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Peta Mitchell, "Mapping the Labyrinth: Twentieth-century Cartography and the City" This paper will explore the way in which much twentieth-century urban writing has linked the subjective experience of the urban pedestrian with a practice of "cognitive mapping." Both Fredric Jameson's now over-familiar call for an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping" and Certeau's espousal of the Medieval "itinerary" propose a particular conception of the urban dweller. The citizen is recast as an urban practitioner; a cartographer who constructs his or her own mental maps of the city. However, this paper will argue that the rise to prominence of cognitive mapping is not the result of a single tradition within which Certeau and Jameson harmoniously exist. Rather I will propose that within the development of urban cognitive mapping, two distinct trajectories are visible. The first has its roots in Continental Surrealism and is reliant upon a semi-liberatory view of the city as a haptic and performative space that calls for a radically subjective cartographic practice. The second is founded upon American Positivism and is predicated upon the ideal of the legible city; a space for which applied cognitive mapping can offer an objective, total map. Ultimately I wish to argue that, while both traditions conceive of the city as a practiced space, they call into play diametrically opposed cartographic practices that inscribe fundamentally different visions of urban space and the role of the urban practitioner. Biography: Peta Mitchell is a PhD candidate in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland. Her research interests include twentieth-century fiction, poststructuralist and spatial theories, cartography and metaphor. |
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