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Graphic flâneur. A map to getting lost | Domaine de Boisbuchet

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Summer Workshops | Park | Event Location

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Si pensem en un espai físic, aquest passa inevitablement pel filtre del nostre record. Si s'ha de representar gràficament aquest espai, haurem de basar-nos en aquest record, la nostra memòria i capacitat de representació abstracta. De la mateixa manera que cadascú viu la realitat segons la seva perspectiva, les experiències viscudes o l'ús que fa d'un espai, també aquests mapes són diferents tot i representar un mateix espai: El Parc de la Pegaso, al barri de Sant Andreu de Barcelona.
Si pensamos en un espacio físico, éste pasa inevitablemente por el filtro de nuestro recuerdo. Para representar gráficamente este espacio, deberemos basarnos en este recuerdo, nuestra memoria y nuestra capacidad de representación abstracta. De la misma forma que cada uno vive la realidad según su perspectiva, las experiencias vividas o el uso que cada cual hace de un espacio, también estos mapas son diferentes a pesar de representar un mismo espacio: El Parque de la Pegaso, en el barrio de Sant Andreu de Barcelona. Any physical space we think of has to pass through the filter of our memory. And if we want to represent this space in pictures, we have to turn to our memory of it and use our skills for abstract representation. Often used as a tool for general, almost scientific interpretation, maps are actually an utterly conventional representation. In the same way that everyone experiences reality in accordance with their own perspective, their firsthand experiences or the use they make of a space, these maps a re all different even though they represent the same space: Pegaso Park in Sant Andreu neighbourhood in Barcelona.

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Si pensem en un espai físic, aquest passa inevitablement pel filtre del nostre record. Si s'ha de representar gràficament aquest espai, haurem de basar-nos en aquest record, la nostra memòria i capacitat de representació abstracta.

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The latter inspired her to launch Desired Landscapes, the pocket-sized magazine exploring the sense of place through visual culture. She shares her week ahead, her inspirations, and thoughts on the contemporary city.

What are you up to this Monday morning?
Mondays are my favorite. I have high levels of enthusiasm, a long list of tasks, and the illusion of an abundance of time of a full week lying ahead. I work from my home studio, and since this is a one-person company, I have found that it is more efficient to spread roles per weekdays to stay on track. Monday is the distribution day.

Most magazine makers hate this part, yet I tend to enjoy it as I feel closer to our readers. I see from which cities they come from, or which issues they have picked, and I prepare the packages one by one. The main challenge is to go to the post office before emails will start to pile up-this is usually the point when the Monday magic disappears and stress hits. And today is snowing too here in Athens, so I have two reasons to get done with it as soon as possible.

I try to plan as little as possible on Mondays, to keep it as a creative window and set the tone for the rest of the week. Today though, I will attend an online guest lecture that my graphic design students have organized, before that I have an advising session with one of them, and later on, I have another online meeting to discuss a text proposal for the next issue. I will be happy if most of today's tasks will be done by 5pm when I should leave to join my Monday dance class. Usually, I miscalculate and assign for Monday as much as I should assign to the whole week!

Describe your desk and your work space.
In one word: modular. I work from a big space, but my goal is to have it as empty as possible so I can move things around to fit any creative process. Most furniture is on wheels and frames are not hung but are just standing against the walls. My latest favorite spot is two big pillows on the floor right next to the heating system.

Whatever is lying on my desk, is what I need to take care of. Year by year I got rid of accumulating papers and might-need materials. I keep only what is relevant and helpful for projects, and only a few selected notes and prototypes reach my archival space. Behind my desk stand two big magnetic boards for all the little notes that would otherwise be on my desk.

The first is the flatplan of the upcoming issue, and the second may accumulate mood boards, time plans, lists, notes on logistics, or even ideas for my business plan. These days it is all about distribution and finding new writers for the upcoming issue.

On my right side, there is a console with four drawers including everything I need for distribution: folders, wrapping paper, stamps, scissors, tape, etc. Almost next to it, there is a bookshelf as a mini version of the warehouse, hosting all the products available on our e-shop. Across from my desk, there is my small collection of guidebooks found on flea markets and my trips abroad. This is where I go when I need inspiration for the magazine. Or, I go to the reading room, right behind me, where I keep favorite books and magazines. In the middle of my office room, there is a pole, for my dance breaks. (told you: 'modular, to fit any creative process')

Which magazine do you first remember?
Oh dear, thank you for this question. You made me activate a forgotten shelf of my bookshelf. The ones I first remember are some magazines my mom had from the 80s-90s with ideas for interiors and travel. But the one that got me into the sphere of independent publishing was , a Greek free-press magazine that was-and still is-all about fashion and urban culture. I still remember how the advertorials made me dream and escape the mundane life of the Athenian suburbs, and part of it must be one of the reasons I run a magazine today.

Which magazine matters to you the most this morning?
I skimmed through one of the back issues of The Plant, to enjoy (once again) the quality of images and how this blends with crisp use of typography. I read a bit of Pin Up's latest issue Radical Optimism, which I bought only because of its tagline, how powerful.

Another one that always stands in my studio view is , as it can't fit my bookshelf due to its format. That's handy because I am a big fan of their texts and choice of archival imagery, not to mention their magnificent covers.

Describe Desired Landscapes in three words.
Cities - Escapism - Archives

Tell us about your relationship with cities in general, and about your home city of Athens.
Cities are my playground. Walking in a new city, or even watching a city in a film, can bring me chills. True story. Happened last week too when watching Rome in Moretti's 'Dear Diary'.

I was born in Athens but grew up in the suburbs, so the first thing I did when I got my first job, was to move to the city center where "life was happening". For me, it was all about walking to every destination instead of waiting for a bus that was never coming, the infinite events that may occur when walking on an ordinary street, the juxtapositions of different styles of architecture, the accidental meetings with people, and later on the link with the myth. Athens is an ancient city with all these co-existing layers, so as I got more into urban research I wanted to capture and understand fragments of it.

When I went abroad walking became my main research method, as it creates a linear order to a rather chaotic urban experience. I started by designing an app to explore your own city by drawing a random shape on top of its grid, and then I focused more on mapping. My first guidebook was an index of the neglected Athenian passageways forming a city within a city. I don't know, there is a certain joy in discovering gems in complex cities and then documenting them in print. The magazine expands that approach to more cities through diverse voices.

My favorite city is Tokyo, and I am looking for a good reason to visit again and live there for a few months.

What drives the choice of cities for each issue of Desired Landscapes?
For each issue, I aim for contrast and patterns. Iconic cities, charged with existing narratives, next to not-so-covered ones or misrepresented. From issue four, I also introduced the idea of always one island being part of the mix. The choice of cities though goes hand in hand with the authors' voices and perspectives. A rather uninteresting city could be featured only because of an unexpected take. Reading through one, or a series of issues, it is nice to see how many things unrelated cities may have in common, and then project such thoughts in your own travels.

The overall sense is of loving the idea of 'city'; would you ever publish an anti-city feature?
This takes me back to the question 'what is a city (now)?'. This occupied my mind quite a lot during the pandemic, as a big part of cities are public spaces, which seem to have migrated to online spaces. Could a recurrent Zoom call be a city? Maybe yes.

Well, in that case, since I can't recognize the seductive elements of it (yet), I would be more interested in exploring ideas of anti-cities. For some reason though, my love of cities is strictly linked with the bodily act of walking and my fascination with architecture, so any future setting that rules out those two might be off my interest.

But that's what I love about this magazine, that I can ask this kind of questions to a different set of people shaping today's cities and imagine together ideal futures.

Most of the cities you cover have time and history behind them; how do you feel about the new mega-cities of China?
Yes, indeed. Nice observation! China has been on the table quite a few times and never made it to the magazine's pages. But again, it was mostly through the prism of failed attempts to build cities from scratch ending up being massive ghost towns.

That gets me thinking that the focus of the magazine is more on the person-to-place bonds and the myths around places. History and literature always add to that kind of narratives. Mega-cities though is a quite fascinating topic and if I would find an author with a valid connection to that kind of place, I think we could craft a relevant angle. Desired Landscapes aims to offer perspectives on cities, and new ways to approach them.

Please share one piece of advice for somebody wanting to launch their own publication.
Be naive! If I would have taken seriously all the 'warnings' from people around me on the sound of "starting a print magazine" I would have never launched Desired Landscapes. I would say, dream big and be consistent to plan these smaller steps to reach that dream. I can't imagine my life without a magazine, and I think that's why I kept pushing even when times were hard.

What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
I just announced the Open Call for the next issue, and I think I will be sneaking into the submitted proposals to meet new voices and unknown destinations. In the meantime, I will be preparing the two main interviews, which is one of the most motivating phases of building a new issue.

But the most exciting thing is that we are preparing a launch in Rome for the end of February-and while writing this I keep my fingers crossed that covid will allow us this and more meet-ups with our Desired friends.

desired-landscapes.com

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Pocket-sized mag Desired Landscapes has a unique approach to travel, exploring the visual culture of cities and asking 'What is a city (now)?' As founder Natassa Pappa answers our weekly Q&A, she ponders whether a regular Zoom call might be considered a city.

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Place is a space imbued with meanings (Relph, 1976), therefore in a regeneration process, the affected
places should be approached and understood as a place represented by a total human experience: the

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This website is derived from an exhaustive research on the Typographische Monatsblätter (TM) focussing on the issues from 1960 till 1990.

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Headlands Center for the Arts provides an unparalleled environment for the creative process and the development of new work and ideas. Through a range of programs for artists and the public, we offer opportunities for reflection, dialogue, and exchange, and build understanding and appreciation for the role of art in society.

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Headlands Center for the Arts provides an unparalleled environment for the creative process and the development of new work and ideas. Through a range of programs for artists and the public, we offer opportunities for reflection, dialogue, and exchange, and build understanding and appreciation for the role of art in society.

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IN-FO.CO (Inventory Form & Content) is an independent design & editorial studio founded by Adam Michaels & Shannon Harvey.

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A question driving most rebrands, particularly for organisations whose output has always been physical-first, is how to translate real-world presence into an online experience. Celebrating its 40th anniversary year, California-based Headlands Center of the Arts, a multidisciplinary arts centre and programme, is undertaking this task with the help of LA-based design studio In-fo.co - a collaboration that has fostered a unique approach to referencing the physical. To translate the experience of visiting Headlands, In-fo.co is mining its natural setting with type.

A unique set of glyphs have been developed from the architecture and natural formations found at Headlands. Used for the wordmark and as markers across the site, these structured glyphs reference buildings and previous artist commissions, "like the David Ireland-led excavation process of the Rodeo Room", explains the release from In-fo.co. At another point, glyphs resembling paving stones signpost a "Wander" section of the site. The two-fold sans serif typeface Graebenbach is used in conjunction with these forms, borrowing details from brush painted signs to "balances the sharpness and simplicity of the digital design process with the warmth and texture of hand-drawn type", In-fo.co adds.

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In-fo.co's Headlands rebrand lets you visit the arts centre, typographically

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A question driving most rebrands, particularly for organisations whose output has always been physical-first, is how to translate real-world presence into an online experience. Celebrating its 40th anniversary year, California-based Headlands Center of the Arts, a multidisciplinary arts centre and programme, is undertaking this task with the help of LA-based design studio In-fo.co - a collaboration that has fostered a unique approach to referencing the physical.

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This story is part of our Weekend Reads series, where we highlight a story we love from the archives. It was originally published on March 23, 2021.
One of my favorite pieces by the artist Shannon Ebner is ASTER/SK R/SK R/SK, a work that comprises four flickering light boxes spelling out ASTER/SK over two lines. Each letter is made out of cinderblocks arranged on a gridded pegboard and photographed; the light behind them flashes in a choreographed sequence, illuminating over time the piece's repetitious title. The modular letters look almost pixelated, reminiscent of Ebner's "The Electric Comma," in which a poem plays out across the kind of electronic signboard usually used for roadside construction. Except rather than composed of light, the letters in ASTER/ISK are built from concrete blocks, solid and immovable. Ebner's photographic works tend to call attention to the limits of language by examining the ways in which it is (literally) constructed.

I came to Ebner's work through her book The Sun as Error , a collaboration with Dexter Sinister , which can also be found on the shelves of more than a few designers I know. She's what I would term a "designer's artist." As Julia Born puts it much better in an interview with the Gradient : " [Ebner] fascinates many graphic designers because she manages to capture and magically bring together typography, poetry, philosophy, politics, language, and aspects of the vernacular." For anyone who loves the visuality of language, and perhaps particularly for those who work closely with language's form and its constituent parts-aka typography-Ebner's way of playing not only with the materiality of language but also with language as material offers a special kind of pleasure.

Ebner is far from the only visual artist who works in this way, who considers language not just a vehicle for conveying meaning, but as a thing in itself. Many of her contemporaries such as Adam Pendleton, Ken Lum, Nora Turato, Tsang Kin-wah, Tania Mousand, and Chloe Bass all use typography in their work-printed on canvas, painted across walls, or reflecting off mirrored signage. Others, like Fiona Banner, Tauba Auerbach, Joi T. Arcand, Samir al-Sayegh, Karl Holmqvist, Shannon Finnegan, Stefan Marx, and Martin Boyce, have created their own typography for their own use, tapping into the personalized, expressive potential of type.

They are part of a longer legacy of artists working with text as material that includes the Dada, Futurist, Lettrist, and Concrete Poetry movements. They also follow artists like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Kay Rosen, Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner, and artists in the 1960s who made language a primary element in their art under labels like Fluxus, Pop art, Conceptual art, and text and image. As Robert Smithson wrote in a press release for a 1967 exhibition of language-based art (which he famously described as consisting of "Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read") at the Dwan Gallery in New York: "Here language is built up, not written." Art that dismantles language, isolates it from its meaning, and treats it as object has proliferated ever since.

If we're to take Smithson literally-and let's, at least for the sake of this transition-the idea of "building language" will be a familiar one for type designers. Type designers also think of language as something physical, as matter. They also disassemble and reassemble it, constructing an alphabet from its constituent shapes. They're also concerned with the aesthetics and experience of language, but not just those things-most typefaces, after all, are meant to be read. For artists working with language, letterforms may be purely a form of expression, but for typographers, letterforms are also tools, giving form to words, which can then be used to convey meaning, to signify, indicate, express, and conjure up ideas. This functionality shapes the rules of typography and explains type designers' obsession with a typeface's stylistic components and concern for the context in which it operates. It's also why, I suspect, artists working with type hold such an enduring fascination for designers (and also for me, a design writer). It gives us an excuse to defamiliarize ourselves with how language is made and used, and lose ourselves in the letters and the expressive possibilities of language and the many ways it can live in the world.

One of the best (albeit one-sided) illustrations of how a designer might approach type differently than an artist is a 2009 essay by David Reinfurt (who used to make up one-half of Dexter Sinister) titled The essay focuses on the use of the typeface Arial in two series, "Adam, Why Arial?" Black Dada and Systems of Display, by artist Adam Pendleton, also the recipient of the titular question. First, Reinfurt takes us through both works and the ways that Pendleton connects disparate eras of art history through processes of fragmentation and re-compilation, resulting in his "layered text-image compositions." Then he switches to type history, explaining the origins of Monotype Arial, which was commissioned by IBM in the 1980s for the sole reason that the company didn't have access to Linotype's widely-used Helvetica. Toward the end of the essay, Reinfurt loops back around to his original question, adding an air of type-nerd incredulity: "But then, why Arial? It's a half-resolved typeface, a debased Helvetica at best, produced in the service of IBM and Microsoft! Come on."

Given Reinfurt's close reading and clear appreciation for Pendleton's work (and their collaborations since ), we can safely read the question as rhetorical, a device for exploring the subjects of the essay. But the question remains: For a project that merges text and image, and that's so obviously seeped in art history, was the history of the typography used also considered? Is that something that would only concern a designer? Or were Pendleton's reasons for using Arial simply different than Reinfurt's reasons for critiquing it? (For contrast, consider designer Mindy Seu's use of Arial for her project Cyberfeminism Index , the reasoning for which she clearly outlines in the website's About section: it's "one of few system fonts designed by a woman.")

"The font also requires examination as a form in itself alongside the apparent statement/message. It becomes a subject."

Lawrence Weiner is an artist who famously considers the context, history and associations of the typefaces he uses-and vocally disavows Reinfurt's favored Helvetica. Weiner has said that he doesn't use Helvetica in his works because of its association with authority, and has chosen instead to work frequently with Franklin Gothic Condensed, adapt fonts to suit his needs, or use the typeface he designed, Margaret Seaworthy Gothic. Artist Liam Gillick, on the other hand, has so often used Helvetica in his works that he's even produced his own cut of a Helvetica variant. "Coming from a European context, I view Helvetica as less traumatic and rather more embedded in attempts to create new social democratic models in the post-war context," he tells designer Tino Grass in Grass's book Artistype . "Of course Lawrence is correct in relation to his own work, where the deployment of Helvetica would shift the meaning of the works toward assertion. My work interrogates systems of power and critiques the middle ground of socio-economic structuring. Therefore the font also requires examination as a form in itself alongside the apparent statement/message. It becomes a subject."

Yet such attention to the history of typography and typographic rules isn't necessarily the norm in , a book that comprises interviews with 14 artists who use type in their work. When asked about the importance of legibility in his typography, Martin Boyce replied, "I am not a type designer so my type does not need to conform to the functional aspects of type design. I do place rules on it, but of course I can break these rules." Fiona Banner replied in kind to a question about following the rules of typography. "I draw, bend, or build my own. The others can take a hike."

