Place as book?

Following on from the notion of landscape as text, is it possible to translate place to book? Using materials generated by the participant observation and the cultural probes, alongside secondary sources of historical and contemporary information about Hackney, can the book format offer an experience of place that transcends the ‘flattening out’ of the map? Within this project it may be useful to apply Schön’s strategy of ‘generative metaphor’ (Schön 1993 cited in Gray and Malins 2004:68). By seeing, in this case, ‘place as book’, the strategy enables the researcher to question how this might be possible, in what ways the two things are similar or different, etc and therefore to actually see one thing as another and to view the design problem in a new light. In this case, perhaps districts could be seen as chapters, paragraphs as streets, and sentences as buildings. It may prove useful to revisit ‘map as book’ in order to furnish the book and its narrative with some unusual navigational tools.

This project, which may form the culmination of the geo/graphic design practice, can draw on many of the theoretical references from both the literature and practice review, including explorations of: pace and rhythm that draw on the contradictions between Massey and Tuan’s definition of place; structure and physical form that move beyond the flat space of the map; multi-linear narratives that draw on place as process and post-modern ethnographic writing; and, an holistic engagement with content, design and typography that works at ‘the level of the text’. Within its narrative it could also include aspects of the smaller projects already developed, those listed as potential ideas and those generated via the cultural probes.

A book is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments… Written language is a sequence of signs expanding within the space; the reading of which occurs in time. A book is a space-time sequence.
Carrion, 2001, np