Cartography and motions:

methodological issues of reading the contemporary city in the light of The view from the road

Abstract

At least since 1960, cartography produced by urbanism in the field of urban displacement has been limited to the geographical position of the observer, largely disregarding the incarnate experience of subjects beyond the visual, as well as the actors and political-strategic agents of formation. of the territory. In 1965, Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard, and John Myer publish “The View from the Road” and establish a methodology for analyzing the quality of the contemporary city's visual form from roads. To some extent they open a reading through the windshield of the moving car, thus engendering a study they call the 'aesthetics of urban roads'. This work focuses on the geographical positioning of the car and does not consider in its scope any political-strategic relations about the approximation of these subjects with that path or space produced. In this sense, this communication proposal considers that it is from the cartographic and technological turn occurred in the 1980s that the contemporary city has demanded an increasing complexity in reading urban displacements, which occur as a dispute between distinct flows experienced and their cartographies. Incipiently, this problem appears in "The view from the road", but closely linked to what is seen in the landscape, disregarding the diversity and quality of road flows. For this communication, we seek to give visibility to the important methodological considerations listed by the planners in this work, regarding the expansion of the urbanism repertoire from the moving image, indicating the need to update them and insert a political layer. of cartography, in connection with what Fredric Jameson called the "new aesthetic of cognitive mapping.