Exploring Urban Geography in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
Abstract
This paper builds on previous work that explored the contribution of photography to teaching urban geography (Sidaway, 2002; Hall, 2009; Sanders, 2007; Rose, 2006). That work focused on how photography could be used to acquaint university students with the skill of “directed observation”. It argued that teaching geography with photography is not merely asking students to go into the field and take pictures but rather, it is to sensitize them to the process of looking with intention (Sanders, 2007) and appreciating what the camera sees. While the picture taker decides what to photograph and which perspective to capture; the camera’s eye behaves as a curious child whose eye catches a glimpse of everything. Here, we explore a different concern driven by the desire to extend the reach of the photograph beyond where it uncomfortably resides (as one of several tools in a large established toolkit of visual methods (Becker, 2004; Brown, 2011; Harper, 2002; Pauwels, 2010; Pink, 2003; Baetens, 2009) and deploy it as a medium of translation – enabling students to “see” written texts that may be difficult, uninteresting, incomprehensible, or cognitively “invisible”. We refer to this translation, unpacking, or decoding as re-presenting text (Hall, 2010). Re-presenting and interpreting what we read is the essence of building knowledge (Hibbing and Rankin-Erickson, 2003). Accordingly, while camera technology can certainly be used to capture the landscape as it is a receptacle for human ideas and will, we suggest here that it can also be a medium of translation-an intermediary between the landscape of action and the topography of consciousness. In our view this interpretative element that the photograph provides; transforming and visually representing text is as important – if not more – than the act of actually taking the picture. We use the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino as fodder for making our case. This process is not unlike what has been referred to in other fields as active learning (Prince, 2004); subjective semiotics (Krogstie et al., 2006); knowledge building (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2006); and re-engineering (Buchanan, 1998).References
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