Both Boyce and Banner have drawn their own typefaces as part of their work. Based on an image of four abstract concrete trees designed by Jan and Joe Martel for the Paris exhibition of the decorative arts in 1925, Boyce developed a pattern on paper that looks a bit like a repeating art deco motif. He then used this unconventional grid to draw angular amateurish-looking letters, which he used to create the piece Concrete Autumn. Banner, for her part, developed a font called Font, an amalgamation of several typefaces she's used in her text-based artworks (in her "full stop" series, for example, Banner's enlarged punctuation marks were in a variety of commonly used typefaces like Times, Gills Sans, and New Century Schoolbook) and an example of her discursive humor. As Mark Sheerin describes it in his review of Banner's 2016 show Font "combines an old-fashioned ecclesiastical look and feel with an au courant encounter with the computerized glitch." Banner has also depicted letters with graphite drawings of fighter planes for her piece The Bastard Word and created a wobbly, delicate alphabet out of glass tubes for her piece, Every Word Unmade.

For Joi T. Arcand, creating her own typography was a way of making more visible a language in danger of disappearing. In her work she employs her Cree Comic Sans in a series of photographs that show everyday scenes in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, replacing the English on shop signs and town wayfinding with Cree syllabics. As the writing system for the Cree dialect, the Cree syllabary is said to have been invented in the early 1800s by a missionary named James Evans, though there are Indigenous Cree who dispute this origin story and say Evans merely took credit for it . Today, the dialect is spoken by approximately 117,000 people across Canada, but that number diminishes with each generation. "People who have no reference point for what syllabics is assume it's foreign because they can't read it," Arcand says in a 2019 interview with Chris Lee and Winona Wheeler in . "When they can't understand something, they get really uncomfortable...As settler people, [you should] not have everything just handed to you, without any question or without being challenged in that way-to think about the fact that something you think is foreign is actually Indigenous."

While the photographs in Here on Future Earth are speculative, depicting an alternate reality in which Indigenous language is widely used on historically Indigenous land, some of Arcand's other works actually create that reality in public. In Don't Speak English she paints syllabics on the stairs of a subway station, and for her Wayfinding series she creates neon signs in Cree (though unlike Banner's, her glowing typeface appears steady and resolute). "[It does something] for people to see themselves and their language reflected and shining back at them," Arcand says of the neon signage. "It instills this pride and recognition."

"[It does something] for people to see themselves and their language reflected and shining back at them."

Wayfinding is also the name of a show by Chloe Bass at the Studio Museum that ran through last fall. Like Arcand, Bass plays with the poetic potential of signage, placing three mirrored billboards throughout St. Nicholas Park in Harlem. Each asks a question-"How much of care is patience?" "How much of life is coping?" and "How much of love is attention?"-in matte text that disappears and reappears with changing light on the mirrored surface, the background reflecting the public space surrounding it. As these textual musings and the park map on to each other, typography acts as much a philosophical guide as it does a physical one.

Bass' use of billboards calls to mind Ken Lum's "I also hope that the text creates a picture of its own, related to but distinctly different from the given picture." In Melly Shum Hates Her Job, one of his many "photo-text works," which he blew up in billboard form to advertise his 1990 show at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam and which became a permanent installation due to popular demand. (Citizens dismayed by its removal at the end of the exhibition called in to insist the city needed a monument to hating one's job). Unlike Bass or Arcand's polished letterforms, Lum often employs playful, expressive, vernacular typography in his photographic works where he uses words to "augment the experience of the photographs," as he writes in his book Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life. Melly Shum Hates Her Job, the word "HATES" is written in a vibrating red and yellow typeface reminiscent of exclamatory type in comic books and pop-art.

Then there are artists for whom creating their own typography is a personal act or a marker of identity. Artists like Stefan Marx and Shannon Finnegan, who employ text frequently in their work, have a trademark style that can be considered akin to handwriting. Tauba Auerbach has said that her habit of changing up the style of her handwriting based on mood or circumstance as a kid led to her interest in developing typefaces for her works, and in particular for her publishing project Diagonal Press. In 2006, Auerbach made her first font , an architectural sans serif composed from a limited kit of curved and straight lines, and she's since created dozens more, including Ribbon Calligraphic Metallic Typeface Three Wire (SRS) , as well as series of Type Specimen posters that she sells through the press.

"I've never sold fonts for use because the letters feel very personal-like visualizations of my voice."

In her written description for the type posters, Auerbach pointed to the personal nature of type as a reason why she's decided not to make her typefaces commercially available. "I've never sold fonts for use because the letters feel very personal-like visualizations of my voice. Seeing one of these typefaces used by a stranger would be akin to hearing my voice come out of someone else's mouth." Auerbach's reasoning illustrates another difference in artists, who develop type for their use only, and designers, who develop typefaces that others can use. But more interesting than drawing on a divide between artists and designers, I think, is looking at the overlaps of two practices so intent on examining language's material DNA and exploring the expressive potential of letterforms. In both design and art (and work that makes no difference between the two) the act of visualizing language, of making it seen, opens up new possibilities. "A poetics of typography operates in the space between language and the alphabet," Paul Elliman writes in his 1998 essay "My Typographies," "and along the invisible networks that connect writing to the world."

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Is It Art, or Is It Type? What We Learn When Language is Built, Not Written

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This story is part of our Weekend Reads series, where we highlight a story we love from the archives. It was originally published on March 23, 2021.

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inc. is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists - artists' books or artists' publications. founded as a for-profit alternative arts space in 1976 by artists and artworkers

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printed matter reincorporated in 1978 to become the independent non-profit organization that it is today. originally situated in tribeca

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printed matter moved to soho in 1989 where for twelve years the book displays and artists¹ projects in the large storefront windows contributed to the artistic and intellectual vibrancy of the neighborhood. in february 2001 printed matter relocated to its current space in chelsea

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where it continues to foreground the book as an alternative venue for artists¹ projects and ideas. recognized for years as an essential voice in the increasingly diversified art world conversations and debates

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printed matter is dedicated to the examination and interrogation of the changing role of artists¹ publications in the landscape of contemporary art.

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Printed Matter, Inc. is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1976 by artists and art workers with the mission to foster the appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of artists' books and other artists' publications.

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RIBBON CALLIGRAPHY METALLIC TYPEFACE (FLAT) TYPE SPECIMEN POSTER

As a kid I would change the look of my handwriting periodically. I have a memory of being in third grade, writing an announcement in my journal that I would henceforth be making my lowercase "a" with a flat top. The resolution didn't stick, but I continued to develop several different styles of handwriting, rotating between them according to mood or circumstance.

From the years 2001-2004 I worked as a sign painter at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco. I had already learned a lot about letter structure from looking obsessively at graffiti - especially from Los Angeles, but this job taught me about strokes, kerning, brushwork and gilding. We did everything by hand. During those years my interest slowly drifted toward linguistics, semiotics and logic, but my love of typography and hand lettering has always remained.

In 2006 I made Fig Font for the titles and headings in a book, and since then I haven't been able to resist making new typefaces for every subsequent publication, including my website and the font used here. In 2007 I began a tradition of making calendars to give friends and colleagues as a New Years gift. The names of the months are always in a new face.

I've never sold fonts for use because the letters feel very personal - like visualizations of my voice. Seeing one of these typefaces used by a stranger would be akin to hearing my voice come out of someone else's mouth. I have occasionally loaned them to friends or created them specifically for use in album art, but it's rare, and there is always a personal connection.

More than anything, this is a document of letter logic. Every typeface is built on a matrix of sorts - a system of components or shapes that combine in various ways to form each letter. Each poster shows the face's matrix glyph (recto) and the resulting alphabet (verso).

All images and works copyright Diagonal Press.

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Ribbon Calligraphy Metallic Typeface (Flat) Type Specimen Poster

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RIBBON CALLIGRAPHY METALLIC TYPEFACE (FLAT) TYPE SPECIMEN POSTER As a kid I would change the look of my handwriting periodically. I have a memory of being in third grade, writing an announcement in my journal that I would henceforth be making my lowercase "a" with a flat top.

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Shannon Ebner A SIDE: STAGE FLOOR * Right: Stage floor from The Wooster Group's EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS: A RECORD ALBUM INTERPRETATION; photographed at The Performing Garage, New York, NY on July 5th, 2018., 2019 Archival pigment print mounted to aluminum 199.4 x 144.8 cm 78 1/2 x 57 in

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Shannon Ebner “The Electric Comma” at Sadie Coles HQ, London — Mousse Magazine and Publishing

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Shannon Ebner’s first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, The Electric Comma, marks the culmination of a three-year project. Black Box Collision A, a parallel

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Today I have the pleasure of introducing you to the delightfully talented Melody Hansen, graphic designer extraordinaire and our guest poster for today!

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The Lakota language was historically an unwritten language. Over the past few decades, native Lakota speakers have contracted and worked with linguists to create a standard orthography with which to write, read, and teach Lakota and Dakota. This standardized writing system is rooted in a Latin glyph system, the same system as our colonizer. While there are compelling reasons for this, I have often wondered what it would look like for my tribe to create our own writing system for both modern and traditional mediums. Although Lakota was primarily an oral language, we often employed our own visual vocabulary to communicate and convey meaning across a variety of mediums-bead and quillwork, paint, sign language, and smoke. Ancestral Type is a speculative attempt to generate a new writing system that incorporates Lakota values, visual vocabulary, and mark-making tools for past, present, and emerging communication mediums.

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The Lakota language was historically an unwritten language. Over the past few decades, native Lakota speakers have contracted and worked with linguists to create a standard orthography with which to write, read, and teach Lakota and Dakota. This standardized writing system is rooted in a Latin glyph system, the same system as our colonizer.

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Reverting to Type 2020 is an exhibition of contemporary letterpress protest posters. These are artworks with something to say: sounding a warning signal about the global climate crisis, railing against fake news and surveillance capitalism, calling out racism, sexism and fighting for equal opportunities and, of course, reacting to the coronavirus pandemic.

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" Varsha Karale, one of the curators of the Visual Arts section, informs that before digital technology came along, artists would draw types by hand. “They would create different fonts to convey the emotion of that letter"

By Deepali Singh

4 February 2020

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"Typography can be defined as the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing"

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From local train station signages to the bus tickets we buy, we are surrounded by typography. Yet, we don't often 'see' it. Acknowledging and celebrating the typography of Mumbai is an exhibition currently underway at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2020, at the David Sassoon Library, The Army & Navy Foyer and Filter, Kala Ghoda. 16 graphic designers have come together to reinterpret the written word they see around them.

Message Received

Typography can be defined as the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing. The tone of the word or the sentence can be interpreted through the type. Varsha Karale, one of the curators of the Visual Arts section, informs that before digital technology came along, artists would draw types by hand. "They would create different fonts to convey the emotion of that letter. With limited resources at their disposal, they would create fabulous signages," she says. For instance, she adds, when the types are thick, bold and loud, one knows what tone is being conveyed. "Types deliver the message immediately," she says.

Celebrating the City

The exhibition has been curated by Alok Nanda, who runs the advertising and design firm Alok Nanda & Company (ANC) based out of Kala Ghoda. "We complete 20 years of ANC this year and we wanted to give back to the neighbourhood and the city we live in. That was the thought behind the exhibition," says Nanda. The company reached out to graphic designers across the city to play with the types that surround us and represent them in a refreshing way. "So, for instance, there are numerous xerox shops with signages in black and yellow around us. We see them but we don't really 'see' them. So, if a graphic designer was to show it to you again with his or her own interpretation, you'll begin to understand and celebrate the typography," adds Nanda.

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When you think of Mumbai, which typography comes to mind?

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From local train station signages to the bus tickets we buy, we are surrounded by typography. Yet, we don't often 'see' it. Acknowledging and celebrating the typography of Mumbai is an exhibition currently underway at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2020, at the David Sassoon Library, The Army & Navy Foyer and Filter, Kala Ghoda.

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As a BFA student in a Typography course, I'm currently reviving this typeface from vintage, engraved street signs. These were removed from a local city and replaced with aluminum signs. Friends and I discovered six of the signs that had been discarded in a wooded area. i'm fascinated by the hand in the craft and the weathering of these planks. These rubbings will help me recreate the available letterforms digitally and use the structures to create new letters with which to complete the alphabet. I cannot wait to see where this goes! I'd love to a signage system designed around this revival.

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Rubbing old street signs to create something new - Sara Similar

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As a BFA student in a Typography course, I'm currently reviving this typeface from vintage, engraved street signs. These were removed from a local city and replaced with aluminum signs. Friends and I discovered six of the signs that had been discarded in a wooded area.

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"We all look at something and acknowledge its presence but when we use our eyes to see we start to be aware and begin to understand"Morag Myerscough

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Morag Myerscough: Can art connect us to places?

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"Morag creates specific local responses to each distinct audience that will see and experience the work, using it to create community and build identity"

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" works with community groups to develop ideas that reflect the identity of the users, drawing on shared cultural history and heritage of the local area"

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Her strong visual approach is instantly recognisable and elevates every context in which it is placed. - Morag Myerscough

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Her work is rooted in creating a sense of joy and belonging for all those who encounter it. Morag creates specific local responses to each distinct audience that will see and experience the work, using it to create community and build identity.

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Her strong visual approach is instantly recognisable and elevates every context in which it is placed. - Morag Myerscough

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Her work is rooted in creating a sense of joy and belonging for all those who encounter it. Morag creates specific local responses to each distinct audience that will see and experience the work, using it to create community and build identity.

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In Loving Memory of Work, a visual record of the UK miners’ strike 1984-85.

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Artist Sam Win­ston has spent the past few years explor­ing how Lon­don, its peo­ple and plants breathe. Trac­ing a web of con­nec­tions, he has inves­ti­gat­ed how the com­plex rela­tion­ship between the urban envi­ron­ment and the breath man­i­fests in sub­stances and liv­ing organ­isms as dis­par…

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Franz Xaver Baier - Spatial Existence and Architecture

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MORNING is a long-term art project that attempts to identify the correlation between a series of climbing frames, designed in the 1970s & situated in Victoria...

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- Sam van Strien

Sam van Strien, American Electric Power: Place & Displacement, 2017. Charcoal rubbing, laser-cut engraving, tyvek, plywood, 1820 × 2380 mm (each).

The process of making a rubbing transcends the traditional boundaries of architectural draughtsmanship and illustration. A rubbing is made by placing a sheet of paper over an object or textured surface and burnishing its surface with a drawing medium such as graphite or charcoal. Many of us might associate the process with gravestone or brass rubbings from our childhood. Making a rubbing can be spontaneous and modest in its means, without a high level of technical expertise, combining elements of drawing, printmaking and sculpture. A rubbing, in contrast to traditional architectural illustrations or photography, makes the surface of architecture visible and highlights the scale of the body as a measure of our built environment, revealing how architecture can be experienced both visually and by the body.

Rubbings can be theorised in terms of the dream (the Surrealist unconscious), the trace (the mark, the evidence, action or event), the phantom (the elusive and intangible) and the memory (to claim and preserve). Rubbings were popularised by the Surrealists, who in the early twentieth century adopted methods of art making that freed the mind from conscious intention by employing automatic ways of rendering an image.

My engagement with rubbings began with a visit to the exhibition, 'Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now', which was organised at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2015. This exhibition was the first to survey the technique of rubbings, a technique that is amongst the most ancient and enduring drawing practices. This exhibition inspired me to incorporate the process of rubbings into my practice as a strategy to reveal my tactile and visual experiences of architecture.

Sam van Strien, Media City Bergen, 2018. Charcoal rubbing, laser-cut engraving, paper, plywood, 1820 × 2520 mm.

Sam van Strien, A Pattern Language, 2019. Charcoal rubbing, laser-cut engraving, paper, plywood, 1160 × 1140 mm.

The rubbings are made on-site by taping paper to the exterior of a building and burnishing its surface with charcoal, pastel or graphite. The result is both an impression of the textural information of the surface of a building and a record of the gestures necessary to make the rubbing. Embedded within the form of the rubbing are the time and the material of its making. Together these constitute a mediated experience of the buildings I encounter. The resulting image gives the work a visual density and an opacity that prolongs the act of recognition, while the accreditation of time invested in the making of the works imbues them with a presence and gravity. I use rubbings as a way to have contact with these buildings, to produce a trace or a record. These are tactile or haptic drawings that rely on touch rather than sight, sensation rather than replication. This process, for me, questions if architecture can exist outside of itself in representations such as photographs or texts, or it exists only as concrete matter, as a place we can touch and see.

The removal of the rubbing from the site makes it both an image and an index of my contact with architecture. Rubbings oscillate between presence and absence, where elusiveness and intangibility become part of how we approach the notion of what was an object. Its status, therefore, is in-between object and image. This process emphasises both the physical substance of architecture and its subsequent surface representation as an image. This is complicated when looking at the rubbings from various distances. From further away they may appear like a building, wall or structure; upon closer inspection, they may appear as a formal or abstract drawing. The rubbings I make are a strategy to engage directly with the buildings I come into contact with while living in a city. While it is unusual and uncommon to touch buildings, this process reveals the lack of physical contact in our experiences of cities. This process translates three-dimensional architectural surfaces into two-dimensional impressions, engaging with the languages of drawing, printmaking and architecture. This creates a dialogue between these mediums and investigates the space in between.

