Global Positioning Systems, Tracking Technologies, Location Based Services: how new technologies affect spatial perception and territorial representations

A representation of a city or territory can be defined as the result of a process of writing that fixes on a defined support data and other information that have been previously recorded, so that they may be available to other users. Such process requires to establish a relationship between who “writes” or “records” and the space around and that the same relationship may be recalled and “fixed” on a physical support, using a perceptive attitude or skill, that men have gradually and continuously improved, even though this approach has at the same time caused a physical and conceptual separation from the real object, that anyone can experience with Google Earth, and its way of “entering” into the space that we in fact occupy, but perceiving it from a virtual, external, point of view. Well, today the relationship between man and its surrounding space is little by little changing. Satellite driven navigators take us to destination by showing a perspective view of the route that is almost independent from the context around.The usual geo-metric modes of spatial relationship, that require to be able to fix a position, the surrounding points of interest and therefore to be able to find a route are at least changing, but we may even be facing a human skill that is day by day evolving till disappearance. A similar reasoning should be applied also to other interfaces commonly used in comparable procedures in respect to recording and perception, mental processing of information and to the related phases of writing and communicating, that have produced a kind of detachment between brain, perceptive skills and actions. Much has been written about the role and the effects of devices lilke pencil, keyboard or mouse in the field of drawing techniques. But what is interesting is that latest technologies of representation are facing a kind of “return to the order”: screens are turning back to “pages” on which we can actually write, the mouse is being substituted with a pen able to write or draw directly on the screen, restoring the original direct relationship between brain, eye, hand and resulting traced sign. Enlarging the scale, in the field of representation of territory, the systems of GPS tracking are bringing man back to the center of the process of recording and writing of information. A man, again immersed in its own space, able to “walk” (as Thoreau or Chatwin, on a literary level) and “record” (as Cullen or Lynch, on a more technical level), directly drawing the “elements” that “compose” the surrounding places, also sharing the contribution of other users (the User Generated Contents that are the base for next to come web platforms). These new tools, that let us (and others) know our position in a space and how we move in it produce for sure an extraordinary possibility to tie territorial representation and geographic information, but mostly, we can ask how these new spatial relationship can affect not only new analytical methods (this is a fact already widely acknowledged) but mostly if the same technologies can influence new behaviors, that may help us to understand and drive the dynamics of contemporary projects.