Project Brief
Complexity Maps
BRIEF:
This project has a specific target area as well as a partner organisation. The focus is on a socially deprived area in the north of Turin, earmarked for future development by the Urban Centre our partner organisation. Our challenge is to complement the Urban Centre’s long term and strategic understanding of this place with the complexity of views and agendas of local people. We will experiment with the concept of the ‘Actor-Network’ and treat our site as a complicated entity made up of a range of competing actors with different interests.
The project has two challenges:
1 Consultation
How can we develop a range of ad hoc ethnographic techniques to engage with local people and get past the language barrier and collect holistic ‘data’ about the local actor network?We suggest to organise a community event that will draw in skills and resources from the local community, while at the same time establishing a meeting space where local actors come together. The setting up of the event will provide an opportunity to contact different stakeholders in the community, and to gather data on their role and visions of the future of their local area. The event itself is an opportunity to bring together and collect different visions of the future.
2 Visualisations
How can we analyse, visualise and communicate the complicated local networks to our project partner, the local participants and a wider public?
The students will be working in small groups on a broad range of themes that overlap strongly with the other workshops: Sense of Place, Social Space, Security/Insecurity, Environment, Future Visions, Mobility, Local resources, Local Stakeholders
This workshop is ambitious in attempting to create a very broad way of looking at a very specific place, so we would benefit from connections with the other workshops that create more detailed analyses of a particular topic. We will also be generating a lot of new data that we could aggregate with another workshop to create comparisons between places.
OUTPUTS:
A community event will provide both the focal point and conclusion to the on-site part of the workshop. It aims to harness community resources and provide food, drinks and entertainment, while also bringing together crucial stakeholders.
Since the aim of this workshop is to develop visualisations we will focus heavily on the final presentation and communication of our results. We are hoping to have access to a large format plotter which will allow each student group to create a 2 meter banner for their topic. The aim is to have a whole wall that will represent the target location from a multiplicity of perspectives. These final maps will be available as PDF’s that can be hosted on a website. As well as these maps there will also be a text written by the project team that will be a kind of guide to the maps on the wall.
If it is essential that we produce ‘2 A3 posters’ then these can be composited from the larger maps as well as the text guide.
The other output will be a blog located at www.complexitymaps.net which the students will use to share data and visualisations. After the projects completion this will also serve to communicate the project to an external audience.