San van Strien, A Pattern Language, 2019. Pastel rubbing, laser-cut engraving, paper, plywood, 300 × 420 mm.

In the final stages of my process, I use a laser-cutting machine to engrave into the rubbings. In spite of my dedication to the process of rubbings, I am also interested in disrupting the singularity of their representation. Through this intervention, I attempt to move away from the rubbings being experienced simply as a reproduction of a particular object or textured surface. The laser cutting inscribed into the surface of the rubbings is sourced from a photograph of the section of the surfaces I take rubbings from. This photograph of the facade is then traced in Adobe Illustrator to produce a vector file. The raised impression of the surfaces produces the lines of the trace, and this is then etched into the rubbings. The laser-cut mediates the photographs I take through a process of digital transformation and medium translation, and brings another tactile representation of architecture. I see a connection between the trace made by making a rubbing and a trace made of Illustrator from a photograph. The work, when laser-cut into, can be experienced as simultaneously abstract and real, detached from and in direct contact with architecture.

I work with different facets of drawing in my work, from the tactility of a rubbing to the technological apparatus of a laser-cutting machine, engaging with architecture through touch, contact and mediation. Through the layering of rubbings and laser-cut engravings, I attempt to create a tension between mediums and processes that are both embodied and tactile as well as distant. Through this, my work aims to question and open up forms in which we can experience architecture, whether through mediated visual representations or our experiences walking in a city.

Sam van Strien, A Pattern Language, 2019. Pastel rubbing, laser-cut engraving, paper, plywood, 600 × 460 mm.

Rubbings represent architecture far more intimately than a photograph or a more traditional form of architectural drawing. For one thing, you know they are of a one-to-one scale and have been made by having direct contact with a building. This situates us in a specific moment in time and place. To me, this physical record is much more emotionally charged than a photograph or an architectural rendering, which by their very nature implies a distancing from the subject. As Walter Benjamin states in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: 'For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand'. Rubbings bring touch back into the way we think about architecture, offering an alternative to the role of looking and observing found in more traditional forms of architectural illustration and representation. Therefore, they can be seen as a more essential or authentic record of the built world around us. As with infants, touch comes before sight: you need to touch the world to decide it is there, your eyesight is yet to be trusted.
Sam van Strien is an artist based in London: www.samvanstrien.com
This text was entered into the 2020 Drawing Matter Writing Prize. Click here to read the winning texts and more writing that was particularly enjoyed by the prize judges.

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Place and Displacement: Rubbings from Architecture

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The process of making a rubbing transcends the traditional boundaries of architectural draughtsmanship and illustration. A rubbing is made by placing a sheet of paper over an object or textured surface and burnishing its surface with a drawing medium such as graphite or charcoal. Many of us might associate the...

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Walter Ruttmann's classic portrait of 1920s Berlin can be enjoyed equally as reportage, social analysis or visual poem.
The opening three minutes of BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY show a train racing towards the city of the title. In addition to positioning the viewer as a visitor and establishing the contrast between the urban landscape and the countryside that surrounds it, this sequence introduces three elements of director Walter (here credited as Walther) Ruttmann's style that become very familiar in the proceeding film - first, and most obviously, a sense of perpetual motion; second, a tendency towards geometric abstraction; third, a preference for the monumental over the specific. As the sequence cleverly ends with a close-up of the railway station's sign, 'BERLIN', one could perhaps add a fourth motif: the sheer volume and variety of lettering all over the city, which might be said to stand in for the film's lack of inter-titles.

Ruttmann is able to find images of great formal beauty throughout the film...

Ruttmann divides his film into five 'acts', covering some eighteen hours of what appears to be a single day. The first three of these correspond to the morning, from 5 am to midday, 'Act IV' is the afternoon and 'Act V' the night. The city begins almost entirely empty of people, save for a few stragglers coming home from the previous night's revels. Factory workers - first one, then a second and a third, and finally a great mass - begin to make their way through the streets towards their workplaces. Once they are at work, Ruttmann makes much of the shapes and patterns of industrial machinery in motion, as Dziga Vertov would do a few years later in MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (markedly similar to this film in so many ways). Despite the real-life subject matter, Ruttmann is able to find images of great formal beauty throughout the film, and a particular highlight comes towards the end, with the gorgeous, high-contrast chiaroscuro of the night-time street scenes.

One particularly fascinating structural repetition in the film, perhaps representing Ruttmann's social concerns, is the sense of this dynamic, apparently thriving city spiralling out of control. The images of a business at work - the secretaries typing, the boss making calls - become more and more frenzied, until Ruttmann cuts suddenly to a pair of monkeys chattering away, then to two dogs fighting. The film has frequent recourse to other, often equally satirical, imagery involving animals. The relaxation of the city as everyone stops for lunch, for example, is shown by a series of animals, including an elephant, lying down to rest. The end of this brief period of leisure is shown by the same elephant getting up again.

"The film, much like the city, seems to give itself wholly over to pleasure..."

This sense of a barely-controlled hysteria underlying the city's activity is shown even more clearly later on. The film shows the word 'Geld' (money) repeatedly jumping out of newspaper text, cuts to a literal roller coaster ride, then goes to a close-up - one of a very few in the entire film - of an unkempt, wide-eyed woman on a bridge, about to throw herself into the river. This scene must have been staged, and there are a few other examples where Ruttmann the director may have been overwhelmed by Ruttman the showman - a sudden fight on the street between two men, with a crowd looking on in fascination, or a man picking up a prostitute.

Ruttmann is keen to show the inequalities of income within Berlin, and rarely fails to match one image of wealthy excess to another of dire poverty. A shot of a cigarette discarded by a wealthy individual about to catch a taxi, for example, is immediately followed by a tramp picking up butts from the pavement. However, in the final 'act', as the sun down and lights coming on all over the city, everything changes. As if beguiled by the variety and exuberance on offer in Berlin's theatres, dance-halls and gaming establishments, the film, much like the city, seems to give itself wholly over to pleasure.

BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY is boldly credited as 'Ein Film von Walther Ruttmann'. However, Ruttmann worked closely with the cinematographer Karl Freund, developing an original idea by the scenarist of THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI, Carl Mayer. Credit must also go to the composer of the orchestral score, Edmund Meisel (best known for his collaborations with Eisenstein on BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and OCTOBER), whose music is integral to the success of the film.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqhI42tH5vw

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Berlin, Symphony of a Great City | TAKE ONE |

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Walter Ruttmann's classic portrait of 1920s Berlin can be enjoyed equally as reportage, social analysis or visual poem. The opening three minutes of BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY show a train racing towards the city of the title.

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A four-metre-tall column of disparate geometric forms, ' Power tower' was constructed as a stainless-steel framework, incorporating triangular panels of plywood and handblown, coloured glass in an intuitive, yet symmetric, manner. Light bulbs mounted at intervals along the length of the column illuminate it from within, casting variegated, angular shadows around the surrounding space. The geometric forms that make up the work were arrived at intuitively through playing with a children's toy, known as Zometools, a construction set that consists of struts and nodes that allow great flexibility in creating geometric forms.⁠

While the panels of plywood indicate the faces of the polyhedrons, the panes of coloured glass are embedded within the structure, sketching out a multicoloured core. The tones progress from purple at the floor through the major colours of the visible spectrum - red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue at the apex.⁠
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Image: 'Power tower', 2005/2023; previously shown in 'The curious desert', in National Museum of Qatar, Doha, Qatar, 2023 (photo: Anders Sune Berg).⁠

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Official website of Olafur Eliasson and his studio: Studio Olafur Eliasson

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Irena Visa, Banyoles 1985. Artistic works portfolio. Imaginary USA / Casa Bloc / Les dues antenes del repetidor de Rocacorba / others.

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Desired Landscapes is a print pocket-sized magazine reading into a diverse mix of cities. Each issue is exploring the sense of place through visual culture. A collection of person-to-place bonds, critical texts, archival material, maps and poetic snapshots, all seen through the eyes of people shaping today's cities. Ju

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Desired Landscapes is a print pocket-sized magazine reading into a diverse mix of cities. Each issue is exploring the sense of place through visual culture. A collection of person-to-place bonds, critical texts, archival material, maps and poetic snapshots, all seen through the eyes of people shaping today's cities. Ju

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Buildings Speak to Us — How To Listen (Published 1976)

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Paul Goldberger describes process of looking at bldgs in order to understand ‘message’ that bldg conveys to viewer; cites as examples Grand Central Terminal, NYC, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Atlanta, Ga, Trinity Chuch, NYC, FBI hq in Washington, DC, shops on Madison Av, NYC, and IDS Center in Minneapolis;…

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Marking space Space slips away like sand between fingers, carried off by time. Nothing looks any more like it was. What has remained are fragments, scratches, traces. Tokens able to keep memories alive. The city is its own book, in which words and phrases are erased continually, pages, even whole chapters are torn out.

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Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it,”

Wilfried Hou Je Bek

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Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City

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If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth, psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot.

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Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City

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If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth, psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot.

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How do different places make us feel and behave? The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire's concept of the flâneur - an urban wanderer - Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.

As a founding member of the avant-garde movement Situationist International, an international movement of artists, writers and poets who aimed to break down the barriers between culture and everyday life, Debord wanted a revolutionary approach to architecture that was less functional and more open to exploration.

The reimagining of the city proposed by psychogeography has its roots in dadaism and surrealism, art movements which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination. Tristam Hillier's paintings such as La Route des Alpes 1937 could be described as an early example of the concept.

Psychogeography gained popularity in the 1990s when artists, writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller began using the idea to create works based on exploring locations by walking.

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Tate glossary definition for psychogeography: A term coined by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to describe the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals

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he zone goes by different names, few of them complimentary. Victor Hugo called it "bastard countryside". The landscape theorist Alan Berger called it "drosscape". The artist Philip Guston called it "crapola". And the environmentalist Marion Shoard called it "edgeland", which she defined as "the interfacial interzone between urban and rural". The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies.

For Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, these are the great "unnamed" and "ignored" landscapes of modern England: places where "our slipstream has created a zone of inattention" in which all manner of interest and beauty thrive. Two English poets "in the lyric tradition", both "edgelands comprehensive schoolchildren in the 1970s", they set out to explore and document this ruderal idyll, hoping to "do for the neglected edgelands what Coleridge and Wordsworth once did for mountains and lakes". Their co-written book instructs us to "marvel at this richly mysterious . . . region in our midst", and to celebrate it as a "place of possibility, mystery, beauty".

So off they wandered, to the brinks of mostly northern English cities, returning with their post-pastoral harvest of prose. The book takes the form of 28 essays, each treating a charismatic aspect of the edgelands - "Cars", "Canals", "Ruins", "Mines", "Hotels", "Sewage" - and each a spray-can squirt in the eyes of the National Trust. The authors' political aim is explicit and harped upon: to chastise the "routine prejudices" that we hold with regard to landscapes. Well, they succeed in that, but they also install replacement biases and nostalgias of their own.

At its best, this book is a delight: witty and wryly contrarian. Farley and Symmons Roberts have conjured a distinctive style for their chosen region: fond, melancholic and glitteringly acute. An exemplary incident comes when one night "on an industrial estate near Morecambe" they encounter an "Iridium Flare watcher": a man waiting, with binoculars, for the moment when a low-earth-orbit communications satellite will flash the sun from its silvery coachwork. They write brilliantly about this contemporary Halley "looking to the heavens to acknowledge the presence of our telecom gods", and the man himself becomes an icon of the book's preoccupations.

Their prose can be close to poetry: the "hum and rumble of skateboards", the "dark dials" of sewage ponds seen from above, the "imponded cars" that have sunk into the water of quarries and gravel pits. There are dozens of fascinating digressions as well as charming counter-factual flourishes in which imaginary futures for the edgelands are envisaged.

Of course, Farley and Symmons Roberts are not the first to venture into the edgelands, nor is the region nearly as ignored as they suggest. For decades the edgelands have been crawling with chroniclers: psychogeographers, biopsychogeographers, autobiopsychogeographers, deep topographers, and other theoretically constituted lovers of the detrital, gleaning their ruminations on ruination. The edgelands are all over late-20th-century English painting, photography, film ( Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit, Andrew Kötting, who has even made a short called Edgeland Mutter), in children's literature ( Stig of the Dump, The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler), in Richard Mabey's prescient classic The Unofficial Countryside and Kenneth Allsop's neglected classic Adventure Lit Their Star, and so on. So modish are the edgelands, indeed, that this summer there is a short-film festival dedicated to "liminal Britain" and "urban outskirts".

Iain Sinclair, too, has been prowling the edgelands for years - but he is anathema to Farley and Symmons Roberts because of his alleged "misanthropy". Much is also made of the misanthropy of "traditional" romantic celebrants of moor and mountaintop. The authors set themselves up - in opposition to both these modes - as social-minded saviours; their book a corrective in which they will "talk to edgelands people", and seek out the "voices of people who still carry the traces of local place in their mouths, in their tongues".

Sounds good. But their edgeland turns out to be a region almost as evacuated of its inhabitants as Sebald's Suffolk or Yves Marchand's Detroit. "Hundreds of conversations" are referred to in the acknowledgments, but a meagre half-dozen are (briefly) rehearsed in the book. A few individuals stumble past in the distance, like extras from The Road. When the inhabitants of this "loved and lived-in" landscape do appear centre-stage, they are left faceless, nameless and allegorical. Sometimes the edgelanders get laughed at. There is an uncomfortable joke about whether the medical condition of anosmia should be rechristened "binman's nose", and a receptionist in a pallet-yard is soundly patronised for not understanding their interest in pallets.

The book also suffers from an inverted form of the blitheness that can beset traditionally romantic nature writing. A pond on the outskirts of Peterborough is "a Pre-Raphaelite vision". Burnt-out cars dumped on waste ground "provide . . . a space where children can turn immobility into limitless freedoms". Waste ground is paradise. Sewage farms are "simple geometric playgrounds" where children have been known to ride the sweep-arms. "Container yards are places of beauty and mystery." Well, perhaps, but they are also places of crushed fingers and low wages. In the end, the love shown for the edgelands is too strong. There is at times an atmosphere of what Patrick Wright calls "the New Baroque sensibility", characterised by a romancing "interest in debris and human fall-out".

In the end, the thought-crimes of which Farley and Symmons Roberts accuse traditional landscape romantics (the editing out of particular people, the excesses of the lyric impulse) get re-performed almost perfectly here, just in a new setting. And there is nothing to suggest that Farley and Symmons Roberts would be anything other than pleased if the edgelands were to sprawl across the entirety of England. A strange book, then. Brilliant in parts, but confused in others. A book which, in its inconsistent, undecided texture is entirely in keeping with its subject.

Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places is published by Granta.

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Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts - review

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Robert Macfarlane detects some hyperbole in a love letter to our overlooked landscapes

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We are a company that draws on creative use of Sound, Digital Technology, Immersive Installation, Site-Specifics and Concept to make art, politics and play happen where it matters.

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archisoup | Architecture Guides & Resources

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If a building can't speak, can it really tell a story?

Buildings, paintings, cities, or any other well designed object for that matter - tell stories in all kinds of ways, from their form to their materials to their referencing of history. They don't do this by themselves, of course; it's the job of the designer to 'write' and express this story, otherwise known as the narrative.

This article explains in detail what an architectural narrative means, with plenty of concrete examples of why and how it might be generated. We offer some tips for improving your skills in producing architectural narratives, and look at strategies for presenting them.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Once upon a time...

Narratives

What is a narrative?

In short, a narrative is just a story - a description of a sequence of events, involving characters and usually some underlying messages or themes. The word is commonly used to discuss novels and plays, but also features strongly in the field of design.

What is 'architectural narrative'?

An architectural narrative is the story that a building tells about its users and/or its patrons. A great example is the Institut du Monde Arabe (1987) in Paris by Architecture-Studio and Jean Nouvel, which combines elements of Western and Islamic architecture in order to illustrate and nurture the relationship between France and the Arab world.

It is a building that can be 'read', almost like a book (and for this reason will be mentioned as an example throughout this article).

What about 'design narrative' and 'spatial narrative'?

The terms architectural narrative, design narrative and spatial narrative are often used interchangeably, though there are subtle differences. Since most fields of design (industrial, graphic, fashion, and so on) use storytelling as part of their process, 'design narrative' has a broader application than 'architectural narrative'.

On the other hand, 'spatial narrative' applies principally to architecture and landscape design, since space is less of a factor when designing a poster or a pair of jeans.

Architectural narratives

Why should architecture tell a story?

During the design process, generating an architectural narrative serves a multitude of functions.

It ensures that the client, architect and broader team are on, and stay on, the same page; it acts as a motivator, since stories remind us why we are doing something; and it works as a unifying factor to create aesthetic harmony throughout the building.

When the building is in use, a strong architectural narrative adds interest for users of the building and attracts outside visitors, as well as strengthening the identity of a particular community.

One story told by the Institut du Monde Arabe, for example, is that French Muslims belong in France; an enormous building in the capital city so influenced by Islamic traditions can hardly mean anything else.

How can architecture tell a story?

Research by Gensler found that architecture and literature share four key storytelling elements, namely characters, image, backstory and theme.

In a building, the characters are the people who are connected with the site, whether patrons, users or visitors; the image is the physical appearance of the building and the impression it creates; the backstory is the rootedness of a place in its historical context; and the theme is the underlying belief or principle that the architect wants to communicate.

The section below ('How do architects actually create narrative?') expands on this idea.

