Getting a Ley of the Land: Fostering Urban Legibility Through Ley Line Mapping, Lightning Talk (7 min)

csherma8@uwo.ca

Cities are challenging texts to decipher, but the task is not impossible. In adapting Alfred Watkins’s (1925) widely criticized theory of Ley Lines (or ‘routes of power’), I posit that we can establish a methodology for deciphering these urban enigmas in a wholly unique way, facilitating orientation within these spaces which goes beyond the mere use of street signs and other textual signifiers. How a city allows or denies access goes virtually unnoticed by the wanderer, but adapting Watkins’s ideas and charting numerous urban elements (coffeeshops, graffitied walls, traffic hotspots, etc.) exposes narratives of facilitation and interruption, and literally gives shape to a city’s multiplicity. This method also highlights sites of psychical overlap hitherto unnoticed by wanderers, exposing intersections and parallels between disparate elements. Despite the pseudo-scientific reputation of Watkins’s theory, it nonetheless facilitates a new way of reading a space resistant to legibility.

https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wlgisday/2021/lightningtalks/30