wk849

In the article The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, while mentioned about the “spatiality”, James Corner thinks the definition of “spatiality” is “are moving away from physical objects and forms towards the variety of territorial, political and psychological social processes that flow through space.(94)” The existence of map itself is not just layouts on paper with accumulation of data. With the development of the city, there are more and more immigrant workers are moving to the cities. At the same time, the evolvement of the technology, such as the application of the GPS and algorithm, more and more data could be collected and become the base of the map creating. In this way, map can exist in different ways in people’s daily lives. What maps can do for people is not just supply the layout information of the city and guide us toward certain destination, at the same time, it is more like a media, a frame, that deliver certain ideas toward the residents in the cities.
Applications of map have emerged in many different cell phone applications. Through the navigation app, such as Google map, or Baidu map, residents follow the route drawn in the app to achieve the destination. Through the map of gourmet apps, people explore what delicious restaurants there are around their neighborhood and decide to have lunch or dinner. The ways of the representation of map vary in different applications.
Here comes the problem that, the visualization and application of map makes map more than an object, itself can represent the culture or, more or less reflect the spirit of the city, however, people’s acknowledge and perception about the city are restricted by the city at the same time. All the objects users can see on the map through cell phone application have been filtered by algorithm. The map would prefer to show the most popular ones. In this way, map is like the lens of the camera, people would only see and know the object shown in the map.
People’s utilization and relying on the map narrow the city they live in. We only know what information we gather through the map, but we would never know what have been lost during such procedure.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs, in the first chapter, introduces the function of the sidewalks and neighborhood. For Jane Jacobs, all these components of the city play different roles, and the function of them should satisfy the local resident in a certain way, which I do not quite agree with. As for me, city itself is functional, and city itself has its own aims, which is set by the government and economics. City is not serving the residents. Taking the central park in New York as an example. The designers of the central park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calbert Vaux, wanted to create a public place, a community where both rich people and poor people can be together to share the park’s view. There is no “class” here but the same mutual happiness from the family trips during the weekends. However, now today, Central Park is surrounded by tall buildings. New York is the running machine in high speed, and most New Yorkers do not have a chance take a break to enjoy the “happiness” in the central park. The central park only belongs to the people who can afford the high rental fee of the apartments around the park.

Even though cities are not serving people, more and more people are moving to cities, because of better job opportunities, better education and higher salaries. The people in the city are the ones who want and grant the benefits from the city, if they can.

Another reason I disagree with the author is the that, how the young generation, or for the people who stay in the city, they have different requirements or understandings of the role of cities while compared with Jane Jacobs. It is true that, in the process of evolvement of city, residents lost the street food, and the many other public space. We now are surrounded by concrete steel, and own our little personal space, but we still try our best to stay in the city, even though we need to afford the high rental fee and huge life expense. Because city is big functional, each part of the city is responsible for different function. In this way, the lay out of the city have been divided. Citizens have been divided into different groups. Like what has been mentioned by Zukin in Global Cities, Local Streets, the culture and environment is related to the local community. Or in other words, though in the same city, different district or community would form different culture, at the same time, the residents from different communities would hold different standards and opinions toward the city. My grandma does not like to live in Guangzhou, but in Shantou, my hometown. For us, the young generation, we think Guangzhou is convenient and we can gather a lot of fun from the city. For my grandma, she needs the public space where she can meet a lot different people and the place she can have conversation with strangers.