The same research also identified situations in which architecture fails to tell a story. One of these is when economic constraints force buildings to be erected as quickly and cheaply as possible, producing 'McBuildings' that appear banal and unconnected to their surroundings.

Another is when architects communicate just one thread of a story, or try to communicate a complex story through just one part of a building, instead of conceiving the building and its narrative as an interrelated and multi-faceted whole.

How do architects actually create narrative?

There are three main ways in which architects generate narrative.

The first is by using forms, materials, scale, light, heat, and sound in particular ways, especially in ways that enhance practicality by linking form to function. Consider the brise-soleil (a feature commonly found in tropical architecture, which keeps buildings cool by deflecting sunlight) at the Institut du Monde Arabe.

Though Paris is far from tropical, the architects included a photo-sensitive brise-soleil with motor-controlled apertures. The resultant filtered light not only evokes the mishrabiya in Islamic architecture, but also protects the delicate objects in the museum.

The second way architects create narrative is by attending to the location and physical properties of a building's site, and working with rather than against them.

This tendency is exemplified by so-called critical regionist architects such as Tadao Ando, whose stepped Rokko housing development (1981-1998) is built into a mountain near Kobe, Japan.

Every house has an outside space inseparable from 'nature', and the architect used concrete so the natural form of the mountain and geometric form of the apartments could be pleasingly contrasted.

The third and final way narrative is generated is by reference to history, ensuring continuity of architectural form and meaning.

For example, Alvar Aalto's Summer House (1953) in Muuratsalo, which served for many years as his experimental space, was inspired by a Roman atrium but opens onto a courtyard like traditional Finnish farmhouses.

Architectural narrative and the design brief

It is common complaint that design briefs, whether for buildings or other products, are full of overused and broadly meaningless words such as 'user-friendly'. (Who wants a school or hospital that isn't friendly to its users?) Creating an architectural narrative is one way to get around such generalizations.

By putting themselves in the shoes of a 'character' - which is to say a typical user or another person likely to be affected by the building - and imagining their 'story', architects should be able to design spaces that are appropriate for the largest number of people.

For example, when designing a family home, it makes sense to undertake a virtual walk-through as each member of that family, may not have the same needs and preferences.

When designing a building that occupies a public space (or indeed designing public space itself), it may be helpful to imagine the responses of those living and working nearby such as older people concerned about an increase in anti-social behavior or parents worried about the loss of green spaces for their children to use.

Discussing architectural narratives

Architectural narratives can feel somewhat intangible, and when presenting them it's all too easy to confuse them or to ramble. The following three-stage process should help you stay on track:

1. Give a very brief introduction

Though your introduction should be brief, the process of coming up with it may not be! In just one or two sentences, you should try to explain exactly what you're about to present, for example, 'This is an antenatal clinic that makes expectant parents feel welcome and reassured'.

It's not always easy to condense everything you're thinking into so few words, but your audience really need to hear a succinct description upfront. Make sure the words you choose are meaningful and precise.

2. Outline your specific approach to the project

There are probably as many ways to create a welcoming and reassuring environment as there are expectant parents, so make plain to your client what your particular understanding of those terms is.

Will the clinic reassure with the clarity and consistency of its design, with its form and color, with the privacy and comfort of its spaces, or with something else?

3. Offer examples in 2D & 3D

Once you've clarified your approach, give the client some specific examples of how you will manifest it using sketches, plans, and models. Don't wander off track; illustrate only the approach you described in step two.

Include enough examples to convince your audience that you've given the building thorough consideration, but not so many that they blend into one and create confusion.

Key tips and strategies

In sum, here are eight tips and strategies to bear in mind when creating an architectural narrative.

1. Location, location, location

The location of the building will be the starting point for many narratives. Returning to the Institut du Monde Arabe, the building's river facade follows the curve of the road (dictated by the river itself), while the opposite facade - the one with the motor-controlled brise-soleil - overlooks a public square.

One 'reading' of this might be that the institute, and therefore by extension Arab culture, can fit harmoniously into the Parisian context without losing itself.

2. Keep people at the center of your story

Narratives are all about people; no great works of literature describe only scenery and objects. Though these things can be important to architects, most of the buildings we design will be for human use. It follows, then, that the way to make them better is to think like the humans who will move through and around them.

3. Create a 'journey' through the building

On the topic of movement, it might help to think of your architectural narrative in terms of a journey through the building, articulated by horizontal and vertical spaces of varying size, brightness and warmth. How do you want someone to feel as they approach the building, and as they experience each of its areas? How can you make this happen?

4. Do your research

Your research should go beyond finding out what the building's users will need (though of course this is essential). Read up on the ethos and history of your patrons, as well as the historical context of the site where the building will be located. Can you incorporate your findings into the building?

An oft-derided example of this is the use of porthole windows and other nautical motifs at waterside apartment complexes, but thorough research will allow you to address this aspect of storytelling with much greater subtlety.

5. Take scale into account

Remember that your building will tell a different story depending on where someone is located in relation to it. Make sure you consider the narrative from a considerable distance, from the middle distance, close-up, and from the inside.

To think about this more clearly, consider brutalist estates of the 1960s that can today appear foreboding as one approaches on foot, but whose spacious flats with their extensive views were generally popular with initial tenants.

6. Every element matters

Architectural narrative is not about making grand gestures that tell a story all at once. It works best when every element of a building, from materials to sound qualities, work together to reveal what it's all about. Take care not to produce the design equivalent of a soundbite.

7. External representation of an unseen reality

Architecture, at its best, can be an embodiment of something that is otherwise hard to articulate. Think of an awe-inspiring, heaven-scratching church or mosque, or the cosy cottage that feels like home even before you've moved in.

These kinds of feelings don't happen by accident; an architect has considered how to induce them with physical form. Get used to making notes of your emotional responses to buildings, and interrogate the reasons for them.

8. Avoid wishful thinking and after-stories

In spite of its connection with storytelling, an architectural narrative should not represent what you'd like to build in an ideal world. It should articulate what you can realistically achieve. Similarly, don't be tempted to design first and create a narrative later.

Tacked-on stories never ring true, and the building will feel much less satisfying for it. Let the narrative truly drive what you're creating.

Examples of architectural narrative

As well as the Institut du Monde Arabe which has been mentioned more than once in this article, you might like to spend time reading about the following buildings which have a strong architectural narrative. There are, of course, thousands if not millions more.

As the holiest pilgrimage site for Muslims, the Masjid-el-Haram (which has existed in its current form since 1571) could hardly tell a stronger story. It is the largest mosque in the world and contains the Kaaba, around which pilgrims must circle seven times.

Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center (1962), part of New York's JFK Airport, is a swirling embodiment and celebration of leisure flight, which had become increasingly popular since the end of World War II.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris (1971-77) by Rogers + Piano represents the decentralisation of the arts by turning the building 'inside out'.

In Berlin, Daniel Libeskind designed the 2001 Jewish Museum as a representation of ethnic fracture and reconciliation in Germany. Similarly, the city's Holocaust Monument (2005), designed by architect Peter Eisenman, inspires reflection on the millions of Jewish lives lost in the war with its scale and sombre materials.

OMA's Casa de Música in Porto, Portugal, which opened in 2005, is a solitary building in the middle of a large public space in a working-class area, designed to symbolise visibility and access.

Summary

An architectural narrative is the story told by a building through its form and feel. It is not superfluous, to be added after the 'real business' of design, but should guide the design.

It keeps project teams on the same page and immeasurably improves users' experience of the building; compare an identikit branch of Starbucks and Uruguay's Café Brasilero, with its nooks and wooden walls, and this becomes immediately apparent!

The key to creating better architectural narratives is to center the people who will use, and/or who have commissioned, the building. This involves thinking like an author, and putting yourself in someone else's shoes so they can . . . live happily ever after!

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Architecture Narratives - The Storytelling of Design - archisoup | Architecture Guides & Resources

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If a building can't speak, can it really tell a story? Buildings, paintings, cities, or any other well designed object for that matter - tell stories in all kinds of ways, from their form to their materials to their referencing of history.

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Description

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields.

The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy.

This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

About the Author

Henri Lefebvre began his career in association with the surrealist group, from whom he learned Hegel and a concern with dialectical logic. He was the first to translate Marx's early manuscripts into French, and his book Dialetical Materialism (published in 1938) became the work from which several generations of French intellectuals learned Marxism. Immediately after the war, Lefebvre began to reflect on a new object of study which he called "daily life". After the publication of Everyday Life in the Modern World, he was drawn to the analysis of urbanism, and wrote several books on the city, including Space and Politics (1972). In the 1960s he became closely involved with the younger school of French architects, and provided a theoretical framework for their work. Finally, the accumulation of these diverse themes led to his major philosophical work, The Production of Space.

Table of contents

Translator's Acknowledgements.

1. Plan of the Present Work.

2. Social Space.

3. Spatial Architectonics.

4. From Absolute Space to Abstract Space.

5. Contradictory Space.

6. From the Contradictions of Space to Differential Space.

7. Openings and Conclusions.

Afterword by David Harvey.

Index.

Reviews

" The Production of Space reveals Lefebvre at the height of his powers: imaginative, incisive and immensely suggestive." Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia

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Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields.

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Jae Ee is a designer and a visual researcher from Seoul, formerly based in LA, currently based in NYC. He maintains a close interest in something marginal.

For further inquiries: email@jae.ee

© 2020 Jae Ee All Rights Reserved.

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Jae Ee is a designer and a visual researcher from Seoul, formerly based in LA, currently based in NYC. He maintains a close interest in something marginal. For further inquiries: email@jae.ee © 2020 Jae Ee All Rights Reserved.

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language we use in our homes becomes a key tool of exploration through intertextuality—a concept that indicates how specific examples within a place function within their site of locality as well as how history and society also interact with that place.

Shauna Wilkinson, The voice of a City

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visual elements that are alive with the community that creates them.

Shauna Wilkinson, The Voice of a City

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visual representation of language in public space is considered to be one of the most salient markers of community in an area and can represent an invaluable aspect of the identity of that place.

- Shauna Wilkinson,The Voice of a City

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[This page is an archive and is no longer being updated]

What is vernacular typography?

One vanishing art that can still be studied in the interstices of the assault of global retail is vernacular typography. All over the world, there are cities and towns that retain their rich traditions of vernacular signage. Unfortunately, the fate of these typographic havens is being threatened by the uniformity of corporate advertising, which ignores and subverts local history and tradition.

This website seeks to collect and document examples of these vanishing symbols of art and culture.

And yes, "vernacular typography" is a misnomer. Most of what is pictured here is actually "vernacular lettering" - inventive letterforms made by hand, not using prefabricated forms of type.

Follow along on twitter @vernaculartype
or Instagram @vernaculartypography

ALL IMAGES AND TEXT COPYRIGHT © MOLLY WOODWARD AND MUST NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION

To inquire about licensing imagery or purchasing prints, you can send an .

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Vernacular Typography is a digital archive and community-based initiative dedicated to the documetation and preservation of vanishing examples of lettering in the everyday environment. It seeks to explore, protect, and promote the typographic heritage of local communities around the world that retain their rich traditions of vernacular signage.

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“Sites and places are never simply locations. They are always sites for someone and something.

Ole Jensen - https://ginger-root.co.uk/thinkboard/the-voice-of-a-city

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One of the ways we see art and design manifest in a public space is through vernacular typography-typography found in physical places that has been created by the community there (this might be posters; billboards; graffiti; shop signage etc. but has curated an amazing catalogue of vernacular typographic examples).

This visual representation of language in public space is considered to be one of the most salient markers of community in an area and can represent an invaluable aspect of the identity of that place. Documenting vernacular typography-and particularly if language used in these examples differs from the 'official' language appear-can form reflections of the community of a place.

If we go further afield than Granby, to Bogota, Colombia, we can see how Bogota's graffiti policy was truly revolutionary in its consultation with local graffiti artists, leading to clearer recognition of vernacular typography as an invaluable cultural practice. This subsequently created unique streetscapes that support the community's stories and memories.

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The Voice of a City | Thinkboard | Ginger Root

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One of the ways we see art and design manifest in a public space is through vernacular typography-typography found in physical places that has been created by the community there (this might be posters; billboards; graffiti; shop signage etc. but has curated an amazing catalogue of vernacular typographic examples).

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DNCO was appointed earlier this year to develop the place brand for Silvertown, an enterprising new town centre for the Royal Docks. The enterprising scheme is bringing Millennium Mills and Silo D back to life - two local landmarks that act as figureheads for the transformation of the entire area.

Recognising local pride in industrial heritage along with the development's vision for Silvertown, DNCO came up with a bold new strapline: 'An iconic East London neighbourhood awakens'. This formed the foundation for the identity, positioning Silvertown as a town centre that "balances the needs of residential communities, next-generation businesses and future visitors to set a new golden standard for community-inspired place branding and as a beacon of enterprise and enjoyment where all of London belongs," as it explains.

For the logo, DNCO was inspired by the signage of Millennium Mills and wanted to build on its legacy. "We created a set of graphical modules to form the foundation for the brand's visual language," explains Patrick Eley, creative director. "We used these to design a custom typeface, form dynamic patterns, as containers to create engaging layouts and at scale as supergraphics. It was a simple yet powerfully effective way of threading Silvertown's industrial character throughout the whole brand."

He adds: "Silvertown will become an iconic London destination, a hero in the wider Royal Docks story with the potential to reinvent the capital's relationship with the waterside. With this brand, we wanted to harness the neighbourhood's proximity to the water and the phenomenal industrial legacy that flows from every brick, tile and silo."

The new brand was announced this week across hoardings, website, merchandise and on-site and will be rolled out over the coming months.

"From the location of Bond and Spiderman films to Newham's annual fireworks display, Silvertown and its iconic mills have been a backdrop to local lives and Hollywood films for decades," says Simon Yewdall of DNCO. "But now it's time for Silvertown to take centre stage as a town centre for the whole of the Royal Docks and its communities. The place brand we created aims to reanimate this piece of dockland history, giving fresh excitement locally and citywide It is a destination neighbourhood for East London true to place, past and the people who call it home."

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The typography of an iconic mill inspires the identity of a new East London neighbourhood

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DNCO was appointed earlier this year to develop the place brand for Silvertown, an enterprising new town centre for the Royal Docks. The enterprising scheme is bringing Millennium Mills and Silo D back to life - two local landmarks that act as figureheads for the transformation of the entire area.

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Explore thousands of artworks
in one 3 dimensional space

A fast internet connection is recommended for this experiment.

Explore thousands of artworks in one 3 dimensional space

This figurine from Berekhat Ram could be the oldest artwork ever found.

Let it be the starting point of a "freefall" into artworks,
from a "cultural big bang" to a timeline decade by decade.

Showing artworks from 623 partner collections

Sphere

The distribution of the artworks on the sphere is calculated based on the Golden Ratio, that is often used in artworks composition.

A wave

This moving topology is a playful way of showing an ever expanding database of artworks.

Timeline

Travel with art through time. Explore more than 300,000 years decade by decade.

expand_less
Explore artworks, artifacts, and more from over 1000 museums, archives, and organizations worldwide that have partnered with Google Cultural Institute to bring their collections and stories online.

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Google Arts & Culture Experiments - Freefall Experiment

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A fast internet connection is recommended for this experiment. This figurine from Berekhat Ram could be the oldest artwork ever found. Let it be the starting point of a "freefall" into artworks, from a "cultural big bang" to a timeline decade by decade.

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NYPL Public Domain Release 2016 - Visualization

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On January 6th, 2016, The New York Public Library made over 187K digital items in the public domain available for high resolution download. This is one of many experiments by the NYPL Labs to help patrons understand and explore what was contained in that release.

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NYPL Public Domain Release 2016 - Visualization

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On January 6th, 2016, The New York Public Library made over 187K digital items in the public domain available for high resolution download. This is one of many experiments by the NYPL Labs to help patrons understand and explore what was contained in that release.

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Overlay features observations of life in Kings Cross, scenes of the present overlapping the area’s rich history. During my time as the House of Illustration’s Illustrator in Residence I spent months mapping the area around Kings Cross, noting traces of its history in its memorials and industrial a

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swiss precision in landscape architecture

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Atelier Girot works in the domains of landscape architecture, urban design and landscape infrastructure to provide outstanding design solutions at different scales from the small garden to the level of the city and larger territorial environments. Our team brings together a broad variety of talents committed to the realisation of rigorous designs through an ongoing multidisciplinary research.

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Her intentions from the offset were to create something incredibly subjective, and she's keen to impress the notion that "this was always a body of work that would be a documentation of my experience of a place, not an objective documentation of all that Kings Cross is and has been. It would be disingenuous and disrespectful to those who've lived there for generations to pretend I could ever create a realistic portrayal of such a complex site in six months." Wandering the streets, Peony replicated this "flaneur-type meandering" online, visiting message boards and speaking to people about their memories of the area. "I'd also visit the British Archives and see what I came across," she tells us. "These random interventions would normally spark seemingly unrelated paths of research (for one week I remember doing intense research into the poet Rimbaud who lived in Kings Cross in the 1800s, another week I'd be frantically trying to find one particular house mentioned in a random interview from 2005 with a support worker who went in foster care in Kings Cross)." Rather than complicating the work, this overlap of tangential information became the work. Peony continues: "everything that forms a place lies layered up on top of each other like silt, all present for you to sift through until you find something that resonates with you personally."

