Dr Min Kyung Lee of Bryn Mawr College is the first Banister Fletcher Fellow, and this lecture is the first in a series of events she is offering under the title ‘The Quantification of Urban Space’.

By the late eighteenth century, all governmental plans of the French capital were based on ground surveys using triangulation. An expensive and laborious task that required building towers and hauling heavy equipment, the method consisted of translating the urban terrain into a gridded image based on imaginary chains of triangles. This geometric practice of triangulation and its rendering into a map replaced qualitative methods of describing the city, in which the resulting image rehearsed a graphic argument of objectivity and technicity. 

Join Dr Min Kyung Lee as she opens this new collaborative programme with this talk that will address how the surveying and the drawing of these maps of Paris as well as how their gridded logic gained authority and constituted the emergence of what has come to define modern space.

Please click here to register.

Programme

This is a first of many Banister Fletcher events. The Quantification of Urban Space programme, imagined by Dr Min Kyung Lee, is divided into two parts: the first part being “Mapping and Measures”, and the second part being “Speculation and Mismeasures”.

Each part includes a key-note lecture, a panel discussion, and a workshop session. All events will be delivered online. The workshops are aimed at graduate students and junior faculty drawn from the partner institutions of ULIP, UCL and QMUL, but participation is welcome from interested parties coming from other places, and if you are interested in participating, you are invited to get in touch with Anna-Louise Milne on anna-louise.milne@ulip.lon.ac.uk.

If you are interested in viewing the full list of events for this programme, please click here to view further information and a list of scheduled events.