while visualising a series of invisible yet existent geographies; geographies that we observed within the space of digital infrastructure, as conceived by Blum (2012) and Starosielski (2015) or explored by Nancy Couling (Couling & Hein, 2018); geographies that are problematised by Graham and Marvin (2001) as a network that intertwines with the urban landscape, from the local level to a planetary scale (Brenner & Schmid, 2015), where the notion of ‘extended’ urbanisation further translates into that of extended networks (Morata, Cavalieri, Rizzo, & Luciani, 2020). The digital infrastructure is here conceived as suggested by Rabari and Storper (2015), as a ‘deep’ skin that shapes the physical urban space, as the bridge in between ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ space, between quantifiable and unmeasurable information
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