Today, novel data allow us to describe and understand urban environments beyond what is visible. We can document and interpret the activity cycles that characterize each city at a macro scale, during daytime as well as nighttime. This information helps us understand how nighttime is governed, the policies that shape it, and the patterns it generates in each city. How do those conditions define a unique territory and the way we as humans experience it? Aiming to capture the micro scale and the personal relationship between people and place during nighttime requires other tools. Photography and an understanding of the history, social interactions, and culture of everyday life can provide an exceptional visual recording of the city and capture the nuanced aspects of our built environment that escape common datasets.
Nocturnal Landscapes: Urban Flows of Global Metropolises is a project that observes and analyzes cities at night from an interdisciplinary perspective. Curated by Iker Gil and organized by MAS Context, it is centered around the remarkable work of Barcelona-based 300.000 Km/s and Minneapolis-based David Schalliol, two MAS Context contributors whose work we first published a decade ago.
Architects Mar Santamaria and Pablo Martínez of 300.000 Km/s use Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) methodologies and data about urban life to compare the rhythms and regions of global cities through cartographic representations.
Photographer and sociologist David Schalliol captures nighttime in cities around the world with photographs selected from more than a decade of work. The photographs emphasize human interaction, highlight moments of celebration and mourning, protest and labor, memorialization and solitude.
Together, the work of 300.000 Km/s and David Schalliol provides an expansive look at global metropolises at night, combining analysis and observation, questioning the correlation of human activity and light, and revealing hidden aspects of our cities.
