Pedagogical approaches to embodied topography: a workshop that unravels the hidden and imaginary landscapes of Elaionas

A workshop aiming to activate the sensory experience of individuals within the urban landscape was introduced to the students of a postgraduate course of architecture. The course seeks to explorecity complexity by mapping the urban phenomena. These readings provide the base for the creation of integral strategic interventions. In the two years it has run, students have shown a preference for analytical tools. This time however, they were asked to perform a series of exercises that sought to increase their body awareness, to help them navigate and read the landscape through their sensory perceptions. The authors of this paper contemplate on the use of mapping methodologies, embodied topography and its relation to the more hidden and imaginary landscapes of the city. They present the reader with a description of the workshop articulation, segments of the student projects and its pedagogical outcomes.


Introduction
As cities become increasingly complex, urban landscape is at the epicentre of architectural schools' attention.Urban landscape is intended here as the agglomeration of the interacting forces that shape the city, its spatio-temporal construct.
The number of agents shaping contemporary urban realities is unlimited and in a constantly dynamic state.It seems that no single interpretation or ideology can surmount the competing and sometimes even contradictory forces that exist in a city.
In this context, making informed decisions involves thorough study and freedom for the designer to choose which matters to address.
The postgraduate program of NTUA 1 that deals with the complexity of the city landscape has run a course for two years.The course attempts a methodological analysis of the urban phenomena with the aim to create strategies of integral urban interventions.In this context, the course presents the students with multiple ways of mapping the urban landscape, through conceptual and visual tools and their respective representational methodologies.It also asks them to come up with their own methods of recording the environment.Each tool presented in the course is determined by a network of relations.These immaterial networks, composed through the diverse readings, determine the city as a complex reality.In this sense, any attempt to intervene into the urban field, design, becomes an act of intentional prioritization.
During the course's two year run students have shown a preference toward the analytical tools [fig.1].It has been easier for them to work within a firmly regulated context with a fixed set of rules that allowed them to control their data and verify their design decisions through a set of algorithms or other forms of mathematically calculated processes.Experiential data on the other hand, were perceived as more difficult to decipher into informed design decisions.As students are pedagogically used to argue about their rationale measurable results are preferred in comparison to personalized sensory and experiential readings for they allude to certain objectivity.As Alberto Perez Gomez states: (...) The projection of scientific models onto human reality exemplified by certain aspects of behaviourism and positivistic psychology has hampered our understanding of the essential continuity between thought and action, between mind and body. 2 In the light of the above, the need of an experiential approach was introduced to this year's students via a workshop that took place last May.It was realized in collaboration with the Urban Emptiness Network, an initiative of the University of Edinburgh and the Milena Principle Foundation (Belgium) of a group of researchers from multiple disciplines who engage in urban mapping through sensory activities. 3The team had previously orchestrated a workshop symposium originally set in Edinburgh in mid February entitled "Silence, Narrative and the Intimacy".This paper will illustrate how mapping is used as an active component of the design process; how the sensual experience of topography lends to the understanding of hidden landscapes, and how the representation of these hidden landscapes facilitates the emergence of imaginary ones.It will further describe the structure of the workshop that took place in Elaionas and the methodology process that was used along with the products of the student endeavours.Finally, it will present the reader with a series of observations regarding the pedagogical implications of using embodied topography and its future potential.

Mapping as a design methodology
For a creative studio teaching, what is really crucial is the interpretative reading of the urban environment.In an educational framework, encouraging students to read and understand the urban fabric needs a creative experimental atmosphere within which they can find their own path of design expression through the reciprocal interaction of sensory and intellectual levels.Any type of landscape or urban information in the form of a map reading may be introduced at any moment of the process of a design studio a condition that seems to reinforce the originality of thinking.Mapping as a design tool introduced in the studio project i.e. in the Elaionas workshop, not only records the existing urban condition but introduces personal interpretations in relation to program, use and spatial qualities.It also facilitates creative thinking on both visual and conceptual level.
Maps support different stages of the planning process which involve rapid and effective storage and retrieval of information, various kinds of visualization as well as design itself, and different strategies for communicating information.Maps have become more complex and dynamic in their representation including references, graphs, photos, notes etc.They are being re-thought, made and used in a different way than the past.For Mark Dorian our way of looking, making and using maps has changed over the past thirty years notating a "cartographic turn" in key areas of architectural theory and practice: "(…) there has been an increasing use of mapping as a generative -that is as a formal, formative, and not simply analytical -process within architectural projects……But equally, an important aspect of the «cartographic turn» is the emergence, more recently, of a new "productivist" ethos informed, in particular, The new mapping techniques re-negotiate the urban landscape and architectural readings through the "eyes of the observer".Under this realm maps are not claiming the role of subjectivity but the one of interpretation and are creatively explored by planners, artists and architects.Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between a map and a tracing underlines the experimental character of a map in relation to the real 5 .
