Siyan

Last weekend, I went to the supermarket with my mother. She bought a piece of pork and a box of eggs and headed for the check-out counter. I was waiting to take over the goods, then suddenly I heard the checker said, “138 RMB in all.”

“What??” I couldn’t cover up my shock on my face, “Why do this tiny piece of pork and this box of eggs so expensive?”

My mother replied calmly, “this is Iberico pork, it’s different than the normal pork. These kinds of black pigs are not fed by normal fodder, they only eat corn or wheat bran, so…”

“So what? They are still pigs!”

“Of course they are different from the normal domestic pigs”, my mother look me into her eyes, “they are raised more naturally, so they are having higher nutritional value…”

“Then what about this box of eggs? Ten eggs for nearly 40 RMB? I guess the little chicken lived inside haven’t got the chance to eat any high nutritional corns…” I asked sarcastically.

“No, but their mums did”, my mother explained, “they are farm eggs, the hens breed them were living in pure natural fields and eat wild vegetables and insects. They are not like hens that lived in cages, fed by a mixture of corn and fodder made from animal byproducts.”

“But how do you know that? Only because the labels on it told you that there are farm eggs inside? What if they are faking?”

My mother pondered for a few seconds, then she replied with a shrug, “still they must be better than the normal eggs. The price is high for a reason.”

In fact, there is no clear and unified standard for the definition of farm eggs in the market. In the consumers’ imagination, the normal eggs are laid by hens living in crowded and messy cages; and the farm eggs are laid by hens live in a fresh and natural environment, surrounded by green mountains and beautiful rivers. But the fact is that its’ the formal and modern farms have strict hygienic standards, systematic management of feeding environment and means of epidemic disease prevention. The feed of the hens is also scientifically proportioned to ensure the nutrition balance and the quality of eggs. And for the hens grew up in open areas, their food, drinking water, and living conditions are out of control. If they are kept near industrial pollution sources for a long time, the contents of toxic substances or harmful microorganisms would be dreadful.

The package of the farm eggs are always full of words such us “pure natural”, “raised in family farm”…

Consumers were too far away from the origin of the food, and too close to the commercial propaganda. In Fabio’s words, “much of what we eat is harvested or slaughtered in distant places we are not familiar with,” and the distance between producers and consumers “create power inequalities” and bring profits to the “food packagers”. They wrap up the food with “naturalism” packaging, set a high price, and claiming that “it’s because our products are more natural!” This method proves effective in the market, an increasing amount of people are willing to pay for the “nature” of the food. But what about the people who produce the food? Do they get their proportional pay-back? Or, do they know their food is labeled as “nature” in the market? They probably don’t even have the entrance ticket to it. Just as Raj Patel stated, “the process of shipping, processing, and trucking food across distances requires a great deal of capital—you need to be rich to play this game. It is also a game that has economies of scale … when the number of companies controlling the gateways from farmers to consumers is small, this gives them market power both over the people who grow the food and the people who eat it.”

In The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention, James Corner redefines the purpose and potential of mapping. By quoting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s declaration of “make a map not a tracing”, Corner emphasizes mapping as a creative instrument that “construe and construct” our living spaces rather than a passive technique of endless data accumulation. “Mapping is perhaps the most formative and creative act of any design process”, he articulates, “firstly disclosing and then staging the conditions for the emergence of new realities.”

With the rapid development of real-time data and geolocation technology, the interactive mapping technique evolves and starts to shape and represent our living spaces in various forms. Generally, a geospatial platform brings data streams into a sophisticated mapping environment. Then, vendors start to provide big data technology that accesses and ingests high-velocity and high-volume real-time data for mapping and analysis. Unlike static maps, interactive maps have the advantage of several features designed to improve the display of a large amount of complex data. It utilizes the GIS (Global Information System) to show pinpoint data on a map and works in a system of layers (combines different levels of geographical information). The visualization and management of interactive maps give new insights and comparisons in different angles of our living spaces from a “formative and creative” way. Here are two typical cases of how interactive maps shapes our living spaces:

As one of the densest areas in the world, Manhattan has two million residents, and nearly an additional amount of two million people pours into the city during workdays. To show how this population pulses for a day, data visualization designer and researcher Justin Fung created the interactive Manhattan Population Explorer. By utilizing and integrating data from the 2010 census, the MTA’s turnstile database, and a population study from NYU Wagner, Justin drew the block-by-block estimates for Manhattan’s population which were reflected in the map’s depiction of hourly changes throughout the week. The map is constituting of bars that look like skyscrapers that reveal the population of a specific area. The color of the bars indicates the density of the population. The interactive map has another name: the invisible heartbeat of New York City. When users set the buttons of “time” and “days” to a typical moment of a week, the map shows the heartbeat of that period of time. If you drag the time button from midnight to daytime, you will feel the awaken of the city. Designer Fung once said in an interview, “when I look the visualization, I do see an organic, breathing being that is the sum of all of us, a beautiful, humbling thing…”

Please click here to view the whole interactive project.

