Cybercities

Boyer, M. Christine (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996)

MEMORY SYSTEMS AND IMAGING THE CITY

Developing an image of the city in an age of visual saturation appears to be a problem, precisely because awareness of the physical space of the city is disappearing or dematerializing-the result, we are told, of new digital information and communication technologies. Paul Virilio says that every city is over-exposed and its physical sense of space decomposed as our eyes are constantly bombarded with ephemeral and interchangeable images, visions that move along the constant space of flows called the informational city. It is then no accident that William Gibson's account of cyberspace in Neuromancer is conflated with an account of a city that no longer has any imageable form or definable boundary. He says this metroscape called "BAMA" (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area) reaches from Boston to Atlanta along the eastern seaboard.

"Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta."

Gibson introduces us to the American space of "the sprawl" b., mapping the cyberspace of the computer onto the physical space of a regional city. And what else, we might ask, is the American city of today but a gigantic, boundless metroscape like "BAMA"? Its appearance seems to simulate a complex switchboard of plug-in zones and edge cities connected through an elaborate network of highways, telephones, computer banks, fiber- optic cable lines, and television and radio outlets. There is an intentional conflation of the physical and the electronic city in Gibson's science-fiction accounts, which is an acknowledgment that a gap exists between the city that we can visualize and the invisible city that is constituted in and through its fields of information circulation.

Furthermore, the radically decentered non-place of the metroscape defies existence as an imageable form because of its very dispersal, as do the matrices of cyberspace.

And what of the knowledge and power that Michel Foucault once described as being embodied in disciplinary places of enclosure such as prisons, hospitals, factories, and even the city as a whole? These spaces or systems, which combined discourses and architectures, programs and mechanisms, also seem to be dislocated from space, deeply hidden within the electronic matrices of a global computer network that connects all points in space and directs our lives from some ethereal "other" location. The processes of city planning once imposed a rational form on the modern metropolis to make it efficiently managed and machine-like. But how do we begin to organize this new metroscape that defies any imageable form, at a time when the role of the planner has been displaced as a coherent site of command and control over the space of the city and when new positions within postmodernity have yet to be defined?

Images, imagination, and memory of cities are intimately linked, and thus I want to turn to descriptions of two different types of artificial memory, so that they may give us some insights into our contemporary crisis of representing invisible cities. The "classical art of memory," as described by Frances Yates, depended on the mental construction of an imaginary but complex architectural setting that contained a series of places, or loci. In these places, vivid images or icons symbolically representing what was to be recollected were mentally stored. In order to remember the parts of a speech, for example, the orator imaginatively followed a path through the sequence of rooms, or topi, where the symbols had been placed, encountering the images one by one and recalling the ideas or arguments that the images represented.

Yates also describes another, lesser-known art of memory. Developed by Ramon Lull, it differs considerably from the classical method in that there are no striking images, and there is nothing to excite recall though resemblance or similitude. Instead, the concepts were designated by letters; it was, in other words, an abstract art of memory. Movement and change were introduced into this static system not by mentally reenacting a promenade through a fixed and memorized spatial container of icons, but instead by using a set of revolving concentric circles marked with letters standing for concepts, which enabled a recombinatory play of these concepts. In this mathematical art of memory, the meaning thus changed with respect to the level of the circle on which a given letter was located- that is, the context that was being used. It required memorizing the principles and procedures of Lull's art and then investigating the combinations through a series of questions and answers. These two arts of memory can help us explore the question of the imageability of cities in the age of electronic communication.

For the classical art of memory was embedded within modernists' visualizations of the space of the city, while the combinatorial art of memory appears to be more closely related to the postmodern view of a city that is increasingly disappearing or invisible. Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City 9 can provide a brief explanation of how the classical art of memory has informed the visual aspect of the city. Lynch was interested in the capacity of the image of a city to generate the kind of order that made a city a legible, memorable, and coherent place-in other words, he sought to describe the spatial container that would hold the icons of memory. This systematic structure, or cognitive map, would be used to guide subsequent design interventions, for Lynch's work was developed during the decades of urban renewal and renovation, when programs focused on improving the image of American cities. He argued, "Orientation in space (and time) is the framework of cognition. We have powerful abilities for recognizing places and for integrating them into mental images, but the sensory form of those places can make that effort at understanding more or less difficult."

Lynch's analysis of the city rested on five different elements: paths, edges, landmarks, nodes, and districts. He noted that problems could arise in this system, which would disorient the viewer by blocking the road to recall. For example, edges could be too weak to delineate a place, or too wide, leaving a district exposed to view; a landmark could be too great or too alien to the character of a district; paths might lead towards but not to a node; or parts within a district might be loosely connected, roughly related, or without a structure of any kind. It then became the planner's task to restore order to the spatial container of memory icons by eliminating these visual inconsistencies in a city's imageable form.