What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real.The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious.It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency (...) The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged "competence." Mapping as a psycho-geographic tool just like in the situationist model of the naked city decenters the attention of mapping from the spatial qualities to human activity; it focuses rather on how the city is inhabited through human everyday rituals and registers the spontaneous and more fluid nature of body movement 6 .(McDonough,   2002) In such records, personal experiential readings of the place may involve memory, movement and negotiation with the boundaries of the real and the mental.
Running a design studio poses always questions concerning the program and the teaching method; especially if this studio comprises the "reading" of a complex 4 Mark Dorian (2005) The structure of any background knowledge can be violated.The ability of de-coupling pre-existing rules is fundamentally creative and innovative.It is a cognitive capacity that leads to the formation of new rules.In order to be able to enter this new world students have to leave behind their 'preconceptions' about the way they walk and understand the urban fabric and look at things.In order to help the students to free themselves allowing their senses to guide them a precise process needs to be introduced.In that sense process needs to be explicit because it facilitates students to work mainly on the level of free associations 7 .

Embodied Topography
According to Edward S. Casey, etymologically, "topography" combines the Greek word for place (τόπος-topos) with the one for writing (γράφειν-graphein), relating lived spatiality with the notion of inscription.In the traditional use of the term, topos is connected to a specific mathematically defined location and graphein relates to "the model of a [two-dimensional] flat surface on which are inscribed images as well as words". 8Thus, traditionally, topography is "the science or practice of describing a particular place, city, town, manor, parish or tract of land; the accurate and detailed description or delineation of locality".Though, the active role of the body in the understanding of place, calls for a critical revisit of the term.
Is the bodily information of a landscape restricted only to what is noticeable and countable?How is the more transcendental aspect of reality mediated through the human body?And how does the individual's memory interfere in the reading of the urban landscape?The individual moving in it, either through habitual movements or pre-reflective ones, has the opportunity to participate in a "happening of place". 9 The path or the road becomes part of a whole with the man moving through it.
Being inside a landscape, therefore, he/she is involved in a dialogic relationship to it.In Simoneta Moro's terms: (...) to describe a city means to find the very roots of the self; we are the place (or places) to which we belong.By analogy, the place that we inhabit (in reality or even in dreams) becomes an extended, three dimensional page: by moving across it we make marks, invent new codes and find new keys to reading it.Any description of a city is necessarily a description of our presence in it -therefore, it is a conversation between ourselves and the place. 10 This embodied encounter involves a dynamic inter-connection of soundscapes qualities direct the individual's movement enhancing the meaning of his/her experience which is also influenced by an active "corporeal intentionality".
The latter according to Maurice Merleau Ponty relates to his/her available ability and potential to be engaged in an intentional sensual interrelation to the world. 12he individual thus participates in the event of place through the inter-communication of his/her senses, making the whole process a project towards movement.
"The body is a potentiality of movement and the perceptual field is an invitation to action" through the response to which the body-subject contributes to the "existential constitution of a spatial level".In this sense, movement involves any displacement of the body or bodily parts, examining the "habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviours".
In this phenomenal framework of the constant interaction between man and the city the previously Cartesian distinctive entities of psychic and physiological are unified through a holistic engagement of the human being to an intentional experiencing of a place.Acting specifically orientated in relation to objects, locations and events, the individual is always an active agent who experiences space and time as inter-dependent parts of the whole of which he/she is part.Place is thus conditioned by the notions of familiarity and participation as the person is invited to be engaged in its constitution: the happening of its organization and dwelling, both as an individual and as a member of a community.
Having definedplace (topos) as the embodied event discussed above, the workshop that was organized aimed at investigating the widening of the traditional definition of topography to include the expression of an experiential approach to the interaction between the individual and the city landscape.This possibly follows Edward S. Casey's concept of an embodied mapping of place 13 .