Another interactive map shows the estimated net migration between global countries from 2010 to 2015. NYC-based entrepreneur and data visualization designer Max Galka found that people have lots of conversations about international issues turned to the subject of immigration no matter what the original context might have been (such as topics like terrorism or the refugee crisis). But the debate on immigration was always lacking in factual information. Galka inspired by the predicament and created the interactive map to show the immigration flow and focusing on answering questions like, “how many migrants are there? Where are they coming from? And where are they going?”

Please click here to view the whole interactive project.

(Hover over the circles to see the net migration totals – blue circles have positive net immigration with people coming, and red circles are negative with people leaving. Each yellow dot represents 1,000 people. Clicking on data points will filter migration in or out of a specific country.)

According to the afore-mentioned mapping projects, we could easily demonstrate that interactive maps are powerful tools for the presentation of our living spaces. It should also be stressed that the flexibility of choosing which layers of information to display on an interactive map, further allows for the isolation and examination of individual variables, and intelligently “unfolds new realities out of existing constraints”. For instance, in the Manhattan Population Explorer, we could not only select the “time” of the map but also the “visible district” of it. It allows us to isolate one typical area and make clear examines of its variables. In the Immigration Map, we could also click on certain countries to have a closer glance at the immigration flows of the typical country (see the picture below). In conclusion, the nature and distribution of a problem are made clearer by the use of different map layers and different interactive ways (scroll to zoom, filters, panels, etc.) to give new insights and comparisons. The charm of maps echoes what James Corner describes in his article, “mapping is not only a creative tool to unleash our imagination, but also a means to better understand spaces, cultures, and societies.”

“Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull.”

In her beginning chapter, Jane Jacobs articulates this simple connection between the life of a city and its street. To some extent, New York perhaps gathers the most charming streets around the world: you will pass by hipsters with craft cocktails on their hands in the Soho area, and meet talented street artists play their wooden pianos in Washington Square Park. You can catch a glimpse of marvelous neon lights at Times Square, and feel the scent of a shirt from a vintage clothing store in Williamsburg. If you head to China town, you will find yourself immediately back to the homeland: Chinese restaurants are all over the streets, and every pedestrian is speaking Mandarin or Cantonese.

Streets in New York have always been noisy. When you set foot on a street in Manhattan, you could literally hear the whole world. The click of heels. The knock from a door. The Latin couple arguing. The kid laughing. The dog barking. The taxi accelerating. The subway passing underneath the pipes. The sound of a businessman yelling into his iPhone… However, as we always say, COVID has changed everything. If you visit a street in Manhattan several months ago during the pandemic time, there’s only silence, silence, silence. Endless and breathless silence. My professor Dana once went back to school to fetch a document. He told me when he came back, “you could not even imagine. Spring Street, Canal Street, the area is now like a ghost town…”

“Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies. They are proximity, density, closeness.” But suddenly all the intimacy has gone. People lost their physical connection, streets lost their vitality, we are no longer students from NYU or Columbia, we are all students from “Zoom University”.

However, COVID did not defeat the city, and the city streets strike its liveness back from an innovative and heartwarming way. In May, there was a time when massive flower arrangements popping up around NYC streets. These flower flashes are displayed in various ways — any spot will do, whether it’s a sidewalk or a signpost, or even a trash bin. The flower designer Lewis Miller has been creating these huge flower arrangements around NYC to honor the healthcare workers who are risking their lives every day.

“Flower decoration” is not the only “fight back” way. New Yorkers also lean out of their windows and stand on their balconies. They clapping, cheering and banging pots and pans to honor essential workers still operating during the coronavirus pandemic. Although they could not go out, they still come together and sing out the spirits of a city.

When I left New York, the city has found its own way to go through the tough time: cases were started to fall, citizens were cautious and wearing masks all the time, shopping malls were reopening with the fitting rooms closed, restaurants were rebooting but only offering outdoor dining. You started to hear noises from the streets and felt the awakening of this city. You would be marvel at a city’s self-healing ability and the tremendous spiritual power deeps inside it. Then you would realize why Glaeser wrote down the line in his introduction:

“On a planet with vast amounts of space, we choose cities.”

 

(If you are interested with the “flower flashes” news, the entire version is here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/24/us/new-york-flower-flash-displays-lewis-miller-coronavirus-trnd/index.html )