Brook, R. and Dunn, N., 2011.

Data Mining: Abstract Urban Topographies

The Geographical Imagination is fuelled by abstract representations of space. In a contemporary sense these are frequently ‘maps’ which expose latent conditions by the manipulation of data sets. Across professional disciplines the GIS, GPS world and the relationship between data visualisation and space is a burgeoning area of study and debate. There is a perceptible gap in the research and practice of Geography, Architecture, Art and Computational Design that is characterised by the isolated explorations of these technologies and the use of common terms with different meanings. It is quite straightforward for data mapping to be locational, but how is this useful to planners, urban geographers and designers who are (usually) searching for formal solutions to, or representations of, complex problems? A simple translation from data to form does not satisfy the schema or acknowledge the complexity of the city despite the complexity of the model or the process. As such this paper seeks to develop an approach that will expose these proximities and differences to enable a discourse as to how the overlaps may be exploited and the gaps closed, or indeed widened, to explore the context of urban space.