Hidden and imaginary landscapes
Besides using the body to register and evaluate the stimuli of the external world to act accordingly, the individuals' perception of the real greatly depends on their memory.Human perception is reconstructed through memory images.Gibson 14 was dubious about the boundaries of present and past experience when he said that: "the stream of experience does not consist of an instantaneous present and a linear past receding into the distance".Bergson, on the other hand, had long before distinguished the processes between pure memory, memory-image and perception: Perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the objects present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it.The memory-image, in its turn, partakes of the pure memory, which it begins to materialize, and of the perception in which it tends to embody itself: regarded from the latter point of view, it might be defined as a nascent perception.Lastly, pure memory, though independent in theory, manifests itself as a rule only in the colored and living image which reveals it. 15sclosing the reciprocal interrelation between experience and memory, Bergson's suggestion calls for the re-structuring of memory to be thought as an important component of design.In the latter we can see the journey of memory from the actual experience to the mapping of the experienced and the imagination of future.
As illustrated in Liane Gabora's recent Neurds Theory (Gabora, 2010), it is this kind of associative thought that emerges from the interaction of an individual to a place -a situation-that activates creativity. 16 architecture, the connection between perception of the exterior world and the designer's internal world is thoroughly described by Gero (Gero 2006)   (2000), one does not retrieve a stored item from memory so much as reconstruct it".(Gabora, 2010, p. 8).
17 According to Gero this process is unique as the individual's constructive memory produces unique representations by associating the external world to the internal one in regard to a place, a condition Gero refers to as situatedness (Gero and  Kannengiesser, 2002).
18 'I term situation any presented multiplicity.Granted the effectiveness of the presentation, a situation is the place of taking place, whatever the terms of the multiplicity in question' in Badiou's 'Being and Event', p. 24.
even if they come from the same individual as memory is always reconstructed and not retrieved.
Allowing the body to be responsive to the environment facilitates the discovery of hidden landscapes thus the urban qualities that usually remain unnoticed due to preconceptions.These are landscapes of subtle undergoing activity that is perceived and recognized once the individual becomes immersed in the experience of being in it.Immersion implies a process of gradual familiarisation with the urban landscape through diverse techniques.These techniques include bodily movements, performative actions (i.e.choreography, walking itineraries) or even digital and locomotive tools (soundwalks, smell-scape recordings) and explorations of human interactions.They aim to extended perceptions of the immediate landscape opening up to possible transformations.What they seek to create is a derive; the recognition of space as an event rather than the finite determination of the physical qualities of the landscape 19 .
For the creative mind, the designer, the aspect of a place is intertwined with its prospect; "perception, memory and imagination are in constant interaction" says Juhani Pallasmaa 20 .The dynamics of metaphor 21 allow for the emergence of imaginary landscapes.The combination of these techniques as a process facilitates the creation of mappings that unfold potential 22 .Maps can also reveal and produce potential."The function of maps", says Corner, "is not to depict but to enable, to precipitate a set of effects in time.Thus, mappings do not represent geographies or ideas; rather they affect their actualization".
The distinction here is between mapping as equal to what is ('tracing') and mapping as equal to what is and to what is not yet.In other words, the unfolding agency of mapping is most effective when its capacity for description also sets the conditions for new eidetic and physical worlds to emerge.Unlike tracings, which propagate redundancies, mappings discover new worlds within past and present ones; they inaugurate new grounds upon the hidden traces of a living context. 23 expect, anticipate, plan, or imagine creatively is to be aware of surfaces that do not exist or events that do not occur but that could arise or be fabricated within what we call the limits of possibility.
Maps can become active agents in producing imaginary landscapes, rather than being passive records of the place 24 .This stems from the belief that thought is inseparable from the medium in which it is formulated and expressed.Vygotsky 25 argues that, if one changes the tools of thinking available, the mind will have a radically different structure.The linkage between tool use and speech influences cognition.By analogy, the use of different design mediums expressively chosen, determines the development of design and thus any form of representation becomes part of the design process.Representations, understood as discursive concepts, should not be equated with mental copies or Images.They possess, in equal measure, a cognitive or mental aspect and a material aspect 26 .The use of an explicit strategy that leads to the discovering of hidden landscapes treats mapping as being able to function prior to conception, giving to it order and meaning.Thus the designer takes responsibility for the mapping process and for those issues that will contribute to the formation of imaginary landscape.

The workshop
The workshop took place in Elaionas the olive grove of ancient Athens.In Linguistics, metaphor, presupposes the establishment of a tension between twoterms in the sentence through the violation of a linguistic code.The metaphoricalstatement then appears as a reduction of this tension by means of a creative semantic pertinence within the sentence as a whole.The emergence of sense is accompanied by a transformation of the referential dimension, endowing metaphor with its power to re-describe reality.
