Feng Jicai edited the "Tianjin Cultural Map: The City I Love to Study" pocket book and cultural map
Baidu map panoramic map Tsinghua University old school gate virtual scene punch card message screenshot
The "May Day" holiday is coming. Whether we "stay at home" and "travel in the clouds" at home, or measure our city with our feet when conditions permit, the cultural map is a good "city exploration" tool and "Pincheng" guide.
More than 100 years ago, urban sociologists abroad began to apply maps to social space research. In their view, the city is not only the arrangement of buildings, but also means the interaction of people. To understand a city, it is necessary to draw a cultural map of different segments and different groups of people in the city. People's daily cultural practices and their cartographic presentation are gradually getting more attention. Cultural maps should not only describe the material cultural resources of a specific region, including the distribution of cultural facilities, cultural organizations, cultural industries, cultural heritage, etc., but also reflect the intangible cultural features of a specific region, including cultural customs, cultural memory, cultural identity, cultural values and other general conditions. In recent years, cultural maps have not only played an important role in social practice, academic research and government planning, but also under the development orientation of the integrated development of culture and tourism, the living inheritance of cultural heritage, and the innovative integration of geographic information services and local life services, it has become more and more deeply rooted in ordinary people's homes.
Three-dimensional information platform
When it comes to maps, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is the tourist map sold by cultural scenic spots. In fact, the amount of information carried by today's maps, especially the information carried by urban cultural maps, has long been far greater than in the past.
The close integration of cartographic technology and modern information technology has made the printing space that can only accommodate symbols and simple descriptions become a more inclusive, expansive and read-write digital space under the support of geographic information databases. This provides a media technology guarantee for us to store, display and update the information of geo-marking points in a more three-dimensional and diversified way such as images, text, audio, video, panoramic VR, etc.
Feng Jicai's "Tianjin Cultural Map: The City That Loves My Studies" was sent to new students along with the admission letters of some undergraduates. This set of cultural maps consists of a small pocket book and a map, and behind it is an information platform that can be continuously expanded and updated. About 200 cultural points on the map are equipped with two-dimensional codes, which can be scanned to see more graphic information. More importantly, the graphic videos in the database can be constantly updated, and even the videos and photos created by students in the process of "exploring the city" and "reading the city" with the book as a window can also be added. In this way, the Tianjin Cultural Map becomes a "living" map, and the reader of the map, as the real protagonist of the book, becomes the co-author of the cultural map.
In fact, today's more cultural maps include dual versions of "physical print maps + online mobile maps" when they are developed. For example, the printed map of "Shanghai Red Culture Map" expresses the most core and condensed content closely related to the red theme, and readers can get the information they care about most at the first time; the online mobile map allows users to further understand the history of red architecture, the life experience of red characters and the story of the red revolution, etc., and obtain a richer knowledge of Shanghai red culture.
Service platform for cultural life
Today, maps are also embedded with a variety of travel navigation and local life services, meeting the dual needs of people to rationally plan their lives and explore discoveries. Under such a general trend, the cultural map is no longer just the presentation of static information, but at the same time carrying the same city services, it helps the culture to enter the people's lives in a more fashionable, fresh and people-friendly way.
For example, the "Wisdom Map of Peking Opera Cultural Journey" to be launched online by the Beijing Overseas Cultural Exchange Center not only displays dozens of ancient Peking Opera buildings, celebrity former residences, guild halls and performance venues in Beijing in the form of graphics, text, audio and video, guides users to witness the rise and glory of the national essence in the field visit to Peking Opera, relives the good stories of Pear Garden hidden in the streets and alleys, but also takes into account practicality, provides tourism service content covering six elements of eating, living, traveling, traveling, shopping and entertainment, and closely cooperates with cycling and experience related to Peking Opera culture 3. Performances and other city activities.
The combination of map applications with life services and activities in the same city may not be a new thing for young people who often jump to digital map applications from platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Dianping, but in addition to the popular "punch card map", we can also use more professional and thematic cultural maps to make the city experience not only have relaxed and fashionable consumption behavior, but also absorb the heavy and rich urban cultural heritage, so that the journey to explore the city is not only a "landscape tour" and a "consumption tour", but also a "cultural tour".
A platform for the construction of urban memory
Many cultural maps will choose "hand-drawn" forms of more individual temperament and emotional temperature to present geographic information. This also means that the process of drawing and disseminating cultural maps is often also a process of constructing regional cultural memory and cultural identity.
In the "Remember Jiangning" activity, The streets of Jiangning Road in Shanghai organized local residents to draw a cultural map of the community. In the end, the "Memory Jiangning" cultural map includes 5 categories and 30 landmarks such as red memory sites, national industrial plants, and excellent historical buildings, including not only buildings that have survived but have changed their functions, but also many landmarks that have completely disappeared and remain only in the memory of residents. For example, the map marks the former Guomian No. 4 Factory on the boundaries of the current residential area, and is accompanied by an illustration of the impression of the factory gate in the 1970s provided by the local "Old Jiangning". In the illustration, two large trees are prominently represented as the characteristics of the factory site in the memory of "Old Jiangning". Such mapping undoubtedly provides an opportunity for residents to revisit collective memory and construct local identities.
Another example is that Baidu Maps has a panoramic map function and supports punching in and leaving messages in virtual scenes. As a result, users have spontaneously carried out "cloud punching" in some urban cultural landmarks. For example, at the old gate of Tsinghua University, we can not only read various feelings of revisiting the hometown, but also see a lot of yearning for the future. These punch cards and exchanges across time and space express people's perceptions and imaginations of the place, and carry the profound emotional and meaningful connection between people and the city.
Walking in the city, the cultural map is not only a guide for us to read the dictionary of the city and experience the city, but also more and more a carrier of urban cultural life, and further construct people's love and identification with the city.
The illustrations in this article are provided by the author of this article