From this concept, she produced a hefty portfolio of work. There's a 12-page comic titled Nottingham to London, for example, which documents Peony's conversation with an elderly man playing one of the public pianos in St Pancras station. "He told me that for a while he'd been visiting London from Nottingham, where he lives in an assisted living centre. He said he missed playing for an audience so much that it was worth the journey just to play for the travellers and see them enjoy his music," she outlines. "He had to rush off to get his train and I never even got his name. I look for him every time I go through St Pancras nowadays, but so far I haven't seen him again." This story exists alongside comics detailing other serendipitous events. Besides that, there are a plethora of poetry pieces; the art form making up a large portion of Peony's practice. And observational drawings - one of the first things she started doing during the residency. "These drawings became something like the connecting points on a spiders web; I like that put together, they form something of a map of transitional moments in Kings Cross over a number of months," she says.

Once the pandemic hit, Peony's process, of course, had to change. After a brief (or not so brief) stint of worrying how a project documenting a place can go ahead when you can't actually go to that place, she realised it could actually be a good thing. "Instead of changing track completely I was just being forced to sit down and look at my work and the site from a new perspective," she explains. And all that looking paid off, for she realised several things about Kings Cross and what the work was saying about how places like it can exist. "They exist only partly in the physical 'now', the hard-fast-concrete present. In all other ways they exist in the set of connections, associations and memories we individually blanket them with," Peony says. "All this history and all these old lives and new lives layer and intertwine, and during our ordinary day-to-day, we only let in a portion of that. Every place exists in a different world for each person, in a way. What for me is a thorough-fare, for her is a spot of respite, for him a holy ground." That ability, for a place to be so many different things to so many different people - a kind of "invisible layering"- is what Peony began to focus on: "Something that begun as purely responding to a site turned into an act of remembering and reconstructing that place the best way I, as a visitor and voyeur, could."

Overlay is available to visit until 27 September.

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Peony Gent's six-month documentation of Kings Cross examines how layered connections, associations and memories make a place

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The project features comics, poems, and observational drawings that Peony created during a residency with the House of Illustration. She details her considered approach to documenting a location and what she learned through that process.

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Brutal London → A Practice for Everyday Life

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Brutal London is a photographic exploration of the post-war modernist architecture of London, documented by photographer Simon Phipps. The featured buildings are arranged by borough, including the City of London, with locations highlighted on maps to enable the reader to explore the sites.

The layout and typography of the book is a nod to the design of printed material from architectural periodicals of the time, and the graphic identities of the local councils, who often dictated the signage in the buildings when they were being used as social housing. The title typeface is a modular sans serif based on sketches by Jesse Collins in 1937. Its style is similar to the typography used for the naming signage on several of the featured tower blocks. Photography throughout the book is presented in black and white, with endpapers and chapter title pages in orange - a brighter, more contemporary shade of the colour often found in documentation of the buildings from the time they were built.

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Brutal London → A Practice for Everyday Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brutal London is a photographic exploration of the post-war modernist architecture of London, documented by photographer Simon Phipps. The featured buildings are arranged by borough, including the City of London, with locations highlighted on maps to enable the reader to explore the sites.

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The act of architectural storytelling is crucial to the building of spaces that convey meaningful messages. Within the frame of the idea that the architect storyteller is someone who makes buildings and spaces that speak, in this event we took a closer look at how different narrative media can be used to create new spaces while also altering our understanding of existing ones.

Curated for the Royal Academy of Arts by the PhD programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Narrative/Making/Space event, held on the 27 th of November, discussed the relationship between architecture and storytelling. The presentations took place at the adjacent Royal Society of Chemistry; a long open library composed of a series of alcove reading rooms and a mezzanine. Through discussing how the need to 'make space' through storytelling seeps into cinema, art installations, and speculative allegorical architectural projects, we counteracted the idea that modern architecture has lost its ability to embody spatial narratives.

The presentations

Thandi Loewenson's research takes the form of a live project: a speculative tender for the Lusaka city dump, being made together with the Lusaka City Council, waste pickers and dealers, which imagines how the dump could be managed by those who currently operate on the site. Through the tender process, she is exploring new methods: how stories told of a fictional city called Mailo can be used to disrupt perceived notions of the city, reinventing it to be discovered again by those who live there.

Acting as a parallel and possible representation of Lusaka developed through drawings and site-specific performances at the dump, Mailo is a test of the possibilities of an architectural interpretation of the literary genre of the New Weird; where politically engaged, urban, 'secondary world' fictions are created which draw on real world models and combine elements of science fiction and fantasy. Mailo is represented through large scale graphite drawings which pick up physical traces of the engagement of the waste pickers and dealers with the work, acting as material witness to the process of producing the tender whilst also transferring marks onto those who participate. Props, such as a storytelling mat which is also the flag for the fictional city, act as bridges between a real and a fictional realm.

This physical process of transfer echoes the process of imagining the city; starting with dialogue, followed by drawing, making and then a partial telling of the story allowing the audience to interpret and take the story forward. Through the drawing, making, telling and then interpretation of the fictional space, insights into current practices and possible futures for Lusaka have been revealed. Thandi presented her work through the telling of the story of her project and a subtly animated series of drawings.

Next up, Catrina Stewart discussed the construction of a hand-made world for the creation of the video game Lumino City. This game was developed through architectural drawings and models which helped with the playful and complex telling of the game's story. A beautiful moment in Catrina's models was a space that rotates 360 degrees, and can work both as a plan and as a section concurrently, which she designed through a series of plans. The game was made to be filmed as a section, and the playfulness of its spaces together with their exquisite detailing, give a sense that this world is a character in itself. Catrina presented the drawings, sketches, and models that she made for the construction of the video game world, together with a film showing the process of filming it as well as the process of combining the analogue spaces and the digital characters.

The third contributor Ifi Liangi presented her film, which is the introduction of her novel, a magical realist fairy tale, entitled 'The Blossomed Bitter-orange Forest'. The writing and animation of her novel is made in the frame of her PhD research, and is in the field of architectural storytelling. One of the driving ideas of her thesis is that our normative world is a dream. This reflects in the idea that the magical realist fairy tale should be the method for the creation of a critical and magical architecture. She says that as a fictional written narrative can tell meaningful stories, so can architecture, which should be able to speak a public language and have a message.

And just as a fictional written narrative cannot tell a story without characters, Ifi is suggesting that a speaking architecture cannot tell a story without a figure. (A figure can be anthropomorphic, or a personified object or an animal.) Her research focuses on Greek architectural storytelling, in Athens, a city in sociopolitical and economic crisis. She is working through a series of translations. From text to text, from text to drawing and model or its reverse, from drawing to model or its reverse, and finally from all three to film. Ifi's film is composed of a series of animated drawings and a variety of characters telling the story under a magical realist soundtrack.

Finally, Kibwe Tavares presented the process of designing the spaces of his films. This is very similar to an architectural design process. He started by discussing the importance of first studying the place where the film is shot, as for example Zanzibar in the case of Jonah. He then went on to describe the careful process of designing the story, involving the making of the spaces and also the characters. In Factory Fifteen, the studio he has co-founded, they work with sketches, drawings, and digital models to explore the designs. Iterations and very careful detailing of the drawings and also the animations are at the heart of their practice. Some of the most architectural moments in Factory Fifteen's work are the shifts on the facades of the buildings, and also the reimagining of a real place's colour, texture, and light.

The conversation

Following the presentations, Phuong-Trâm asked a series of questions, relating the different presentations through an engaging conversation.

The first was 'On the transformation of the narrative using different mediums'.

Catrina discussed her intuitive use of hand-made models and her collaboration with animation artists and game designers for the creation of the story for the Lumino City video game. Iterations and sketches over sketches over models were a key part in the process of the creation of the narrative and the transformation didn't stop happening until the combination of the digital and the analogue, where the digital character and analogue lights and atmosphere are combined in unexpected ways.

Ifi talked about her process of first writing her novel and then translating it from Greek to English, which is a process that creates new ideas, as in order to translate the experience of a place one has to describe it. She also talked about the translations from text to drawing and to models, which she is trying to make as a series of interpretations rather than copies, a process that creates more stories through unexpected results because of the translations. These work as creative openings to the next piece.

Thandi said that her narrative shifts continuously as her project develops, being developed by each interaction between the audience-participants, storyteller, paper and graphite. The dialogue between those who engage with the fictional and the material transformation of the drawings through this interaction further contribute to the narrative's transformation.

Kibwe discussed the use of drawing in making the films. Unexpected drawings, such as the section of a fish, or very complex and ambitious drawings, such as the modelling of an entire world, have to be designed in line with the real place where the film is shot, so that the conversations between the two, both visually and intellectually, is believable and critical.

The second question was 'About the tactility of all the work', model, drawing, real characters, and the awakening of the senses, and how important is the relation between the tactile and sensual quality in the work and its digital translation.

Thandi's work is a fascinating example for this answer, as the tactile quality of her work is the essence of it at most times. The animated version of her drawings communicates their material qualities through the soundtrack; the pressure on the paper while engaging with the drawings but also when making them, leave the traces of tactility and bring the observer closer to them.

In Catrina's work, the detailing of the models and their translation to the digital had to be made carefully and at times, in order to keep the game's world visually coherent, it was not possible to do otherwise but in an analogue way; a good example of this was the game's miniature lights, which had to be made by hand.

Ifi suggested that drawing in 3D digitally is useful, but has limits: it is a process where one can find their own ways of synthesising ideas, but at some point it starts becoming stale of unexpected mistakes. Translating to make physical models, the magic of the unexpected comes back. Another important tactile part in her work is smell, which the physical models and drawings communicate more effortlessly than a film.

Kibwe talked about the textures and sounds in his films and how these have to be designed with detail so as to engage the audience emotionally and transport them to the imagined places created.

The third question was about the role of playfulness in the work and the use of poetic narratives as a means of referring to concerns about social and cultural issues, as well as the role of characters in the stories.

Ifi discussed the role of magical realism and the classic fairy tale in her work, and more specifically the fact that both magical realism and the classic literary fairy tale were born as means of social critique, at different times and places. In her project, the two narrative modes come together, and allegory, made through language tropes, plays an important role for the communication of the story's ideas. The figurative is one of the vehicles in her novel, which includes thirty six characters, telling stories about the neighbourhood of Kipseli in Athens, both literally and experientially.

In Thandi's work, characters who originate in the fictional city act as bridges through performance allowing the fictional to become a real presence which can be engaged and debated with in the real. Catrina's models with their long legs and the little huts with the windows and doors that look like characters imply that architecture is alive, while her projects have a subtle environmental narrative.

Kibwe's films also use allegorical techniques and science fiction to discuss current social concerns. The design and making of his characters goes through a process of getting into their shoes: How would that character think? What would they say? Kibwe said that a city can be a character itself, which is a fascinating idea, and also one that weaves the ideas of these four architectural storytellers together. A successful architectural storytelling, a building or a space that speaks, be it drawn, made, filmed, or played, is one that can be read as a character itself.

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Credits:

Royal Academy:

Helen Ikla

Organised in collaboration with the doctoral programme at The Bartlett, with (in alphabetical order):

Penelope Haralambidou
Ifigeneia Liangi
Rebecca Loewen
Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen

The event was chaired by:

Rebecca Loewen & Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen

The speakers were (in order of presenting):

Thandi Loewenson - architectural designer, venture futurist
Catrina Stewart - architect, architectural designer for BAFTA winning video game Lumino City
Ifigeneia Liangi - architectural designer, illustrator, storyteller
Kibwe Tavares - architect, animator and filmmaker; co-founder of Factory Fifteen

The speakers

Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer and a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research is on the fringes of the real world; operating through design, fiction and performance. In her doctoral research she is exploring the extractive agendas driving the urban development of Lusaka, Zambia. Central to her research is a live project, investigating how insertions of the other worldly and the downright weird can support a community of waste pickers to influence the future of the city dump.

Catrina Stewart is a cofounder and partner at Office S&M, a cross-disciplinary architecture studio based in London. She has previously taught at the Bartlett and now teaches alongside Hugh McEwen at Oxford Brookes University. Her work aims to blur the boundaries between the man made and the digital, driven by the need to express the materiality, colour and richness in the details of the everyday. In 2012 she started a collaboration with State of Play Games, designing and building a hand-made set for a computer game called Lumino City. Amongst other awards, this went on to win a BAFTA for 'Artistic Achievement' as well as being listed as Apple's top 20 worldwide Apps in 2015.

Ifigeneia Liangi is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is an architectural designer and storyteller. She has been teaching at the Bartlett for three years and is now co-running the Undergraduate Unit 3 with Daniel Wilkinson and tutoring in the second year in the AiS course with Chee-Kit Lai. She has worked in Athens and London based architecture practices and has designed for architecture and exhibition projects in London. She has exhibited her drawings at the Athinais Cultural Center, (2009) and at the Michalis Kakogiannis Foundation, in the frame of the exhibition for the fairy tales of Eugene Trivizas, (2017) in Athens. She has just been commissioned her first theatre set design for a production in Athens, in 2018.

Kibwe Tavares is a co-founder of Factory Fifteen and a Sundance prize-winning film director. He combines his training as an architect with his love of storytelling and animation to create futuristic live action/animated films. He created his film Robots of Brixton during his Master of Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, which won the RIBA Silver President's Medal in 2011. In 2012 he was cited as one of Fast Company's '100 most creative people in business 2012' and was awarded a prestigious TED fellowship. He went on to direct the Sundance film Jonah, a stunning combination of live-action and CG shot on location in Zanzibar. In 2014 Kibwe was named as one of the top 20 young directors at the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase. His third short film Robot & Scarecrow, starring Jack O'Connell and Holliday Grainger, premiered in the UK this summer.

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Making spaces meaningful through architectural storytelling

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The act of architectural storytelling is crucial to the building of spaces that convey meaningful messages. Within the frame of the idea that the architect storyteller is someone who makes buildings and spaces that speak, in this event we took a closer look at how different narrative media can be used to create new spaces while also altering our understanding of existing ones.

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Totalitarian regimes of the beginning of the last century, tried to control every aspect of human life, using architecture as a tool to communicate new ideas about education, health and family life. In Italy the Fascist Regime developed a special programme focused on children - educated as New Italians devoted to the Nation, they were meant to become masculine soldiers or prolific mothers. During the long summer break from school, a special institution took care of their health and growth. The Colonie [1] were Summer Camps built throughout Italy, along the seaside, on the slopes of the Alps and the Apennines, and, for daily use, around city centres. These buildings were designed carefully to organise the daily routine of the children that, in groups, never left alone, moved together through the spaces and the different activities.

Abandoned after WWII, the Colonie were forgotten - their difficult historical legacy has prevented them from being re-used. The research I carried out sheds light on how these interiors were designed and unveils their double nature - they emerge from the landscape as icons of political power but their interiors are very sensible, designed carefully around the everyday rhythms of human life.

The double nature of the Colonie has been investigated in order to identify opportunities for renovation and new use, with the help of the students in my Interior Design Studios.[2] We studied and redesigned two Fascist Summer Camps located in the Ligurian Apennines, in the municipality of Savignone; the first is Renesso for 8/14 years old girls (the so called Piccole Italiane), which is next to the village, in the hamlet of Renesso, and the other is Montemaggio for 8/14 years old boys (the Balilla), which is in the woods of the hamlet of Montemaggio, higher up the valley and visible from far away. They were constructed in 1933 and 1937 by the engineer Camillo Nardi Greco, helped in Renesso by Alfredo Fineschi.

Knowledge/identity: reading the existing

The two buildings are high up in the Scrivia Valley. Montemaggio in particular is perfectly visible for dozens of kilometres - its unique identity written in its white façade, with the asymmetric tower originally bearing inscriptions that proclaim Fascist ideas. The interiors at Montemaggio are the object of systematic vandalism. People have entered the building - unprotected and unprotectable because of its position - and systematically destroyed it: doors, windows, partitions and false ceilings. This is a relentless process that nobody is able to control. The interior, the "soft" part of the building, translating fascist ideas about taking care of children, is hidden and largely forgotten.

From our historical and archival research we understood that the now semi-abandoned volumes were coloured and designed in detail, with bespoke furniture. In the dining hall 'all tables are blue: they are made in the upper part of a material composed by slate and nitrocellulose, washable and unbreakable; they are edged with steel, to protect corners from dents and cuts. Dishes are all yellow: every soup plate is embossed with the initials of the Fascist Federation of Genoa in golden letters. Cutlery: spoons, knifes and forks are of a brand new type, exhibited this year for the first time in the Triennale of Milan.'[3]

The process of documenting and interpreting the identity of the Colonie, initially uses traditional methods, such as direct survey and the consultation of historical sources. Their reconstruction, through drawings and three-dimensional maquettes, highlight unexpected opportunities to re-use their inhabitable spaces. The circulation of the building is one of the main features and is designed to direct children from the outer garden, to the entrance hall and stairwell.

Entering Renesso (and to some extent Montemaggio) means crossing a set of interconnected spaces, perfectly controlled in their design and construction. From the outer open space, children had to reach the raised ground floor, climbing up eight steps that were built and finished using bricks. Upon reaching the landing they had to cross a double, full height door in chestnut, framed by decorations in a local green marble; an inner landing with the inscription A.XI [4] framed by white tiles on a field of grey tiles; and a second glazed door, before arriving at the entrance hall. The floor finish is continuous throughout, and leads to the main staircase. Concrete transverse beams and a large geometrical lamp, articulate the ceiling. The three flights of stairs are made of three different materials and different colours: red for the metal banister, black for the treads, the skirting, and the top of the opaque part of the parapet, and white for the plaster of the walls and risers. The full space is perfectly lighted by two big rectangular windows.

