Dunn, N., 2011.

Living on the edge: cultural proximities, social peripheries and spatial margins

The social peripheries of urban life and the resultant connections and networks of individuals and groups through various cultural proximities suggests a complexity of spatio-temporal relationships woven through the urban fabric of cities. It is proposed here that we are able to identify the narrative nature of these conditions with particular reference to moving images that may afford exploration and understanding of urban space and event as filmic mappings. The legibility or disclosure of the urban landscape in films is positioned here as a pedagogic device, complementary to the ‘imageability’ that Kevin Lynch sought to identify in his early research on understanding cities, by contributing to our knowledge of cultural proximities interwoven with the appropriation of residual urban space. Furthermore, films have the capacity to render the city as a narrative in a reflexive relationship concerned with spatial sequence, editing, revelation and event. The story of how a space is used, in relation to character and action, may reveal a latent history of the role of space within the city. Of particular significance here is the value of films as diagnostic instruments that afford us the opportunity to describe and understand urban conditions and spatio-temporal relations through the experience of them. Indeed, the ability of the camera to move through space and place facilitates the articulation of these architectures, allowing us to perceive the lived experience of the films in a visually rich manner, compressing the complexity and density of information into an understandable sequence.

Related Research:   Nick Dunn