{"id":459,"date":"2011-07-03T19:59:50","date_gmt":"2011-07-03T17:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visurus.wordpress.com\/?p=459"},"modified":"2011-07-03T19:59:50","modified_gmt":"2011-07-03T17:59:50","slug":"urban-earth-photo-mapping-urban-spaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/2011\/07\/urban-earth-photo-mapping-urban-spaces\/","title":{"rendered":"Urban Earth: Photo-mapping urban spaces"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Geography enthusiast at The Geography Collective (image by The Geography Collective)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Urban Earth<\/a> project by The Geography Collective<\/a> aims at representing humanity’s habitat by walking across some of earth’s biggest urban areas. The motivation is critical of media and their portrayal of our living environments:<\/p>\n

The media distorts the way we see our world(s) with stereotypical images highlighting the most extremes of places. Urban Earth aims to expose what our cities really look like away from the bias and spin of commercial agendas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(This reminds me a bit of the distorted body image in the media and, for example, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty<\/a>. For an ever-astounding short film [1:15 mins] click here<\/a>. End of short side-track.)<\/p>\n

The Rules<\/strong><\/p>\n

The recipe of Urban Earth is very simple: Walk across a city taking a photograph every 8 steps (roughly) and put them together sequentially into a movie. Photographs are always taken looking forward, without focusing on specific landmarks or ‘nice’ parts of the cityscape. The thing about an Urban Earth walk is that it tries to find normality within each city:<\/p>\n

Geography is more important than many people think. A random route across a city may expose many things, but an Urban Earth walk is special because it attempts to reveal what a city is like for the people who live in it. Urban Earth is not about following the tourist trail or tracking down the most extreme places\u2026 it is about finding normality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The walk is adjusted such that it features deprived areas proportionally to their abundance in a city. Also, the walk tries to cover areas where many people live and, through the 8 steps rule, the length of the walk becomes proportional to the size of the city.<\/p>\n

Coverage<\/strong><\/p>\n

So far, the Urban Earth project has covered the following cities:<\/p>\n