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

电影地理学旨在利用电影和运动图像有助于我们理解城市的独特机制，通过研究两种不同但互补的理解建筑环境的方法的汇合点：一方面，由伦敦调查(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对城市的电影解释。以巴特西为例，我们的目标是通过通过定位移动设备在现场提供一系列新创建的数字资源来丰富伦敦调查，从而帮助人们更好地了解和参与建筑环境。伦敦调查(SOL)被英国遗产(EH)称为“最接近伦敦官方历史的事情”，它对每个教区的地形和建筑历史--对其建筑的描述--进行了严格而系统的审查。相比之下，电影提供了拉班(1974)所创造的城市的‘软’的一面：我们想象中的城市，那么，一个充满幻觉、神话、渴望和噩梦的软城市，与人们在统计地图上、城市社会学、人口学和建筑专著中所能找到的硬城市一样真实，也许更真实。巴特西，一个正在经历巨大变化的风景，已经被EH选为即将出版的SOL卷。作为对EH记录和探索巴特西建筑历史的巨大努力的补充，我们正计划通过一个名为“电影城市考古”的过程来调查巴特西的“软性”。这种创新的技术使人们可以看到现代城市的出现及其自1895年电影诞生以来的变化。由于越来越多的档案材料--虚构电影、纪录片、新闻纪录片，以及作为我们研究重点的业余电影--现在对城市的这种纵向电影研究成为可能。电影具有复活城市地形的非凡能力，而这些地形--连同它的社会和文化背景--经常被折叠在过去的地图上。我们的初步调查显示，巴特西的活动图像特别丰富，我们希望通过为这座城市创建一个新颖且可持续的电影数据库来强化和宣传这一事实。在用保罗·维利里奥(Paul Virilio)(1987)的话说，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，它带来了一种“此时此刻”的感知，一个人在时间和空间中的存在，以及一种表现的美学。因此，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变得可见和可用，同时也为对其不断变化的格局进行批判性检查奠定基础。地方性媒体有可能打破日常生活和想象力之间的鸿沟。我们认为，明智地使用地方性媒体有能力揭示隐藏的“记忆之地”。在这样做的过程中，一种新的城市地形可能会出现，在那里，过去的记忆与个人或社区联系在一起，将使“看不见的东西”变得可见。考虑到在“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型，并开发一种足够强大的方法，以便未来在其他城市复制。它将在2012年6月的旺兹沃斯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运动会上展示。

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.