The identity of these buildings is written in their material form. As in all arts, the signifier (the material form and appearance of the work) and the signified (the cognitive, intellectual and emotional content), are embodied and convey their meaning. The reconstructed plans and sections highlight the unexpected and precise control of all the elements of architecture, from the layout to detailing and materiality.

Old/new: design strategies

Following this approach, the projects developed for the Studio, and deepened in a Master's degree thesis, have continued to imagine the Colonie as a place to take care of young people. One approach was to maintain and reinforce a selected feature: the tension in height of Montemaggio, expressed by the higher right tower, can be seen in the project for a Science Museum for Children. The whole height of the tower becomes visible thanks to superimposed voids on different levels, crossed by a transparent slide bringing young guests back from the higher level of the exhibition to the entrance floor.[5]

Another strategy was to recognize and evolve a feature, in this instance the strict functionalism of the Colonie and the organization of the circulation of large groups of children - translated into long, straight corridors along the rear façade of Montemaggio. The feature is highlighted and transformed by modifying the corridors in order to disrupt and diversify the rhythm of the circulation.[6]

A last approach was to recognize and exceed a feature: the strict symmetry of the dormitory of Montemaggio is completely overtaken by the new distribution of space, moving the entrance of the art and performance area to the side of the building.[7]

Hidden/unveiled: a possible conclusion

Every design opportunity comes from the comprehension of the identity of the building. In the specific case of the Colonie, it means to unveil what is hidden, invisible or concealed, yet existing. This process allows us to dissect different layers of meaning in order to bring to light its basic, fundamental identity.

Interiors are a part of this identity, but not the main, nor the unique one: they are one of the actors in a play. The presence of opposite attitudes in this specific typology of building, monumental and intimate, makes their recognition difficult. Every interpretation, for preservation or for re-use, has to accept the nature of the building, working not only on commonly recognized features, but also on the ones usually undervalued or neglected, expressed by the complex material forms of architecture.

Notes & Citations

Colonie Estive are Summer Camps, built during the Fascist Era and dedicated to the recovery of the health of children and to the construction of the new Italian citizen, the perfect Fascist, a good soldier obedient to the Regime rules. They were built at the seaside, on the slopes of the Alps and the Apennines, and around main urban centres, to be used daily. To give an idea of their diffusion, from 1931 to 1938 4.262.015 children stayed from 20 to 40 days in a Fascist Colonie, and the number can be doubled when considering also the summer camps managed by industry and religious institutions. They were originally published by Istat and collected by GIL, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (Jocteau 1990)
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I refer my experiences to the following Design Studios I supervised in the Architecture, Built Environment, Interiors Master Degree of AUIC School of Politecnico of Milano, and to the 6 thesis derived from them: Interior Design and Preservation Studio, with prof. Nora Lombardini for the Preservation module, A.Y. 2015/16 and 2016/17; Architecture of Interiors Design Studio, with prof. Luana Filogamo for the Building Physics module, A.Y. 2017/18.
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The description was originally published in a local newspaper. Silvia Barisone, Architetture in Liguria dagli anni venti agli anni cinquanta (Milano: Abitare Segesta, 2004).
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A.XI, anno undicesimo (October 29th 1932/ October 28th 1933), stays for Eleventh Year of the Fascist Era, the one of the inauguration of the building .The Fascist Year began the 29th of October, the day of the March on Rome, an organized mass demonstration after which the King appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister, transferring political power to the fascists without armed conflict.
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Alice Coppola, Federica Ponzio, and Marta Averna (supervisor), "Hands on! Architecture. Layering the existing to slide into an exhibition" (Master Degree Thesis, Politecnico di Milano, 2016/2017).
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Riccardo Saligari, Matteo Tavazzi, and Marta Averna (supervisor), "Upgrading Montemaggio. Inside architecture: unconventional spaces for private and public dwelling, fostering a new way of learning by doing" (Master Degree Thesis, Politecnico di Milano, 2016/2017).
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Martina Merlo, Gonçalo Rufin, "Upgrading Renesso. project for the Interior Design and Preservation Studio 2" (course work, Politecnico di Milano, 2016/20170.
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Bibliography

Jocteau, Gian Carlo. Ai monti e al mare. Cento anni di colonie per l'infanzia. Milano: Fabbri editori, 1990.

Ottolini, Gianni. Forma e significato in architettura. Roma Bari: Laterza, 1997.

Barisone, Silvia. Architetture in Liguria dagli anni venti agli anni cinquanta. Milano: Abitare Segesta, 2004.

Coppola, Alice, Ponzio, Federica, Averna, Marta (supervisor). " Hands on! Architecture. Layering the existing to slide into an exhibition". Master Degree Thesis, Politecnico di Milano, 2016/2017.

Saligari, Riccardo, Tavazzi, Matteo, Averna, Marta (supervisor). "Upgrading Montemaggio. Inside architecture: unconventional spaces for private and public dwelling, fostering a new way of learning by doing". Master Degree Thesis, Politecnico di Milano, 2016/2017.

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Unveiling. Identity and interiors. | Interior Educators

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Some buildings are considered without interiors, their majestic and monumental facades concealing their interior spaces and their history inhibiting their adaptation. This paper addresses the Colonie - a legacy of Italy's Fascist past - which through a process of survey, the consultation of historical documents, and their reconstruction through drawings and maquettes, highlights unexpected ways of remodelling the Colonie's interiors as inhabitable spaces.

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Special places make us who we are. Meet the supporters sharing their connections to important places that have shaped them.

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Environmental psychology: How spaces influence us

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What qualities must the design of a space have in order for it to foster creative and focused work with minimum levels of stress?

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engaging with the identity of a place — whether that be its physical attributes or social history

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‘Any description of a city’s shape that can be gathered from a citizen’s comments,’ he continued, ‘represents a constant and intimate dialectic between the citizen and the physical forms he or she inhabits; this may influence [the city’s] image as radically as its economic or political life.’

Joseph Rykwert in The Seduction of Place (2000).

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'We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’ Winston Churchill

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Every city has its unique and valuable identity, this identity is revealed through its physical and visual form, it is seen through the eyes of its residents and users.

Cities' Identity Through Architecture and Arts

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Every city has its unique and valuable identity, this identity is revealed through its physical and visual form, it is seen through the eyes of its residents and users. The city develops over time, and its identity evolves with it. Reflecting the rapid and constant changes the city is subjected to, Architecture and Arts, is the embodiment of the cultural, historical, and economical characteristics of the city. This conference was dedicated to the investigation of the different new approaches developed in Architecture and Contemporary arts. It has focused on the basis of urban life and identities.

This volume provides discussions on the examples and tendencies in dealing with urban identities as well as the transformation of cities and urban cultures mentioned in terms of their form, identity, and their current art. Contemporary art, when subjected to experiments, continues to be produced in various directions, to be consumed and to put forward new ideas. Art continuously renews itself, from new materials to different means of communication, from interactive works to computer games, from new approaches to perceptional paradigms and problems of city and nature of the millennium.

This is an Open Access ebook, and can be found on www.taylorfrancis.com.

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Cities' Identity Through Architecture and Arts | Proceedings of the In

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Every city has its unique and valuable identity, this identity is revealed through its physical and visual form, it is seen through the eyes of its residents and users. The city develops over time, and its identity evolves with it.

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Proshansky (1978), who defined place identity as “those dimensions of self that define the individual’s personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values, goals, preferences, skills, and behavioral tendencies relevant to a specific environment”

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College of Public Administration, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China

Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

In order to synthesize the extensively studied place identities and their meanings, this paper reviews how researchers have conceived and deconstructed place identity. CiteSpace, a scientometric tool for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature, is used to identify the active topics and new developments of publications in place identity. The data set input into CiteSpace consists of 1,011 bibliographic records retrieved from the core database of Web of Science with a title search of the articles published between 1985 and July 2019. The scientometric review reveals the extensive applications of place identity in various topics. Studies in this field experienced an active exploration in plural disciplines after 2000, and the hot area gradually concentrated on the discipline of humanities and social sciences after 2010 and shifted toward place marketing until now. A network of co-cited references identified seven dominant research clusters, of which the research on the influence of place identity on social actors' attitudes and behaviors is most prominent and the research on the effects of physical environment change on place identity captures the latest emerging area. Versatile meanings of place identity are witnessed in different clusters and articles of a cluster. These meanings are intertwined in shaping the knowledge base of thematic concentrations. To supplement the scientometric analysis, a deep survey on measuring methods and roles of place identity in the contents of academic articles was done to trace knowledge connections between different empirical understandings of place identity. Finally, this paper summarizes the meanings of place identity in four dimensions and in turn offers some suggestions for further research directions.

Introduction

Place identity is a versatile concept upon which many psychological theories of human-environment relations are built ( Zimmerbauer et al., 2012; Gieseking et al., 2014). The social constructivist theory of place identity sheds light on individuals' subjective perceptions of geographical space, providing valuable insights for studies of various disciplines, such as geography, sociology, psychology, environmental sciences and ecology, public administration, spatial planning, and so on ( Haartsen et al., 2000). As broadly acknowledged, place identity was initially introduced by Proshansky (1978), who defined place identity as "those dimensions of self that define the individual's personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values, goals, preferences, skills, and behavioral tendencies relevant to a specific environment" ( Proshansky, 1978, p. 155). Proshansky's view on place identity has been widely referred to. Another dominant explanation of place identity can be found in most of Paasi's articles ( Paasi, 1986, 1991, 2002c, 2003, 2009a, b). He thought it would be beneficial to distinguish analytically two aspects of place identity, namely, place identity of a place and people's place identity. The former refers to those features of nature, culture, and people that are used in the discourses and classifications of science, politics, cultural activism, regional marketing, tourism, governance, and political or religious regionalization, to distinguish one place from others. The latter refers to the identification of individuals with a place. The definitions of place identity by early leading scholars, such as Proshansky and Paasi, from different disciplines have influenced the formation of the versatile meanings of place identity to a great extent.

There are many other scholars who have contributed a lot to enriching the meaning and theory of place identity ( Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977; Peterson, 1988; Saleh, 1998; Twigger-Ross et al., 2003; Carrus et al., 2005; Huigen and Meijering, 2005; Hauge, 2007; Groote and Haartsen, 2008; White et al., 2008). However, in most occasions, their conceptual foundation of place identity revolves on either the place identity of a place or people's place identity. They seldom notice both sides of place identity, or at least, there is a paucity of empirical studies that have discerned the two sides of place identity. Academic journals have witnessed increasing publications in relation to place identity over the last 40 years, particularly since 2006, as shown in Figure 1. Nevertheless, few studies have reviewed and elaborated the versatile meanings of place identity. Limited arguments in a few studies are available on the relationship between these meanings. For example, Paasi (1986, 2002c) used "subjective identity of a region" to connect the two aspects of regional identity. The "subjective identity of a region" refers to images held by the people living in and outside the region, which resemble regional consciousness. Few studies proposed that individuals' identification with a place can be reflected in the identities that they ascribe to the place and are subsequently incorporated into their own identities ( Rijnks and Strijker, 2013). However, these intricate debates on the analytical interactions between place, people, and place identity make the meanings of place identity even more confusing. An additional obstacle to the understanding of place identity is the widely complained-about unclear relations between place identity and other environmental psychology concepts, such as place attachment, rootedness, sense of place, place dependence, and place satisfaction ( Lewicka, 2011; Xu et al., 2015). Distinctions between these concepts have never been unanimously agreed upon and are still under discussion today.

Different understandings of place identity and consequent divergent methods of measuring this construct make the accumulation of knowledge in this domain difficult ( Lewicka, 2011). The emerging increment of publications in which numerous roles of place identity have been claimed makes it tough to grasp a coherent intellectual landscape of this area, if it exists. In order to synthesize the extensively studied place identities and their meanings, this work reviews how the literature has conceived and deconstructed place identity. We intend to guide audiences through the development of place identity since its introduction by Proshansky. The emphasis will be on sketching an overall intellectual landscape and investigating the active topics and new developments. More efforts will be paid to a deep examination of the measures and roles of place identity for tracing knowledge connections between different empirical understandings of place identity.

In the next sections, we first use CiteSpace to identify the active topics and new developments of publications on place identity. CiteSpace is a visual analytic system for visualizing emerging trends and critical changes in scientific literature ( Chen et al., 2014a, b). Compared with a traditional literature survey, which relies on domain experts' insights and selections of publications, CiteSpace adopts a computational and visual analytic approach drawn from the field of scientometrics and information visualization and can reach a much broader and more diverse range of relevant topics ( Chen et al., 2014a, b). Our data set input into CiteSpace consists of 1,011 bibliographic records that are derived from the core database of Web of Science (WoS) with a title search for "place identity" or "regional identity" or "regional identities" between 1985 (the earliest year for data available in the core data base) and July 2019. Each bibliographic record contains the metadata of a published article, including the authors, the title, the abstract, the keywords, and the references with relevant information. In total, 31,307 references are cited by these articles. The examination of the measures and roles of place identity is based on some representative articles selected according to the analysis results generated by CiteSpace.

Meanings of Place Identity

People's Place Identity

On an individual's identity card, there is always information about where he or she is from. Everybody in the world belongs somewhere. Although the first impression an individual gives to others is always his or her physical appearance, such an impression would often coincide with the assumption of the place one comes from. For example, people with yellow skin and black hair would be judged as Asian. Therefore, we may realize that man is not simply a physical creature but mostly shaped by relationships, be they social, cultural, environmental, or others. The process by which other people judge you on your appearance is an expression of social and cultural relationships, as they are defining you as different from themselves. The influence that a place imposes on an individual's identity is one of those relationships, and it constitutes part of the individual's selfhood ( Basso, 1996, p. 146).

In the late 1970s, to enlighten people on the importance of places influencing the formation of individuals' identities, the term "place identity" was introduced by researchers within the interdisciplinary field of environmental psychology ( Proshansky, 1976, 1978; Hauge, 2007). It is described as individuals' incorporation of places into the larger concept of self ( Proshansky et al., 1983). The work of Proshansky et al. (1983) has been criticized for their tendency to emphasize the individualistic dimensions of place identity ( Dixon and Durrheim, 2000). This shortcoming has been mitigated by the later work on place identity, which suggested a genuinely social understanding of place identity by showing how places might become significant and contested arenas of collective being and belonging ( Bonaiuto et al., 1996; Devine-Wright and Lyons, 1997; Dixon and Durrheim, 2000).

On the other hand, along with place identity, there are a number of other constructs developed by environmental psychologists to define and measure individuals' relations with places, such as place attachment ( Giuliani and Feldman, 1993), place dependence ( Stokols and Shumaker, 1981), sense of place ( Lalli, 1992), and so on. There has been no universal agreement on the relationships between these constructs ( Fresque-Baxter and Armitage, 2012). White et al. (2008) saw place identity and place dependence as two dimensions of place attachment when they studied the effect of prior experience with setting and place attachment on visitors' perceptions of recreation impacts. However, Bleam (2018) found that place identity is more than a sub-construct of place attachment. Hernández et al. (2007) viewed place identity and place attachment as different constructs. They thought place attachment develops before place identity. They contended that "one person could be attached to a place but not be identified with it," and "someone could have a high personal identity with a place and not a high place attachment." Hernández et al. (2010) argued that "place attachment is an affective-emotional bond with residence places, whereas place identity is a cognitive mechanism, a component of self-concept and/or of personal identity in relation to the place one belongs to." Antonsich's (2010) work pointed out the terminological confusion of these place-based concepts. He summarized that sometimes, place attachment is treated as a synonym of place identity, correlated with it or subsumed within it, or occasionally as a prerequisite. Sometimes, both place identity and place attachment are instead treated as components of sense of place ( Jorgensen and Stedman, 2001). In other cases, place attachment is described as a superordinate category ( Kyle et al., 2004). Chow and Healey's (2008) argument is consistent with Antonsich's findings. They noted that place attachment is subsumed under place identity in some cases, while some others view place identity as a form of attachment or consider both identity and attachment as dimensions of sense of place. This consensus is shared by Hernández et al. (2007) as well, who identified four different relations between place attachment and place identity according to their review of previous research. Other proposals suggest grading the sense of place. Shamai (1991) divided the sense of place into seven levels, in which attachment is a phase prior to identification.

Confusion and overlap of the concepts that define emotional bonds to places, along with the multidimensional meanings of place itself, lead to the anxiety and criticism on the vague meanings of place identity ( Hauge, 2007; Lewicka, 2008). Nevertheless, it has filled a gap in environmental theory and research, through bringing forth the idea that identity is formalized against the backdrop of physical environment ( Bonaiuto et al., 1996; Hauge, 2007).

Place Identity of a Place

Place identity ascribed by people to a place is constructed to differentiate one place from others. Differences between places are attributed or perceived by inhabitants living in or outside of those places. It is, to some extent, if not entirely, a subjective social construct based on objective physical settings. In this sense, the meaning of the construct "place identity" of a place resembles that of the construct individual's "place identity" in that both of them are developed to describe subjective cognition about places.

