The Chorography of the Modern City

Garcia De Cortazar Galleguillos, Gabriela (2017). The Chorography of the Modern City. PhD thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.0000bebe

Abstract

Until the nineteenth century, space was represented and produced through mathematically constructed drawings: plans and sections captured buildings and the scientific map recorded the territory. The development of technologies of transport brought crisis into this static and balanced world as speed and displacement radically reconfigured the subject’s orientation. This thesis examines the maps, plans, guides and signs produced in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth century to accompany railway travelling, motoring, underground commuting and walking in the city, arguing that they indeed became chorographies of the modern metropolis. These modern chorographies not only exploited the possibilities of the graphein in order to deal with the complexities of space, time and movement, but they also prescribed a very specific knowledge, one that dictated a new way of being in space. In fact, they created a new set of spaces altogether.