Citymurmur

The traditional topological forms of mapping and representing the city are becoming inadequate as new forces shape urban development. To meet these new needs, cartographers are building new maps based on co-extensive visions that define and visualize the city’s physical and social networks. These new mapping activities not only describe quantitative data, but also create new narrative forms. The CityMurmur project addresses this issue by sketching an image that shows the influence of media on the city. It describes information flows by linking them to physical geography. In addition to the noticeable city and the historic city, CityMurmur reveals a number of emerging cities shaped by invisible but real drivers. It depicts a city as seen by local media, full of places and events distributed over the territory; a city of international media, reduced to the crucial point of political and cultural activities; the cultural city and the sports city; and all the cities created by intersections of media traces. Each city is outlined by faint signals that are real and important when they are considered as a whole. Online newspapers, information agencies, blogs, personal web sites, and thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions in the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to creation of an atlas that produces different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of the city’s media attention, biases, and social and cultural diversity.