Invisible Cities Project | September 27th, 2009
Of all the cities described in the book, I was most interested in one of the first ones that Marco Polo describes: Dorothea. "There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea," the young explorer says. The first way to describe the city by what one might see from above, hear about from someone else who had traveled there, or read from a map: the towers, the gates, the canal the formal spatial division of the city, and a few of the city's most precious commodities. The other way is the vernacular way, the informal "lived-in" way that one might describe the city after actually experiencing it: the markets, the varying masses of people, the carts and banners.
This is getting at the discussion with which we opened the class: what sort of dialogue can there be between the so-called "planned" city and the "open" city. In this spirit, I've represented the two ways of describing Dorothea on two sides of the same board. One side is a bird's-eye, a formal map of the city, labeled with Marco Polo's descriptions; this is just one possible way to "plan" Dorothea from the information he gives us. The other side uses collaged images to represent the "many paths that opened before" Polo's friend, the camel driver, when he first visited Dorothea. The trail of highlighted images through the center represent specific things that he remembers seeing, but this trail is set against a background of city images, showing that the camel driver only saw one version of many possible Dorotheas during his walk through the city.
Because the tensions between of the planned vs. open city are unresolved (in this class, and in urban studies as a discipline), my representation is certainly open to interpretation. I don't think that the planned city and the lived city are always in conflict, as suggested in many urban studies texts. I tend to think of them as two sides of the same coin, happening simultaneously, affecting and being affected by the other constantly, but many others think of them as fundamentally opposed and unresolvable. This is why I chose to represent the "two Dorotheas" on opposite sides of the board, instead of together.
Dorothea.ppt
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