As Corner states: "the various cartographic procedures of selection, schematization and synthesis make the map already a project in the making".(Corner, 1999, p. 216).Odos known from the antiquity as the road connecting Athens to Eleusis.Despite a key position in relation to the metropolitan center, the area remains completely cut off and inaccessible from its surrounding.It is surrounded by strong and fixed boundaries i.e. railway lines, high speed road axes.
It is an area occupied by industries mainly paper, scrape yards, logistics, and derelict urban voids, fragments of natural landscape (river, olive trees, and plantation fields) and abandoned buildings [fig.2-3-4].The absence of infrastructure and a proper street plan leads to a very chaotic, non traversable and introvert urban landscape that allows for marginalized behaviors.As a consequence the land cost is very low and the area is occupied by illegal immigrants, gypsies and recently by Syrians living temporarily in an organized camp.
[Fig.2] Scrap materials are stuck in empty lots, the refugee camp stands opposite the stream.The sound of running water, the wilderness of the untended nature and rust prevail in the landscape of Elaionas.
[Fig.3] Within the ruins of former industries and odorous garbage there is another occult and mystic landscape, one of concentration or even meditation and prayer.The silent walk made everyone seek contemplation, and slowly each one of the group drifted apart from the others.
For the purpose of the course an experiential workshop was briefed to introduce the ideas of body awareness in the process of urban reading, narratives and design.Three key tasks were suggested to the participants.A silent group walk along a predefined route that the students did not know beforehand was the first action.
It aspired to allow participants the possibility to walk through the landscape in order to gradually increase their level of awareness to what is happening around them.
The process was emphasized reflection and concentration on one's inner self (or thoughts), a meditation like itinerary in which the simple/elementary body movement provokes a spiritual bonding with the place.
A second walk followed during which the students were invited to interconnect with the landscape through the reading and documentation of its specificities also carrying an envelope/sketchbook with guides and material that was handed to them at the pause between the two walks along with sound recorders and the detailed brief of the event [fig.5].The crafting of the envelope was part of the briefing process, a process that was organically connected with actions of Urban Emptiness that took place in Edinburgh.The design of the envelope followed a process-specific method as informed by the briefing of the actions taking place during the workshop.Seeking to answer questions of fluidity, collection and bodily action, it is an envelope with different kinds of papers.The participants could use it as a drawing board, a notebook or even a container of material and immaterial elements of the landscape.The brief was also scored in a choreographical way.It was re-written in a more abstract way focusing on bodily actions.
This second walk required the students to seek the hidden landscapes behind the more obviousand easily measurable layers of information.The sketchbooks served the students' need to make records of their experience both verbal or visual 27 .
Sketching is personal and conditioned by the representational skills and choices of each participant which was what this workshop aimed to inspire 28 .
In an attempt to combine devices of analogical and digital mapping techniques, the students also received sound recorders to be used in order to create a soundwalk depending on their position and movement.The placing and editing of sound happened on their iOS mobile device using the GeoComposer app 29  Students were finally asked to perform a third task as well.The task required them to create three distinct narratives: individual stories, the story of the site as it is and a new site according to their subjective drive using any medium they preferred to 27 Following Gibson's suggestion to "preserve what was noticed and considered worth noticing".(Gibson, 1978)   28 For Purcell and Gero sketching is instrumental in visual thinking both for internal and external representations as it lingers between working memory, imagery and mental synthesis.(Purcell and Gero,  1998).
This also follows G. Goldschmidt claim that sketching has the power not only to transfer information but to transform them as well.(Goldschmidt, 2014).
[Fig.4] Scattered items, signs of deterioration on the buildings' walls and trivial objects dispersed in the streets are just a few of the unexpected encounters with the reality of Elaionas.
[Fig.5] The envelope/sketchbook(image on the left) and the application used to apply the sound piece at the location.express it by answering the questions: "where do you come from?", "where would you choose to live in the area?" and "how would this place would be going to be lived?".The students were asked to answer to questions of possible familiarity, affinity and proximity with Elaionas in an imaginative way and translate it through the narrative and representational techniques they wanted.

