Cinematic Geographies of Battersea: Urban Interface & Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge

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CINEMATIC GEOGRAPHIES aims to harness the unique mechanism by which cinema and the moving image contribute to our understanding of cities by investigating the convergence of two different yet complementary ways of understanding the built environment: on the one hand, the historical approach developed by The Survey of London (English Heritage) and on the other, the cinematic interpretation of cities developed in the departments of architecture at the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool. Using Battersea as a case study, our aim is to contribute to a greater level of understanding and engagement with the built environment by enriching the Survey of London with a set of newly created digital resources made available in situ by means of locative mobile devices.The Survey of London (SoL), referred to by English Heritage (EH) as 'the closest thing to an official history of London', provides a rigorous and systematic examination of each parish, whose topographical and architectural history - a description of its buildings - is what we would describe as the 'hard' city. Cinema, by contrast, provides the 'soft' side of the city as coined by Raban (1974): 'The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture'.Battersea, a landscape currently undergoing considerable changes, has been chosen by EH for a forthcoming volume of the SoL. Complementing EH's enormous effort to record and probe the architectural history of Battersea, we are planning to investigate the 'soft side' of Battersea through a process entitled 'cinematic urban archaeology'. This innovative technique makes visible the emergence of the modern city and its subsequent transformations since the year 1895 - the birth of cinema. Such retrospectively longitudinal cinematic studies of cities are now possible due to the increasing availability of archive material - fiction films, documentaries, newsreels, but also amateur films which are a particular focus of our study. Films have a remarkable capacity to resurrect a city's topography, which- together with its social and cultural context - is all too often folded away in maps of the past. Our initial investigations have revealed that Battersea is particularly 'moving-image rich', a fact that we want to enhance and make known through the creation of a novel and sustainable film database for the city.At a time when in the words of Paul Virilio (1987) the screen 'became the city square, the crossroads of all mass media', so-called smart mobile phones play an important role in enhancing our experience of place, by bringing a perception of the 'here and now', one's presence in time and space, together with an aesthetic of representation. In the second phase of our project, by means of these ubiquitous smart phones, we are therefore aiming to make visible and accessible our new resource for Battersea, while also delivering the basis for a critical examination of its changing landscape. Locative media hold the potential to crack open the gap between everydayness and imagination. We argue that an intelligent use of locative media has the ability to reveal hidden 'lieux de memoire' [sites of memories]. In doing so, a new city topography can emerge where past memories, connected with individuals or communities, will make the 'invisible visible'.Mindful of a careful balance between 'technology push' and 'content pull', we aim to offer an inspiring model for a coherent location-based digitally augmented experience and develop a methodology robust enough to be replicated in other cities in the future. It will be tested and demonstrated at the Wandsworth Heritage Festival in June 2012 and showcased in the London Cultural Olympiads later that summer.