Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In the 1950s, Urbanist Kevin Lynch’s research project on the city led to two seminal books: “The Image of the City” in 1960 and “A view from the Road” in 1964. During this research, Kevin Lynch described the perceptual impact of transportation infrastructure on how the city is perceived. They identified two primary ways infrastructures influence our perception of the city: As a point of view to see the city, from the infrastructures themselves, developed in “The View from the Road,” and as a “dominant elements in our cities, that should be expressive forms with an emotional and symbolic value.” Our research roots itself in Lynch’s project and explores the interaction between infrastructures and landscape in the Wenzhou region, south of Zhejiang, China. Its suburban landscape is shaped by two infrastructural networks: the historical Wenruitang rivers system, on top of which a series of contemporary transportation grids are overlapped. From infrastructural palimpsest results in a fragmented landscape where traditional settlements along the Wenruitang are juxtaposed with tower clusters and surrounded by highways and rail tracks floating above the ground. As seen from above, this landscape is illegible. They find their logic and legibility from the road or the river. To understand this landscape, one has to overlap the different perceptions from the different infrastructural systems to create what Bruno Latour calls an “Oligopticon”: an addition of partial and discontinuous views on a given object, here the Wenzhou territory.