As for the combinatorial art of memory, let us first explore Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities before quickly reviewing Michael Sorkin's book entitled Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42¥ N Latitude. In a I967 talk entitled "Cybernetics and Ghosts," Calvino described the tendency at that time to consider the world, in all its various aspects, as "discrete" and not continuous in form. He used the word discrete in mathematical terms, meaning composed of separate, divisible parts. Instead of a series of linear images that formed a sequence or a system of places, thought now appeared as a series of discontinuous states and combinatorial relays. Calvin claimed that early computer scientists such as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and Alan Turing had radically changed the theoretical image of our mental processes. Computers could now instantaneously create a combinatorial complexity unattainable by human minds. They had, he noted, finally displaced the classical art of memory, and had realized the combinatorial art first imagined by Ramon Lull.

We can turn to Calvino's Invisible Cities to see this art in action: here a series of city descriptions fail to geographically connect the discrete elements located within each city. Though each element is endowed with startling visual presence, when assembled they remain merely a listing of icons. There is no mental map to tie these piecemeal images together so that they describe or structure the elusive journey from city to city; instead, there is only a combinatory system of rules and relationships at play. Indeed, only a great atlas containing the maps or forms of all possible cities allows for an imaginary projection of what otherwise remain invisible places. Marco Polo, the protagonist, tells Kublai Kahn, "Traveling you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name."

Thus the combinatory order of the atlas enables Marco Polo to: "put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends our, nor knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey rends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must nor believe the search for it can stop."

Recombined and reordered, these visual configurations take on their own imaginary force, helping to overcome the failure of vision in a culture so saturated with visual forms that images often fail to register at all. Invisible Cities represents a network much like the matrix of a hypertext, in which the reader can select multiple routes and draw a variety of confusions. Since all representational forms can now be subjected to the algorithmic manipulations of abstract computer logic, it is not surprising to find that a contemporary account of city order, Michael Sorkin's Loral Code, is based on the listing of a discrete set of places that have no relation to each other save the common set of rules or regulations that generate elements within them. A comparison of "adjacency restrictions" is the basic mode of operation in this game of set theory. Each set is a vector of information that encounters other vectors constituting the city matrix; as in set theory, these vectors are transformers with an ability to grow and change direction.

While borrowing much from the paths, edges, nodes, and districts first outlined by Lynch, Sorkin compounds the contemporary problem of imageability by developing his own vocabulary for urban planning: districts have been changed into "Nabs" and residential areas become physical places of inhabitation or "Has," paths are now "Nets," air and light considerations are labeled "Heliotropism's," the garden city model is referenced as "Territory and Ring," the civic center is now a "Mosaic" oriented to the cardinal points of the compass, and so forth. This cool mathematical approach to the problems of the contemporary city is the result of Sorkin's singular failure to provide the reader with the wealth of symbolic and visionary incitement that words and signs can provide.

In an afterword, Sorkin admits this failure, and says that it was only after much consideration that he decided to exclude visual imagery such as drawings and diagrams. Underscoring his ambivalence over the power of images, both verbal and visual, he notes, "The medium [of text] has its limitations: verbal, it lacks a dimension of precision that more literally architectural media might provide....The code recognizes that a vision already concretized preempts the greater possibilities of an incitement open to many interpretations. Like all building codes, this one is an essay in the limits of specification.. . [but at the same time the code] seeks a city designed not simply through the deductions of a dominating generality [the kind that always inhabit a master plan] but also via induction from numberless individual points of departure [by comparing adjacent elements in a series]....Codes are Rosetta Stones, keys or prescriptions for acts of translation. Poised between fantasy and construction, codes-if they are both broad enough and precise enough can be the channels of urban invention."

But are codes or are images the generators of imagination and memory? Is it the structural formation of the city-the listing of relations that govern a set of vectors and the elements within each vector, similar to the static system of rooms and icons that define the classical art of memory-or is it the mental objects and visual images embedded in structural form that generate magnificent and evocative patterns of thought? Again I want to return to Calvino, for he is a master at structural combinations and ordered abstractions as well as an expert conjurer of the evocative power of words.

At one point in his accounting of invisible cities, Calvino describes poor Kublai Kahn focusing so narrowly on a chessboard of black and white squares that the game's meaning has eluded him-it has become simply an abstract square of planed wood. Then Calvino has Marco Polo point out that this wonderful board was "inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple," and from there the Kahn's imagination takes flight, moving from the images of ebony forests and rafts laden with logs, to river docks and welcoming women, and so on. In this manner, Calvino taught a lesson: either readers can reduce events to abstract patterns that facilitate the procedures of logical operations and the demonstration of theorems, or they can make words reveal the very tangible aspects of the objects to which they refer, thus engendering imaginary visions while allowing that something unfathomable will always remain.