Carto-City to Surface-City: un-mapping and re-mapping the urban emotion of missing

ABSTRACT Drawing on a fascination with Denis Cosgrove’s term ‘Carto-City’ that encompasses the concept that ‘Urban space and cartographic space are inseparable’ [Cosgrove, D. (2006). Carto-City. In J. Abrams, & P. Hall (Eds.), Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of networks and territories (pp. 148–157). University of Minnesota], this essay applies the idea to a conceptualisation of ‘city’ as urbaness – as a connected state of mind or urban emotion. Through a visual methodology of ‘unmapping’ and ‘re-mapping’ of Carto-City as Surface-City, this artistic research practice aims to contribute to how we understand and map the connected cartographies of contemporary urban consciousness. Cosgroves “seeing, imagining and representing” (2008) is re-interpreted to map a specific emotion within urbaness emerging out of the restricted transience of a world-wide pandemic – the emotion of missing. As physical city spaces across the world stood still, digital connection expanded creating a focused space for critical reflection on how interconnected layers of urban emotion might be mapped. My response to this, Surface-City, is grounded in my ongoing body of research into urban consciousness and its mapping through academic writing and visual practice.


Carto-City
The term 'Carto-City ' (2006) belongs to Denis Cosgrove (1948Cosgrove ( -2008)), a remarkable geographer who was a leader in his field in challenging concepts of geography, cartography, and city.For him, the visual representation of the city through mapping not only records the geographical but also the cultural and social.Linguistically and visually the term 'Carto-City' succinctly captures the idea that 'Urban space and cartographic space are inseparable' (Cosgrove, 2006).His noting that 'as each is transformed their relationship alters ' (2006) recognises this is an idea that has a life of its own well beyond the life of Cosgrove himself.It is the potential of what Cosgrove refers to as 'seeing, imagining and representing' ( 2008) that grounds the mapping approach posed in this essay (Figure 1).
Over many years the 'city' and its mapping have been the subject of my research through the interconnection of academic publications and artistic practice.My focus encompasses the conceptualisation of 'city' as what I have termed urbaness (McCormick, 2009) as an interconnected state of mind or emotion within an increasingly urbanised and digitalised world.With a strong research interest in how the mapping practice of art contributes to a deeper understanding of the changing nature of the 'city' and urban consciousness, I am drawn to Cosgrove's recognition of how knowledge is inseparable from visual understanding.As Cosgrove noted, the 'contemporary city presents both complex and new challenges and enormous opportunities for mapping ' (2006).He goes on to propose that 'the map may be the only medium through which contemporary urbanism can achieve visual coherence ' (2006).The nature of the form of that mapping has changed dramatically from its early iterations scratched into the ground or drawn onto parchment, to the Google satellite maps and beyond of today.While art has always been intertwined with science in multiple mapping modes through the act of drawing and the design of the maps themselves, there is an increasing recognition of the 'mapping' capacity of art and what 'art can tell us about maps' (Harmon, 2004).My focus in this essay is on what visual art practice, through the re-interpretation of Cosgrove's acts of seeing, imagining and representing, can reveal about a specific emotion of urbaness that emerged out of the collective experience of the pandemic yearsthe urban emotion of missing.

Urbaness
The term urbaness evolved out of my Doctoral research at The University of Melbourne -The Transient City: mapping urban consciousness through contemporary art practice (2009).The research drew together urban theory and art practice to reflect on a cultural phenomenon of our timesthe re-defining of the concept of 'city' and the consciousness of being urban, shaped by a transience created through rapidly increasing urbanisation and ubiquitous digitalisation.During this research I became aware of several new terms emerging that aimed to give voice to this unique situation.This included 'space of flows' (Castells, 1996), 'liquid modernity' and 'liquid times' (Bauman, 2000(Bauman, , 2007)), 'cityness' (Sassen, 2005) and 'urbophilia' (Radovic & Dukanovic, 2007), to name just a few.My original term, urbaness, adds to this new urban lexicon.
Urban consciousness is as old as cities themselves.An increased compression of space and time through first trains, then planes and now screens with their instantaneous connection means we can be simultaneously in many places and time zones at once.While cities retain their specificity, materially, culturally and socially, the essence of what it means to be urban is rapidly becoming a collective experience.Posed at the time of the emergence of the modern city in the 1930s, the question 'What is a city?' asked by Lewis Mumford (1996) did recognise the city as more than just its materiality as 'a theatre of social action', but he could not have envisioned the complexity of today's answer.Now 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas and the UN (United Nations) predicts that this will increase to 68% by 2050.Such much-quoted data about the ever-increasing world urban population implies not only a physical reality that will have multiple cultural and social implications but also reinforces the interconnectedness of human consciousness across the planet.