As to the question of what place identity of a place is, the answer is still not clear, though it has been, for a long time, a frequently mentioned term in geographical research. Paasi (2001, 2002a,c, 2003, 2009b) argued that place identity refers to those elements of nature, culture, and regional life (inhabitants, people, or population) that distinguish a region from others. Groote and Haartsen (2008) defined place identity as a combination of physical and man-made processes, specific elements and structures in places, and meanings ascribed to places. The elements that have been referred to by studies as components of place identity indeed cover almost every aspect of a place. In other words, place identity can be anything that makes a place identifiable within the spatial system. There are no fixed components of place identity. Language is one of the most popular features to make places distinctive. Saleh (1998) used physical configuration of places or architectonics to describe place identity of Saudi cities, where local images are enhanced to meet individual and public needs. What's more, people do not discern places in the same way. They perceive identities of places differently and differentiate them by drawing on different elements, such as physical features, cultural attributes, historical associations, experiential ties, and so forth ( Peterson, 1988).

Active Topics and New Developments in Place Identity

A Lightweight Survey of Major Topics

Two polygonal tree maps (see Figures 2, 3), known as foam trees, were generated by Carrot2 to provide an instant and primary detection of major topics in the studies of place identity. Carrot2 is an open source search results clustering engine that can automatically organize small collections of documents from various search sources into thematic categories. Figure 2 shows a foam tree based on the 113 results of a web search with the keywords "place identity." The foam tree in Figure 3 was derived from the 1,011 bibliographic records of WoS, which were converted to the required format of Carrot2 prior to the data input.

With the views generated by Carrot2, the lightweight survey of major topics in the literature on place identity provides a useful basic reference to how the term "place identity" is generally conceived ( Chen et al., 2014a). As shown in the two figures, psychology, cultural identity, role, identity theory, identity development or processes, identity construction, and place attachment are among the leading topics in the literature on place identity. Among other major topics, studies on place identity at different spatial scales constitute a certain portion of the data set, such as community identity, urban identity, regional identity, national identity, and national and regional identities. A distinction between the two aspects of place identity can be observed in the foam trees. Whereas topics such as local identity, new identities, national identity, identity politics, identity of the area, importance of regional identity, role of regional identity, urban identity, development of regional identity, community identity, rural identities, place names, and regional specification refer greatly to "place identity of a place," topics such as role in identity, identity processes, identity development, and one's own place identity have obvious connections to "people's place identity."

Category and Keyword Co-occurrence Networks

Figure 4. Co-occurring subject categories network (A) and co-occurring keywords network (B). The color of the network edge indicates the year in which the co-citation link was first made. For example, early co-citations are colored in blue, and the latest are in yellow and orange.

As shown in Figure 4, the research on place identity involves numerous disciplinary areas, which may shift over time. The burstness, signifying the fast shift of subject categories and keywords, indicates the most active research topics ( Chen et al., 2014a, b). Figure 5 shows the top 20 subject categories and keywords with the strongest citation bursts. The refined review results of the subject categories in Figure 5 reveal the neurobiological supports for the phenomenological studies of human geography and environmental psychology on place identity ( Lengen and Kistemann, 2012). At the top of the list of Figure 5A, the discipline of biology, including the subject categories of biochemistry and molecular biology, neurosciences, neurosciences and neurology, and genetics and heredity, occupied the hot area of place identity study prior to 2000. The decade after 2000 experienced an active exploration in plural disciplines in research on place identity, such as history, computer science, geography, psychology, economics, cultural studies, planning, and education. Gradually, the hot area came to the humanities and social sciences after 2010, while the subject category social sciences-interdisciplinary obtained the strongest burst strength of 5.5864 in 2013-2016. Recent hot areas were captured by architecture, hospitality, leisure, sport, and tourism, which suggests a shift of the study focus of place identity toward place products or place marketing. In general, the development of place identity research mainly experienced four stages, namely, theory construction and verification, active multidisciplinary exploration, in-depth study in social sciences, and application of place identity theory in place development.

Figure 5. Top 20 subject categories (A) and keywords (B) with the strongest bursts.

Bursts of keywords may provide a more refined indication of hot topics (see Figure 5B). All of the top 20 keywords bursts appeared in the last 15 years. The keyword attachment has a strong burst from 2017 to 2019, with the maximum burst strength 3.6387, and it is used in 41 articles. It seems the keywords on the list can be classified into four groups. The first group focuses on places of various scales, including home, neighborhood, city, nationalism, and world. The second group focuses on personal characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors, including race, gender, participation, experience, and attachment. The third group focuses on the construction of place identity, including construction, place-making, representation, and discourse. The fourth group focuses on globalization and countermeasures, including culture, authenticity, globalization, governance, and management. The above preliminary classification implies that the research problems of place identity mainly revolve around where the place identity represents, whose place identity it is, what the place identity is, and how the place identity is affected.

Clusters of Co-cited References

CiteSpace provides visualizations of synthesized networks of co-cited references, which are usually used for the analysis of emerging trends and new developments of a research field ( Chen et al., 2014a, b). Figure 6 shows a snapshot of the network of co-cited references derived from the core data set with CiteSpace. A link in the network represents how frequently two articles are cited together by other articles in the data set. A red ring in the network denotes a citation burst, while a purple ring represents the betweenness centrality. The size of a node of the network indicates the frequency of citations of an article. Based on their interconnectivity, these nodes can be aggregated into clusters that represent thematic concentrations. A cluster is a group of tightly coupled references that form the intellectual base of a research field, and articles citing these references represent the research front of that field ( Chen et al., 2014a, b; Shi and Liu, 2019). The seven largest clusters numbered from 0 to 6 are shown in Figure 6. Table 1 summarizes the basic information of the seven clusters. The label of each cluster is extracted with a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) test, and it summarizes the impact of the cluster on more recent research ( Chen et al., 2014b). A silhouette value ranging from the lowest, -1, to the highest, 1, is used to measure the homogeneity of a cluster. Each of the silhouette scores in Table 1 is close to 1, suggesting a reliable quality of grouping. Timeline visualizations generated by CiteSpace can make the new developments in research on place identity more easily recognized. As shown in Figure 7, the most recently emerging area is captured by cluster #3, labeled natural disaster, which can also be confirmed by the average year in Table 1, which indicates the average publishing year of the cited references of a cluster. Cluster #6 on exploring residents' attitude and cluster #4 on regional development are also relatively new.

Among these seven clusters, the largest one is cluster #0, labeled place identity, which contains 31 member references. Most of the top cited references in cluster #0 discussed place attachment, and some of them debated its relationship with place identity ( Hernández et al., 2007; Lewicka, 2008, 2010, 2011; Rollero and Piccoli, 2010). Articles citing members of a cluster determine the aggregations of co-cited references, and they indicate major interests and research trends in a thematic field associated with the cluster ( Chen et al., 2014a, b). Table 2 shows the most-representative citing articles of the seven clusters. CiteSpace identified 11 citing articles shaping cluster #0. Evident thematic connections revolving around place identity can be observed from the titles of these citing articles. Particularly, these connections reveal the research concentration of cluster #0 on the role of place identity in social actors' attitudes and behaviors in the present transitional world with environmental depredation, climate change, urban renewal, and increasing and complex human needs, if we look further into the contents of these articles.

The second largest cluster, #1, shows thematic focus on the construction of place identity in the process of place promotion. The term "place promotion" appears in the title of a top citing article ( Zimmerbauer, 2011). Place promotion and marketing are keystone practices in regional development, where political forces always play a determinant role. Deinstitutionalization or institutionalization of a region imposed by politics may lead to regional exclusion or othering when place promotion strategies are taken. Spatial identities are constructed by various stakeholders at different spatial scales. Place identity emanating from residents' perspectives has attracted a lot of attention in this theme, whereas its construction is still essentially impacted by the globalizing forces of development.

For cluster #2, the term "sonic geography" in the title of the top citing article ( Boland, 2010) is extracted to be the group title. In the article, the influence of sound, for example, a distinctive accent and/or dialect, on the construction of local identity is examined. The cited references of cluster #2 concentrate highly on Paasi's articles ( Paasi, 2002b, c, 2003), which results in the thematic focus of this cluster on the construction of place identity of regions. Research emphases of cluster #2 have been put on special factors shaping place identity, for instance, vernacular, symbols, narratives, children's reading and writing, and professionals involved in the development of a region.

The young cluster #3 focuses on the effects of physical environment (change) on place identity and well-being. Knez et al. (2018a) article titled "Before and After a Natural Disaster: Disruption in Emotion Component of Place-Identity and Wellbeing" gained much attention in this cluster. Studies on the role of place identity in regional development are prominent in cluster #4. Place identity may play a driver or a barrier to regional development. Graphic symbols, landscape features, discourses, rurality, and other place components can be employed as identity instruments for place marketing and local development. Yet, the mechanism underlying the role of place identity construction or reconstruction in regional development is under-discussed and needs more study efforts.

Representative citing articles of cluster #5 suggest a thematic concentration on the effects of socio-spatial environment (change) on place identity. The term "place memory" for the cluster label appears in the title of a top citing article ( Lewicka, 2008). The shaping of memory depends on many socio-spatial environment factors, such as history, culture, architecture, and family, which overlap the components shaping place identity. The transition or new development of a socio-spatial environment, for instance, undergraduates making the transition from home to university, can disrupt pre-existing memory and emotional attachments to a place and threaten place identity processes. The smallest cluster, #6, includes seven member references. Cluster #6 pays special attention to the relationship between place identity and residents' attitudes, especially the attitudes toward spatial planning or human intervention in places.

Apart from the difference in thematic concentrations, these seven clusters also differ in the foundation of the meaning of place identity upon which the citing articles are based. In Table 2, representative citing articles of cluster #0, cluster #3, and cluster #5 conceive place identity as an individual's sub-identity. Those of cluster #1, cluster #2, and cluster #4 generally deem place identity as a social construct that differentiates a place from other places. However, place identity in the article by Zimmerbauer (2011) in cluster #1 is understood more in terms of regional consciousness and a sense of belonging to a region; a similar understanding can be found in the citing article by Miloslav (2018) in cluster #4. Some citing articles, for instance, Antonsich (2010) in cluster #2 and Semian and Chromy (2014) and Melnychuk and Gnatiuk (2018) in cluster #4, advocate the co-existence of the two intertwined and complementary meanings of place identity. The two representative citing articles of cluster #6 do not share the same view on the meaning of place identity. Wheeler (2015) adopted a similar meaning as that of cluster #1, cluster #2, or cluster #4. In the article by Bradley (2017), the meaning of place identity as a human's sub-identity seems mixed with that as features of a place. Though versatile meanings of place identity are used in different clusters or even in articles of a single cluster, they are not isolated and hence are sometimes intertwined in shaping the knowledge base of thematic concentrations. For example, Stedman's (2002) article titled "Toward a Social Psychology of Place: Predicting Behavior From Place-Based Cognitions, Attitude, and Identity," which has a betweenness centrality score of 0.11 and the most-cited frequency in cluster #5, is also co-cited in cluster #0 and cluster #2.

The extensive applications of place identity in various topics and the complex connections between its meanings in articles or thematic clusters have strengthened the necessity of in-depth examination on its fundamental meanings. Indeed, such necessity has already been responded to in the academic world, which is revealed by our citation burst analysis. A citation burst is a phenomenon where an article is highly cited at an increasingly faster rate. It indicates the likelihood that the scientific community has paid or is paying special attention toward the underlying contribution of these cited articles ( Chen et al., 2014a, b). The top five cited references with the strongest citation bursts associated with Figure 7 are listed in Figure 8, out of which Dixon and Durrheim (2000) is in cluster #5, Lewicka (2011) in cluster #0, Scannell and Gifford (2010) in cluster #6, Cresswell (2004) in cluster #2, and Amin (2004) in cluster #1. Dixon and Durrheim's (2000) article titled "Displacing Place-Identity: A Discursive Approach to Locating Self and Other," has the strongest citation burst, with a burst strength of 4.55. This article, published in British Journal of Social Psychology, presented a sympathetic but critical evaluation (review) of research on place identity. The beginning year of the citation burst of this article is 2006, which coincides with the time when the acceleration of publications on place identity took off (see Figure 1). The articles by Amin (2004) and by Cresswell (2004), both of which elaborated the concept of place, attracted great attention in studies on place identity from 2008 to 2012. The latest citation bursts are the remaining two review articles published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology by Scannell and Gifford (2010) and Lewicka (2011) on place attachment, in which its relation with place identity is discussed. From the evolvement of these top five busts, we can see that the fundamental meanings of place identity have been widely of concern in studies in this field. Articles focusing on reviewing or elucidating the meanings of place, place identity, and other place-related concepts have gotten critical attention. The attempts to fit together the versatile meanings of place identity have witnessed increasing difficulties, as the meanings of place, other place-based concepts, and their confusing interrelations have been developing.

Measuring Methods and Roles of Place Identity

Our scientometric survey has revealed the intellectual structure of the research landscape relevant to place identity. However, there are still some key issues about place identity research that this methodology seems unable to answer. For example, how has place identity been measured in the literature? What are the roles of place identity that have been identified? The method to measure or reveal place identity can be most scholars' primary concern when they propose questions in this domain. The roles of place identity in relation either to people or to regions have long been debated (see cluster #0, cluster #4), yet no universal agreement has been reached. In this section, we reviewed these two essential issues by further examining the contents of articles on place identity.

Measuring Place Identity

People's Place Identity

As a subjective and enigmatic social construct, place identity is seldom engaged in individuals' daily thoughts and communications. People do not become aware of place identity until their sense of place is threatened ( Proshansky et al., 1983). Individuals' lack of self-awareness of place identity has not discouraged researches on place identity assessment. It is shown in plenty of articles that place identity can be measured either qualitatively or quantitatively.

As witnessed in the citing articles of cluster #3 and cluster #5, changes or interventions in living environment usually offer good opportunities for researchers to investigate the affected individuals' place identity. Chow and Healey (2008) interviewed 10 students twice over a 5-month period to assess the extent of changes in their place identities. These students had relocated from their homes to university. After the hurricane Hugo in September 1989, Hull et al. (1994) interviewed the residents of Charleston by telephone about the meanings associated with physical features damaged or lost due to Hugo. The authors argued that the meaning and values symbolized by place features or place icons play a role in the formation of place identity.

Rank ordering of place-related self-categorizations is widely used to assess place identity in many countries. The top citing article of cluster #5 ( Lewicka, 2008) applied this instrument in a study on memory of residence places and its relationship with place identity and place attachment. Participants in the study were asked to rank three objects out of a list of possible places of identification, which include city district, city, region, country, Europe, the world, and finally, a human being.

A lot of studies rely on a Likert scale to assess individuals' place identity ( Kyle et al., 2004; Williams and Roggenbuck, 1989; White et al., 2008). In many cases, these Likert-scaled items are measured on a five-point strongly agree to strongly disagree response scale. Typical items include "the place means a lot to me," "I am very attached to the place," "I identify strongly with this place," "I have a special connection to the place and the people who live and visit there," and so forth. In some studies, such items are measured with a seven-point scale. Carrus et al. (2005) measured regional identity with 16 items on a seven-point Likert scale. The authors divided the items into two categories, regional pride and regional empowerment. In a citing article in cluster #3 by Knez et al. (2018a, b), the 10 statements to measure place identity are also divided into two categories, namely, emotion and cognition components, and responded to by participants on a seven-point scale.

Some studies have made attempts to measure place identity with a single question. Pretty et al. (2003) asked for residents' responses to a statement to test their identification with their residential community. The statement was designed as, "I would really rather live in a different town. This one is not the place for me" (p. 275). The authors argued that "one's town is not the place 'for me' is to suggest that one's town is not constituted as part of one's self-identity" (p. 275). Respondents who agreed with the statement were classified into a group with low community identity. Those who disagreed were classified into a group with high community identity. The community identity of undecided respondents was deemed undecided.

Place Identity of a Place

Scholars tend to use "strong" or "weak" to depict the intensiveness of people's perception of the place identity of a certain area. In this sense, there can be a scale to measure the intensity of place identity. However, such a scale has not yet been unanimously agreed on in practice. Various methods have been adopted in literature to trace identities of places.

Approaches in literature to depict and measure place identity focus generally on what the identity is and how it is constructed by different social actors. Vainikka (2012), a representative citing article in cluster #1, used focus-group interviews to scrutinize to what extent place identities are shaped and shared by citizens. The author found that place identities perceived by citizens often differ from the identity discourses produced by media, regional administrations, and others. Haartsen et al. (2003) proposed a method to assess the rural identity perceived by residents of different age groups in the Netherlands. They asked the respondents to give the four words or phrases that first come to their minds when thinking about the countryside. The answers were aggregated into three categories: (1) a socio-economic functional image base ("how rural areas work"), (2) a visual-figurative image base ("what rural areas look like"), and (3) a socio-cultural image base ("what rural areas mean"). Elderly people were inclined to have a more socio-cultural representation of rurality, whereas younger people often characterized the countryside as an agricultural production zone. Similarly, place identity is divided into three interpretative dimensions, strategic, cultural, and functional, in the article by Van Houtum and Lagendijk (2001). This division was applied as a place identity analysis framework in two regions with comparable economic conditions and urban structures. The authors captioned each identity dimension of the two regions and elaborated with facts and historical narratives on how that identity was constructed.

