Artist, teacher and cultural activist Christian Nold is running Bio Mapping, an innovative community mapping project where participants walk around neighbourhoods, wired up to a device which works like a lie detector. It measures Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), and is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in relation to particular geographic locations. These responses are then compiled into communal emotion maps which show the areas that people feel strongly about, where they feel stressed or excited. These maps begin to reveal the social spaces of a community and explore the relationships between people and their social and built environments. This project has been carried out in several cities including London and San Francisco.
As an interesting conceptual art work, it appeals to all my curiosities about art, urban places, science and maps, but oh, the urban planner in me can’t help but think about the practical possibilities of this idea. There are certainly similar community consultation exercises already used to create the same sort of important social and cultural analysis. But I think many parts of the consultation and planning process get clouded by our own unavoidable thinking and assumptions about how people should response in urban spaces, and what makes a place good or bad etc. Maybe that’s why I like this bio mapping idea – because there seems to be something powerful truthful about measuring a response that can’t lie or be complicated by intellect.
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