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

电影地理学旨在通过研究两种不同但互补的理解建筑环境的方式的融合，利用电影和运动图像的独特机制，促进我们对城市的理解：一方面，伦敦调查（英国遗产）开发的历史方法，另一方面，剑桥大学和利物浦大学建筑系开发的城市电影解释。以巴特西为例，我们的目标是通过使用一组新的数字资源，通过定位移动设备，丰富伦敦的调查，从而促进对建筑环境的更高层次的理解和参与。伦敦调查（SoL），被英国遗产（EH）称为“最接近伦敦官方历史的东西”，为每个教区提供了严格和系统的检查，其地形和建筑历史-其建筑的描述-是我们所说的“硬”城市。相比之下，电影提供了城市的“软”一面，正如拉班（1974）所创造的那样：“那么，我们想象中的城市，幻想、神话、渴望和噩梦的软城市，与统计地图、城市社会学、人口学和建筑专著中所定位的硬城市一样真实，也许更真实。”巴特西，一个正在经历巨大变化的景观，已经被EH选为即将出版的SoL。作为EH在记录和探索巴特西建筑史上的巨大努力的补充，我们计划通过一个名为“电影城市考古学”的过程来调查巴特西的“软面”。这种创新的技术使现代城市的出现及其自1895年电影诞生以来的后续转变变得清晰可见。这种对城市的回顾性纵向电影研究现在是可能的，因为档案材料的可用性越来越高——小说电影、纪录片、新闻片，以及业余电影，这是我们研究的一个特别重点。电影有一种非凡的能力，可以重现一个城市的地形，连同它的社会和文化背景，这些地形经常被折叠在过去的地图上。我们的初步调查显示，巴特西特别具有“丰富的动态影像”，我们希望通过创建一个新颖和可持续的城市电影数据库来增强和宣传这一事实。用Paul Virilio（1987）的话来说，在屏幕“成为城市广场，所有大众媒体的十字路口”的时候，所谓的智能手机在增强我们对地点的体验方面发挥了重要作用，通过带来对“此时此地”的感知，一个人在时间和空间中的存在，以及一种审美表现。在我们项目的第二阶段，通过这些无处不在的智能手机，我们的目标是使巴特西的新资源可见和可访问，同时也为其不断变化的景观提供批判性检查的基础。定位媒体有可能打破日常生活与想象之间的差距。我们认为，位置媒体的智能使用有能力揭示隐藏的“记忆地点”（记忆地点）。在这样做的过程中，一个新的城市地形可以出现，过去的记忆与个人或社区联系在一起，将“不可见”变为“可见”。考虑到“技术推动”和“内容拉动”之间的谨慎平衡，我们的目标是为连贯的基于位置的数字增强体验提供一个鼓舞人心的模式，并开发出一种足够强大的方法，可以在未来在其他城市复制。它将在2012年6月的旺兹沃思遗产节上进行测试和展示，并在那年夏天晚些时候的伦敦文化奥林匹克竞赛中展出。

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.