Exercise Four: Game Board and Rhizomes

GAMEBOARD MAPPING

-presented like a game board of contested territory with drifting and layering-the analytical seperation of different agendas and issues.
-Raoul Bunschoten-London based architect- developed a system fro mapping agents and players that draws out the urban potential. -different frames over the map represent conditions )ie: socio, economic,...)
-Rauol's plan for Bucharest can be shown on a larger scale relative to around cities situated around the Black Sea, depicting a sort of cartographic stage which shows grand scale relationships.

-Bunschoten memorized four fields:

TOPONYMY(masque) cultural plan of an ethnic society)
FLOW(market) new influx and regulatory mechanisms
BASIN(urban flotsam) regeneration of ecological environment.
INCORPORATION(liminal bodies) design of institutions for conflict and negotiation.

-He then created steeping stones between the four fields. mapping all possible scenarios between parties.
-the MAP evolves and is drawn and redrawn often by planners.

RHIZOME

-point to point connections arranged in hierarchal systems expanding outwards from a mid-point.
-milieu-defined as the urban center.

-difference between MAPPING and TRACING:
-MAPPING allows innovation, TRACING is redundant and often just repetitive overlaying.
- key is INTERCONNECTION-body of connections, graphic and notational systems depicting even the "unmappable."

-See: Joseph Minard's narrative map of the fate of Napoleon's Army-sythesizes relationships using geometric forms, vectors, etc. to tell the story of the terrain.-it is essentially a framework, a "data-scape" that may be read.
-frameworks such as these can use anything from images to infra-red photos of an aerial view-field plots to show agriculture.

-MAPPING should be a creative and immaterial representation of a multi-faceted world, free of hierarchal relationships, and depicting ideas that are able to affect change. -making logical but possibly fictional constructs- similar to a good argument.

"All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention." -Rudolf Arnheim