Workshop Pedagogical Outcomes
According to Perez-Gomez, "perception is our primary form of knowing and does not exist apart from the a priori of the body's structure and its engagement in the world".(Perez-Gomez, 1990, p.3) The senses that are activated during this walk, do not refer to the landscape as an external reality to be sensed, but they focus on the body that traverses the landscape and the impact the landscape has to its movement, and vice versa, the impact the body's presence has in the landscape.Most importantly, seeing that becomes seeing as 30 , just like listening to becomes listening as such 31 .Imagine walking in an empty street where one can hear his/her footsteps and how that interferes with his/her understanding of the place.Or instead, imagine someone walking in an unknown territory where the sudden appearance of a barking dog interrupts the itinerary and forces him/her to change route.
30 seeing asis determined by Gabriela Goldschmidt when the designer is using figural or gestalt argumentation while sketch-thinking while when seeing that the designer advances non figural arguments pertaining to the entity that is being designed.In G.  to outline her sense of the place as the elusiveness of a former glory.
Some of the students used video as a means of merging the in-situ experience of the place with the thoughts and memories they related to it.Text was also used to describe the sensation of the place, along with more specific comments about the way the place made the students feel.One of the students went as far as to write by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.The emphasis here falls upon what the architectural strategy/representation does rather than what it means." 4 [fig.5].The GeoPlayer app played the sound piece at the location, based on their geo-localised position tracked via GPS outdoors or via iBeacons indoors.Both apps were integrated with Google Street View, so that users could virtually experience both the visual environment and sonicscape together on the screen.Recording sounds, collecting elements from the landscape, taking pictures or sketching relations and impressions while immersed in one's thoughts explored the pedagogical potentialities of embodied topography.Creating new memories in a landscape, synchronizing the body movement to the landscape's inner rhythm and rituals, avoiding obstacles, reaffirming one's location by looking back and forth, exploring limits in walking, being scared by unknown sounds, running away from displeasing scents are some of the undergoing events that occurred and were registered in student documents [fig.6].

[
Fig. 6] Students are shown walking down Iera Odos, getting instructions, receiving their envelopes and downloading their sound recordings to the organizing team's computer.[Fig.7] Student project from workshop (St.B.).This pedagogical model despite being bound to the place in which it occurs, faces mainly to the participants' inner itineraries and their ability to increase their awareness when attempting to map the urban landscape.Furthermore, it encourages the creation of new schemata of representation as documented traces of this newly acquired awareness.The process of immersion as described in the previous sections enables the designer to open himself or herself in new combinations of the elements of the landscape.The designer is responsible for both registering and representing his/her own intentions, expressed through the particular information that he/she chose to collect and the way/method he/she used to do it.In sensory maps urban landscape becomes a deducted internal interpretation of the author's sense of re-ality.In the case of the student St. B., for example, collages -the restructuring of images in an apparently arbitrary sequence-refer to her own depiction of reality while her sense of the place is enhanced by the predominant sound of the running waters of the Aghia Zoni's stream that she recorded while walking [fig.7].Bringing together disparate elements of a place is evident by both the use of collage and audio archives to record the aural context of her encounters.Her closing reference to Camus quote 32 is even more intriguing as it attributes Elaionas with a quality she remembered from the description of an imaginary literary landscape.It is these thinking threads that this pedagogy aspires to create; the opening of communication with the inner self, the individuals' body and memory.Collages were used by most of the students to illustrate Elaiona's affinities with other existing or imaginary landscapes.In the case of K.V. the natural milieu of Elaionas brought back the image of a Klimt painting.Drawing sequences were also used to reconstitute human activity from random traces.In the case of Ph.Ch., the drawing sequence shows a man waiting at a corner, a story improvised out of the infinite cigarette butts found on the spot [fig.8].32 "... Evenings in these parts must be a sort of mournful solace.Now, in the full glare of the morning sun, with everything shimmering in the heat haze, there was something inhuman, discouraging, about this landscape..."Albert Camus, THE STRANGER, Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert, VINTAGE BOOKS, N.Y., 1946, pg.11. [Fig.8] Student projects from the workshop (on the left K. V. and on the right Ph. Ch.).[Fig.9] Student project from workshop (E.Kr.).Sound has informed their photos or sketches or their photo collages.In the case of E. Kr. selected areas of Elaionas [fig.9] were attributed a main identity through a specific word which was in turn associated with an image of another place (imaginary or not) or an object, while each and every one of these threads corresponded to a sound she recorded from that particular area.She too borrowed a literary metaphor from the Greek poet C. Cavafis and his poem: "The God abandons Antony"