THE CITY OF COLLECTIVE DESIRE
USA, 2017

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of the discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else” (The Invisible Cities)

Italo Calvino’s book “The Invisible Cities” reconstructs extreme imaginaries describing cities in their physical characteristics, memories, economic activities, etc. These are the product of a re-reading of an existing city, Venice.

In so, we used Calvino’s technique with the objective to re-imagine our own city. Our points are geolocated in relation with city locations that resemble some of Calvino’s stories in Boston and Cambridge. Each of us picked a city described by Calvino: Phyllis, Zora and Tamara in order to find in their intersection a new invisible city: Noziroh.

With this, we aim to walk though David Harvey’s spatial classification: “absolute”, “relative” and “relational”.
In the bottom surface we analyzed the “absolute” euclidean distance between the points that constitute the essence of Phyllis, Zora and Tamara.

The above surface shows the kernel density of the class points in relation to our paths. In addition the density calculates the “relative” time that will take to access Noziroh. We assigned a different speed to each function, constructing a range where mental is the fastest and economic the slowest. Since Noziroh is an imaginary city, we found crucial to have a high mental activity level to access to it.

To unveil Noziroh, we re-construct its skyline, which is the “relational” space that exists in between our absolute and relative surfaces. The skyline is conformed by the overlay of three planes. Each of the planes provides in the X axis glimpses of places which assign visuals to the points. And in the Z axis replicates the images, according to the speed that will take to access Noziroh from that location.

Welcome to Noziroh, a city that is infinite, where the objects replicate themselves and where time and space is a result of each individuals mind.

Project for Mapping Geographic Representation + Speculation Course
Team: Jorge Silva - Juan Santa María - Claudia Tomateo
Harvard Graduate School of Design