Abstract
Mapping the City: the possibility of developing a rich picture place through experiments with conventional, digital and stolen techniques of mapping.

“With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental derives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influence, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the earliest navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism”. (Debord)

The paper describes how traditional, web and digital techniques of drawing, modelling and recording can be combined to produce a rich multifaceted picture of place, time, activity and experience.
The paper documents collaborative work undertaken by students of architecture, fine art and design as part of a short elective course aimed at considering the prominence of the city within contemporary creative practice, and what variety of methods could be deployed and appropriated to map, analyse and understand such a place. The course, which introduced a wide range techniques used by artists designers and architects to conceptualise, explore imagine and delineating their surroundings, and promoted the use of the surrounding city as a location for exploration and examination and a provocation for collaboration and discussion and action. The course also provided a locus for experimentation risk taking and invention, where possible free from the tacit, often artificial boundaries between disciplines and the anxiety of assessment. In particular sorties into the city proposed both finding and locating and getting lost, sometimes together, demanding new strategies to document the experience and communicate findings. In this we discovered the need to navigate between the digital and the traditional, between drawing by hand, modelling, digitizing and scripting. In sharing our findings and thoughts we also opened new possibilities for searching for information and records of place and sharing findings through Google, Vimeo and other web based sources. Through discriminating between the results we identified new practices and sequencing of activities melding digital and conventional means.
This paper aims to describe the processes that prompted discussion and action, and to show the outcomes of these evolving techniques.