Mapping urbaness
Mapping consciousness and emotion requires an extended cartographic methodology.Utilising walking as a means of knowing a city and its urban emotions is now well embedded in our cartographic thinking through such foundational concepts as Walter Benjamin's walking practice of the flâneur as a practice of strolling to immerse oneself in the rhythm of the city.Later, the dérive that the Situationists International (1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972) applied to the city of Paris, introduced chance and unexpected encounters while walking into the experiential knowing of the city.Collectively the Situationists as artists, writers and activists, drew art and theory together in their new mapping.This can be seen in a series of maps of Paris by Guy Debord in the 1950s including the Psychogeographic Guide of Paris (1957) amongst many other examples.Through a process of détournement or different juxtapositions of existing maps, new meanings of the city were explored and mapped.Such thinking paved the way for an increasing desire to understand 'the abstract space of the street' and 'to sense the passing ambiences' by 'mapping the 'psychogeography' of how particular streets could make you feel (Wark 2012).McKenzie Wark has extended the Situationist thinking to add digital 'walking' through another addition to the contemporary urban lexicontelesthasia (2012).This describes a process of bringing what is distant near through today's digital telecommunications with its roots in telegraphs, telephones, and televisions.The concept of urbaness evolved out of both physical walking, enabled through our capacity to fly around the planet at increasing speeds, and digital walking as our interconnected urban consciousness expands with every new piece of technology.
The urban consciousness of the times became particularly evident as our restricted urban lives moved entirely on-line during the pandemic global wave.Our screens recorded the emptiness and restricted physical walking within multiple urban spaces evidenced in scenes of singing from separated balconies to wind-swept streets with not a soul in sight.While the interconnection between urban spaces has been experienced now over many years, leading to such concepts as urbaness, this specific pandemic timeframe exacerbated the awareness of this phenomenon.Albeit in this case, it was a focus on one of the negative aspects of urbaness, that is, that a pandemic knows no borders.This urban experience negated any physical experience in favour of a total digital experience and in the process created a sense of collective missing.There is a certain irony in that it also opened up a focused space for critical reflection and posed questions as to how such interconnected layers of urban emotion of missing might be mapped.The complexity of the understanding of 'city' as urbaness, be it negative or positive, requires a new language but also cartographic practices that have the capacity to investigate and map the collective emotion of when the urban world stood still.My response to this phenomenon came in the form of visual mapping through Surface-City.

Carto-City as Surface-City
Surface-City adopts an extended mapping process that builds on the Situationist slogan Beneath the pavement, the beach!seen on the streets of 1968 Paris, to apply to the specific emotions and psychogeography of the twenty-first century 'city'.In Surface-City, walking is both the practice of observation of the streets beneath my feet and embedded in the revelation of the street itself.By adopting a visual methodology of 'un-mapping' and 're-mapping' of Carto-City as Surface-City, this mapping practice aims to reveal and record a cartography of the emotion of collective missing that emerged out of the emptiness and restricted physical transience of the pandemic time frame, when humans faced nature at its most powerful in virus form.
The Surface-City practice is first one of interpreting Cosgrove's 'seeing' as deep observation through detailed close-up photographic recording of the visual evidence of transient movement and erasure, through the act of walking over time in the physical context.City surfaces of bitumen and asphalt are the very essence of how humans lay claim to the ground of the Earth and transform it into a city.Transient movement or the act of walking is an integral part of the shared cartography of all citiesbe it physical or digital.Even Google maps display this as we observe the user, mobile in hand, move in one direction and then abruptly change direction in response to the screen movement (Figure 2).Drawing on a collection of close-up photographs taken of public pavements I have walked in multiple cities, Surface-City reflects on the human/city interaction through both the act of walking and the absence of walking.While I had not originally set out to specifically photograph map like aspects of pavements, I immediately recognised a collective imagery across the photographs that already appeared like typographies.Grouped together the erasure evident in the photographs revealed to me a sense of the cities  themselves as entities with agency that led me to my 'imagining' of an interconnected 'city' self-mapping (Figures 3-5).
Evidence of the erasure of one map and the creation of another records time, the halting of time, and the associated collective emotion of missing across these cities.In response to what Cosgrove referred to as 'representing', the individual photographs from different cities are juxtaposed against each other, each mirroring the other.The imaginative intellect comes into play here in the artist mapper's aesthetic response to the images and in many ways the cities select themselves.Through this process, erasure and re-mapping emerged as the key aspects of the enquiry.The embracing of time through erasure is responded to by a drawing process interwoven through the pavement like 'city' panels of stencilled and stamped numbers that introduces the human intervention into the cities' own cartographies.The outcome is not linear but rather reflective of a timeframe without humans present that created the emotion of missing.The final iteration of Surface-City as multiple city panels presents itself as a collective map of urbaness as the emotion of missing (Figure 6).