As discussed previously about the thematic focus of cluster #2, extracting place identity components from texts, discourses, and narratives about an area is widely used by studies in this domain. Ritalahti (2008) searched and analyzed the web pages of individual tourism enterprises, municipalities, and other actors, in order to get a holistic view of how the identity of the study area is described there. The author did the same analysis in neighboring areas to detect possible boundaries created with place identities by social actors between these areas. Visitors' perceptions of the study area were then compared with the place identities ascribed by the tourism actors. Brace (1999) examined the identities of Cotswolds and the larger England in fictional and non-fictional rural writing, topographical writing, guidebooks, magazines, and articles. Other publicly available materials in relation to place identity, such as advertisements, were analyzed by researchers as well. Keegstra (2009) collected the pictures in advertisements on websites from different social actors in the Loire valley in France. The author identified different identities ascribed by different groups, including tourist organizations, farmer organizations, and governments.

Some research uses photos to measure how people perceive a place. This instrument is generally applied in two kinds of approaches. In the first approach, researchers take photos and present them to respondents ( Van den Berg, 1999). Buijs et al. (2009) asked respondents to assess full-color pictures of 10 typical and non-urban Dutch landscapes to analyze the cultural differences in landscape perceptions in the Netherlands. Each picture was scored on a 10-point scale, ranging from 1 (not attractive at all) to 10 (extremely attractive). Hawthorne et al. (2008) applied a similar approach to examine residents' perceptions of land use in their neighborhood. The participants were asked to rank 19 pictures related to trail development and explain why they ranked them in that way, which was intended to understand the image of the neighborhood in residents' mind. In the second approach, researchers asked participants to take photos that they think can represent the identities of a place. Stewart et al. (2004) used this "photo-elicitation" method to map residents' visions of their community. Twenty participants took photographs of community landscapes and were interviewed while viewing their photographs. The interview texts about meanings of the environments were analyzed and grouped.

Roles of Place Identity

People's Place Identity

People's place identity is individuals' strong emotional bonds to particular places or environments ( Fresque-Baxter and Armitage, 2012; Zimmerbauer et al., 2012; Melnychuk and Gnatiuk, 2018). It influences the way we look, see, think, and feel in our interaction with the physical world. Proshansky et al. (1983) has been frequently cited in the clusters that concentrate on people's place identity, such as cluster #0, cluster #3, and cluster #5 ( Chow and Healey, 2008; White et al., 2008; Devine-Wright, 2009; Devine-Wright and Clayton, 2010; Hernández et al., 2010; Fresque-Baxter and Armitage, 2012; Lengen and Kistemann, 2012; Urquhart and Acott, 2013). In this article, the authors initially depicted that place identity has five core functions: recognition, meaning, expressive-requirement, mediating change, and anxiety and defense function. The recognition function implies that individuals may adapt to and derive satisfaction from the settings where they spend a while. The meaning function proposes that place identity is the source of meaning for a given setting because of the cognitions that enable the person recognize a setting and understand its purposes. The expressive-requirement function involves two types of place identity cognitions, of which one is a cluster of cognitions that expresses the tastes and preferences of the person and the other represents what spaces and places require as far their purposes are concerned. The mediating change function indicates those place identity cognitions that serve to mediate change in discrepancies between a person's place identity and the characteristics of an immediate physical setting. The anxiety and defense function refers to those place identity cognitions that may signal threat or danger in physical settings or may represent response tendencies that defend or protect the person against these dangers.

There are many other efforts to explore the roles of place identity. For example, Fresque-Baxter and Armitage (2012), a representative citing article of cluster #0, summarized three conceptual approaches to analyze the role of place identity in climate change adaption. The first approach is the cognitive-behavioral approach, which examines how place identity influences individual decision making from risk perception to intention to action. The second one is the health and well-being approach, which emphasizes the importance of place identity in individuals' emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. The third one is the collective action approach, which examines the role of place identity in shaping values at a collective level and opportunities for and/or barriers to collective action. However, within the literature, the functions of place identity articulated by Proshansky et al. (1983) or others are seldom systematically testified or refined in empirical studies. In some occasions, part of these functions may match or relate to the assumptions or conclusions of a few studies, either because these functions are defined inclusively or because they fit well with the real world.

Among empirical studies on place identity, most of them have demonstrated its positive effects, which include preventing negative environmental perceptions, providing support for public land use policies, strengthening the commitment of residents to improve their homes and neighborhoods, and so forth. By examining the effects of nationalism and local identity upon perception of beach pollution, Bonaiuto et al. (1996) found that identification with a town or nation prevents people's negative physical assessments of pollution, which is interpreted as a strategy used to cope with the threat by an outgroup to place identity. Low and Altman (1992) identified "satisfaction" as part of the merits of people's affective bonds with places because "places permit control, foster creativity and provide opportunities for privacy, security and serenity" ( Chow and Healey, 2008). Kyle et al. (2003) found that when visitors' place identity increases, their support for paying fees for recreational use increases as well. Uzzell et al. (2002) argued that place identity can positively predict environmentally friendly conduct. Brown et al. (2003) found that the commitment of neighbors to improve their own home and the whole neighborhood is positively related to the emotional connection they have developed to the place. Carrus et al. (2005) also detected a positive role of place identity in predicting support for the protection of nature areas. Manzo and Perkins (2006) argued that particular preferences, perceptions, and emotional connections to places relate to community social cohesion, organized participation, and community development. Hernández et al. (2010) found that place identity positively influences environmental attitude and injunctive social norms. Knez et al. (2018b) found a positive relationship between place identity and perception of naturalness.

A few articles have also pointed out that the strong emotional bonds between individuals and particular places may have a less positive role. As place identity is a dynamic and dialectic process, in some occasions, it may act as resistance factors that are latent in man's mind. Manzo and Perkins (2006) argued that if people's emotional responses to a place are not acknowledged and understood, they can be divided and immobilized by their anxieties. Forester (1987) pointed out that bonds with a place can form the basis for cooperation and community action, and they can also lie at the root of community conflict. Both Stoll-Kleemann (2001) and Bonaiuto et al. (2002) suggested that local residents would oppose the designation of protected nature areas if a strong sense of identification with their local community is present.

Place Identity of a Place

Numerous studies on place identity have stressed its intrinsic nature of resistance to globalization in the process of regional development, which responds to our previous keyword burst analysis, where globalization and countermeasures are highlighted as hot topics ( Paasi, 2002c, 2003; Van Rekom and Go, 2006). Globalization can be defined as the intensification of economic, political, social, and cultural relations across borders, while regionalization is the growth of societal integration within the border of a given region ( Kacowicz, 1999). A region is established in the regionalization process, maturing with people's consciousness of place identity that differentiates it from others. While increasingly fast globalization is threatening the genuineness of regions, place identities stand to maintain regional distinctiveness. This plausible contention can be greatly found in research about tourism and place identity. Dredge and Jenkins (2003) argued that globalizing forces have contributed to increased homogenization of tourism products. Local destination identity has been associated with perceptions of homogeneity. Destinations are under increasing pressure to construct and promote distinct identities in order to counterbalance these homogenizing influences and pursue tourism growth. Gospodini (2004) suggested that built heritage and innovative design may work as place identity generators in modern and post-modern European urban societies. They can promote tourism and create social solidarity among inhabitants, and subsequently defend against the place identity crisis in the processes of economic and cultural globalization. While the preservation of place identity can attract tourists, it puts the place at a risk of exposure to globalization forces. However, economic success brought by tourism may stimulate the place to maintain its identities that are discovered by tourists ( Van Rekom and Go, 2006).

Besides the role in maintaining a place, place identity has also become a slogan for making a place, which is also referred to in our previous keyword burst analysis ( Paasi, 2009b). For one, an established place identity shared by common social stakeholders forms structures of expectations, which can be used as a collective mobilizing force ( Terluin, 2003; Knapp, 2006). For another, discourses on place identity, which embody social actors' interests and expectations, may create the reality that they are describing and generate action when the reality is accepted by the public ( Paasi, 2002a). Politicians and policy makers have been, for a long time, exploiting place identity narratives in planning to lead place-making ( Paasi, 2009b). Saleh (1998) argued that place identity is an important factor to mobilize people, which explains planners' enthusiasm for its introduction and application. Stewart et al. (2004) suggested that place identity has the potential to serve as visions for planning processes. The involvement of citizens' thoughts on what the identity of a place is and should be forms part of the visioning process in planning. Hague and Jenkins (2005, p. 8) deemed planning to be about place-making, which means one of the significant objects of planning is to "create, reproduce or mold the identities of places through manipulation of the activities, feelings, meanings and fabric that combine into place identity," Moreover, place-making needs planners to incorporate visions of place identity not only from politicians' and economic interests but also from local residents and other members of civil society, because identities ascribed to a place by different stakeholders are contested and may play a potential role in social conflicts ( Bridger, 1996; Haartsen et al., 2000; Stewart et al., 2004).

Discussion

Place identity is gradually preferred by geographers to preach in extensive occasions, such as planning, regional regeneration, heritage conservation, landscape appreciation, tourism, environmental management, environmental behavior, local conflict, and so on. Researchers involve place identity in so many diverse contexts that this term is endowed with increasing explanations and connotations. The broad use of place identity makes it like a panacea to deal with problems of the relationship between a place and people. Although the meanings of place identity have not been unanimously agreed upon to date, it is undoubtedly positive that "place identity" has acted as an outlet to integrate physical reality and social cognition. When we begin to become aware of the complexity and chaos in place management issues, the object-oriented strategy-making process fades out of its dominant popularity in place-making. As a traditional top-down policy-making approach tends to meet resistance in the late policy implementation phase, increasing attention has been paid to information and knowledge from the grassroots and stakeholders. Participatory planning has been introduced, and a great deal of consultancy work is launched before decision making. To do that, we aim at digging about what and how people think of the place where they live or that they care about. People's perception of a place derives from direct or indirect contact with the place. They ascribe identities to a place based not only on objective physical features but also on less tangible meanings, memories, and information from others, from the past and the future.

One of the essential prerequisites to make a place is to cater to its owners' or users' thoughts and requests. The rising of inhabitants' versatile requests on places drives us to contemplate place management issues as an integration of complexity. We want to modernize our place with global leading technologies, yet we are afraid of losing its historical traces. We need wide roads to improve traffic and larger cities to accommodate more population and buildings, yet we are reluctant to sacrifice limited farmland and natural landscape, which preserve rural identity. Such dilemmas or conflicts in place development are realities, and we cannot tackle them within a single sector or discipline. Place identity can be a solution to integrate those issues ( Pinto, 2000). However, when we come to this approach, we may encounter another risk. Since the components of place identity are too broad and inclusive to operate, pursuers of place identity are sometimes frustrated by its vague meaning. In a lot of studies, researchers try to avoid in-depth debate on the conception of place identity when they investigate identities of a case area. Instead, they lean on previous relevant studies and extend those definitions and methodologies in their own ways.

Generally, the efforts to promote the identity of a place can enhance its inhabitants' place identities at the same time, and vice versa. The intricate relationships between people, place, and place identity occasionally confuse researchers who try to deconstruct the meanings of place identity. For example, Yuen (2005) cited Proshanky's definition to conceive place identity as a "substructure of self-identity." However, most of the arguments in his article concentrate on the increasing emphasis that Singapore has given to urban conservation as a way to strengthen the identity of the city. Paasi's theory on the formation of a region and its identity is applied in the research by Raagmaa (2002). The measurement of place identity Raagmaa designed is biased to examine residents' identification with their communities. We need place identity as a term to integrate complex physical reality and social cognition, but we do not expect a vague meaning of this term to be widespread in various domains.

To study people's place identity or the place identity of a place, the literature generally analyzes them through two perspectives: external looks or internal thoughts. From external looks, researchers observe people's physical appearances and behaviors associated with a place. How a group of people looks and behaves is thought to be a direct indicator separating this group from others. People's dress, hair, skin, dialect, diet, and other behaviors are inherited to a great extent. In other words, these characteristics lean on local traditions and genetic inheritance, which have roots in a place. People who have migrated to a new place would keep these origins for a long time. Therefore, the external looks of these characteristics constitute part of people's public self-identity imprinted by the place where they or their ancestors come from.

As to the external looks of a place, we tend to locate the place on a map at the very beginning. The boundary on the map offers a concrete geographic position and extension of the place for people to identify it in the world. Other tangible elements of a place, such as place names, buildings, land use, population, landscape, landmarks, governments, culture, organizations, and so on, define the external looks of this place together. According to Paasi's (1986) view on the formation of a region, these elements can be generally grouped into three categories, which are known as physical shape, symbolic shape, and institutional shape. In instructions of a place, one or more of these tangible elements are usually narrated as components that make up the identities of that place.

From the perspective of internal thoughts, researchers strive to design methods to explore subjective connections between people and places. When scientists carry out empirical studies from this view, there is a subtle difference between the methods to measure people's place identity and the place identity of a place. Respondents are usually asked how they perceive a given place or places in both cases. However, in the case of studying people's place identity, researchers' aim emphasizes especially on the meanings and importance of the place(s) people feel in their lives. To attain that, investigations revolve mainly around questions about people's attitudes and feelings related to a place. Such attitudes are usually value-oriented, such as love for a country, and landscape preferences, which indicate the role of a place in the formation of a belief or standards that guide people's choices. The feelings can be considered as affect-oriented, which indicates the internalized manifestations of the effects of a place (or elements of a place), such as the importance of elements of a place to the self, and the identification with places of different spatial scales. It is necessary to point out that people living outside of a place are seldom included in this case, because those who have no contacts with the place can hardly perceive the importance of the place in shaping their personality. People's internal thoughts that reveal their bonds with a place constitute part of their private self-identity imprinted by the place.

With respect to internal thoughts about the place identity of a place, researchers' major efforts focus on the images of a place people hold in their minds. Such images can be perceived by people living either inside or outside of a place ( Paasi, 1986, 2002c). In academic studies and spatial policy-making practices, both collective and individual perceptions of place identities have been paid much attention. Individuals seldom encounter official boundary lines or marks of places in daily life. They often perceive the existence and extent of a place in mind according to the elements of the external looks of the place. From this point, researchers examine the boundary of a place in individuals' minds to study the intensity of the perceptions of place identity. Besides, individuals bear in mind different representative elements and holistic images of a place, which forms the competitive nature of place identities and becomes the central research interest in this domain. The elements and images of a place in leading social actors' minds are always shown in place marketing or planning media, discourses, and narratives, with the intention to present to the world what the identity of the place is. In some occasions, the place identity constructed by leading social actors may not be consistent with the place identity perceived by the public, but it may be gradually accepted as the collective place identity through spatial planning, place development, or promotion.

Conclusion

On the base of the bibliographic records in the core data set of Web of Science related to place identity, this paper identified active research topics and new developments in place identity with a scientometric analysis. An extended survey on measuring methods and roles of place identity in the contents of academic articles was done to supplement the scientometric approach. Distinctions and interrelations between the two meanings of place identity were highlighted with respect to intellectual base, thematic concentration, measurement, and function. Although this paper tried to separate place identity of a place and people's place identity in multi respects, there are a lot of subtle similarities between their attributes. Both of them are contested, and both are attached with significance in place development, planning, and social conflicts. Similarities also exit in the methods to study them. The establishment or intensity of the identity of a place is often examined by asking about people's identification with the place. Such similarities could be greater if additional efforts are made to look into the cross-cited articles between the clusters generated by our scientometric analysis. Longtime ignorance of the mixed uses of the two meanings in the literature, in addition to their confusing relationships with other environmental psychological concepts, such as place attachment, has led to a lot of criticism, which can also be blamed for the slow progress in the development of place identity theory.

The quadrantal dimensions of the meanings of place identity presented in this paper are expected to help scholars find their positions when they are involved in research questions in this domain. Place and people are interdependent. Although people's place identity and place identity of a place are not the same, we did not mean to stress their differences and encourage separated studies on either of them. Instead, places, people, and processes through which both identities are formed should be taken in a comprehensive structure that is supported by a set of theory-grounded principles ( Lewicka, 2011). The existing theories relevant to place identity, as well as their interrelations, within the top subject categories identified by our scientometric analysis are not reviewed in this paper, but they are worthy of future study.

To make places better in the contemporary world with increasing mobility and globalization, place identity has been gradually used as an instrument in various domains, such as spatial planning, place marketing, and so forth. However, there are still many outstanding key issues in this area. What should be and how to establish the optimal identity of a specific place? How to reconcile the optimal identity of a place with residents' and other stakeholders' place identities? How to measure the costs and benefits in terms of social capital, regional or community resilience, and other human well-being or place growth-related scales, of the transitional process of place identity? More empirical studies are needed to figure out practical solutions and principles for these issues. Otherwise, the research of place identity will always float in the air, so that policy makers and relevant practitioners are not able to touch and operate this tool in practice. Before answering the above questions, we suggest the most fundamental task at present should be to straighten out the differences between place identity and other concepts defining people's emotional bonds with places and to sort out the basic framework of place identity theory and its relationship with other relevant theories.

Author Contributions

JP collected and analyzed the data in the manuscript. JP wrote the manuscript. DS introduced the idea and guided the revision of the manuscript. QW offered suggestions for the revision of the manuscript.

Funding

This work was jointly funded by the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (No. 71403129), the National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 17ZDA076), and the 111 Project in China (No. B17024).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Footnotes

References

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Place Identity: How Far Have We Come in Exploring Its Meanings?

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In order to synthesize the extensively studied place identities and their meanings, this paper reviews how researchers have conceived and deconstructed place identity. CiteSpace, a scientometric tool for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature, is used to identify the active topics and new developments of publications in place identity.

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Placemaking is a participatory process for shaping public space that harnesses the ideas and assets of the people who use it.

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