Urban Portraits. A spatial ethnographic Atlas. Extracts.
Research Project. Spatial Ethnographic Cartography. 2012 - 2015
This spatial ethnographic practice-based research project links to our increasingly overseeing societies and the fact that we know too little about the actual experiences of older citizens in urban contexts. To study various aspects of older people's everyday life, we undertook a deep, almost forensic journey into the lived space of individual older people and began to translate the rich and dense archive of collected and recorded stories, experiences and narrative into maps that are conceived as personal atlases. Our intention is to give the term “Old Age” a name, a narrative, a person, a body, a history, a place, a story, a past, a present and a future. The process of Ageing brings fundamental changes into our lives. The maps explore various strands of a person’s live, from their geographic disposition, to their daily routines and used urban and domestic spaces to more internalized, imaginative and experiential spaces.The atlases produced, of which an extract can be seen here, fuse the analytical and tactical with the emotional and experiential, transgressing scales of personal and urban realms. The maps offer insights into personal tactics and strategies that could provide starting points for a wider ranging debate on future strategies for our cities and how architecture and the urban condition could be a proactive and creative, rather then reactive tool to recent developments. The work challenges dominant narratives on how older citizens liveand critically reflects on concepts such as localneighbourhood, community and participation currently hotly discussed in work on over-ageing societies. Extracts presented here are from the live of Ms Rose (a botanical name standing in for her actual name).
A practice-based cross-disciplinary research project supported by the Region of Baden-Würtemberg and awarded with a Research Fellowship and Residency at Academy Schloss Solitude © offsea 2012-2015.