Surface-City roots
The Surface-City series has its roots in my overall visual research into urban consciousness over many years but particularly in an earlier visual mapping of urbaness as Sub-City.This earlier series used a similar methodology to investigate the invisible Sub-City by using the movement and the connections beneath the city as a metaphor for the collective consciousness that lies beneath urban materiality.In this case, it revealed the consciousness of interconnection itself and the resulting urban identity.Sub-City began with appropriated subway maps in multiple languages from metros, u-bahns, undergrounds, tubes and other subway configurations across the world.Preference was given to tourist maps that drew different urban spaces together through text, such as the London Tube map in Chinese.By reassembling and over drawing on these maps designed to be practical guides to transiting subways, the resulting works are a 'collective portrait of multiple journeys' (McCormick, 2009), of imaginations and emotions.Subway maps today rarely if ever relate directly to the city above.Beginning with Harry Beck's 1931 London Tube map, preference is given more to connection points than to geographical accuracy of the streets above.So, while my Sub-City practice was one of 'un-mapping' and 'remapping', the maps themselves had already gone through a process of erasure and recreation, much like the Surface-City pavement photographs.By digitally tattooing the Sub-City 'maps' onto my photographic back and grouping multiple maps together such as from Melbourne, Beijing and Vienna (MelBeiVien) or Melbourne, Shanghai (Mel-Shang) a new 'city' was created each time.The works reflected my mind space at the time and reinforced the idea of urbaness, that today we are 'born urban, born transient' (McCormick, 2009).The later work, Surface-City, reflects on the impact of the restriction of this transience (Figure 7).

Cartographic lessons
Mapping through art practice employs the imaginative intellect through a process of stages that the practice itself creates.At each stage responsive choices and decisions are made so that the final map gradually reveals itself to the artistic map maker as a series of learnings.This is evident in the Surface-City practice through what is revealed to the map maker at each stage of walking, photographing, juxtaposing and grouping of multiple city self-mappings to create a single map of urbaness as the emotion of missing, as discussed earlier.Reference back to the roots of Surface-City in Sub-City, an earlier visual mapping of urbaness, locates Surface-City within my overall research into the 'city'.Lessons learnt through the Sub-City art practice included the recognition that the tourist map is already a re-mapping of the subway map which led directly to an openness to the idea of city self-mapping in the Surface-City inquiry.Walking as mapping practice incorporated into both Surface-City as physical walking and its predecessor Sub-City as movement through transience, engages the map maker not only in the act of walking as a process of knowing but also becomes an interwoven intellectual exercise.Surface-City builds on Sub-City's transient practice and the resulting imaginative inquiry.This type of cartographic practice undertaken in Sub-City and more recently in Surface-City, adds an additional layer of knowledge to broader urban cartographic practices.In so doing the capacity to map consciousness and emotion is increased and knowledge and understanding of what 'city' might mean in the twenty-first Century is extended, particularly in Surface-City in a time of urban missing.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Maggie McCormick.Sub-City.Detail.Appropriated maps, photography and drawing printed on vinyl panels.72 cm H x 55 cm W.