The performativity of urban context

The idea of how the city should perform is particularly important when urban environment is understood as a setting of everyday living. There has been a growing interest in the notion of performativity in architecture and the urban environment (Leatherbarrow 2009; Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005). It underlines the shift of thinking of the built environment from “what it is” to “what it does”. The idea of performativity in an urban context highlights the importance of the actual performance in urban context (Borden 2001) which forms the real meaning of spaces in the city.

The notion of performance has been addressed in urban design practice and inquiry in different ways. Some studies attempt to explain the relationship between the spatial configuration of space and the social behaviour of the users through quantitative methods, such as space syntax analysis (Hillier 2007), which build upon network-based analysis. Some others attempt to identify various spatial qualities that become the parameters of the desired condition of urban life based on empirical observations. For example, Gehl’s study (2011) emphasizes the social aspects of the city and suggests some design principles based on the understanding of the desired urban activities.

Another kind of approach considers how the city could be read or comprehended, as attempted by Lynch (1960) in his seminal empirical research on cities on the roles of urban elements in contributing to the legibility of the city, as well as by Downs and Stea (1973) in their studies of the cognitive mapping of the city. Another study by Ewing and Clemente (2013) proposes the protocols for measuring the common perceptual built environments—imageability, visual enclosure, human scale, transparency, and complexity to determine the prescribed quality of an urban environment.

These studies provide various frameworks to understand urban forms and urban elements (Oliveira 2016). They focus on spatial configuration and urban typology which are related to particular social behaviour, perceptual properties and patterns of activities thus enabling the formulation of urban planning and design principles. However, most approaches build upon the observation of modern western cities where the level of formality tends to be taken for granted and thus could not adequately address the contemporary urban issues, particularly in developing countries. Informalities that are persisting in developing country mean that the cities are constantly adapting (Dovey and Kamalipour 2018). Most often, the realities of urban spaces occur beyond its predefined, formal types (Atmodiwirjo 2008). The practice of urban design needs to address the various spatial practices that are emerging as a part of such informalities and adaptive nature of the cities.

De Certeau (1984) used the term “ways of operating” to refer to the way of “doing things” (p. xi) to denote the actual performance in space. Ways of operating “constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” (p. xiv). The idea of operation as key to the performativity of urban space will become the main standpoint of this paper, as an attempt to develop an alternative way of seeing the city that can address more appropriately the users’ appropriation of urban space.

Performance of the city within space–time: the challenge of representation

There are at least two ways in which the idea of performance of the city may change the way we understand urban context. First, the understanding of ‘site’ as the context of performance requires a shifting of idea from ‘site’ as a geometrically defined parcel into the more active “milieu” (Corner 1999, p. 224). This changing idea of ‘site’ reflects the shift of the contemporary structure of urban society, which is no longer stable. The ‘site’ is no longer stable and static, but it becomes unstable yet more dynamic and active. Secondly, by acknowledging the ever-changing nature of the ‘site’ as a contemporary space, we become aware of temporality in the operation of the city. It is important to acknowledge urban architecture not as “a fixed and controlling frame” but as “an open framework that can accommodate the multiple actions of time” (Till 2009, p. 116). The contemporary space of the city needs to be represented as a network of trajectories (De Certeau 1984), rather than as static or stable entities. They are characterized by the temporal flux, which often brings uncertainty, disorder and chaos, as the aspects that make up the experience of everyday life in the city.

The understanding of an urban context based on its performativity requires an alternative mode of representation of urban space, which poses a significant challenge to the practice of urban mapping. Corner (1999) suggests the role of mapping to reveal the potential of an urban space. The mapping practice should, therefore, be seen as a performative act that addresses the cultural, social and political aspects of everyday life. It is a practice capable of uncovering the reality and proposing alternatives.

The performative nature of mapping is said to be temporal (Vaughan 2009). Further, mapping should be understood as process of becoming rather than a fixed process (Crampton 2009) which allows the concept of time to be introduced into design practices. By incorporating time into the process, mapping becomes a communicative device to express ideas and latent spatial possibilities, which might be different from the abstraction that is irrelevant to both the temporal and social aspects of a lived space. This paper proposes the performative mapping approach as a means of revealing the ways of operating in the spaces within a city. In particular, we argue that such ways of operating could be revealed through a mapping practice based on narratives.

Performative urban mapping: generality versus particularity

The continuing development of geographical information systems (GISs) and digital methods inevitably changes both the ontology and epistemology of urban mapping (Dovey et al. 2017). Indeed, it has shifted the capacity and accuracy of complex spatial data harvesting, processing and presenting, thereby enabling the development of various means of mapping. Dovey et al. (2017) suggest some interesting mapping frameworks reflecting the contemporary issues concerning the sociospatial and temporal aspects of a city. Their frameworks rely on the roles of maps as ‘abstract’ tools for representing the data so as to gain insight into how a city works. The availability of GISs has allowed for an unprecedented capability in terms of handling a large dataset to produce a map on an urban scale. However, since the map was based on the urban morphological approach, it principally focuses on the story of the city, which is mainly prescribed, typological and formal. Moreover, its static graphical representation tends to freeze the social and temporal aspects of an urban environment. Acknowledging the limitations of the process, Dovey and Kamalipour (2018) suggest the need to seek alternative ways of handling the smaller, unpredictable phenomena associated with an urban environment.

The incorporation of the temporal aspect of an urban environment has been attempted in previous mapping studies. For instance, Neuhaus (2011) proposes the use of tracking data and a GIS to represent the ticking of an urban environment. The use of empirical tracking data to learn the performance of an urban environment provides an interesting model with which to view the time–space ordering of a city (Schaick 2011). Another strategy has been developed by codifying the spatial–temporal configurations into chronotopes (Mulíček and Osman 2018; Dovey et al. 2017). This approach attributes the sum of places to predefined temporal pattern, thereby providing the geographical views of spatial–temporal pattern. While this method is highly beneficial in terms of synthesizing the time–space problem (Schaick 2011), its generalizing strategies mean that it can only reveal the big narrative of an area.

The mapping of movement provides a starting point for extending the ideas of performance and operation. The operation of movement is often lost during the mapping process, since it is “transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map” (de Certeau 1984, p. 97). The micro-reading of the spatial narrative of one’s passage of movement shows how the space is actually lived (Paramita and Schneider 2018). Marušić (2011) integrates the open-ended codification system of behavioural observation into a GIS map so as to produce a series of maps of the behavioural spatial patterns that reflect the occupancy during different times. The mapping reflects the physical attributes of places in relation to their different uses; however, it depends to a significant extent on the typology of common events and activities, which means that it potentially discounts some interesting events that might come as a surprise.

The above examples illustrate how various mapping attempts benefit from the increasing capacity of digital technology in terms of recording, handling and processing large amount of data, thereby producing a mapping that represent the total view of urbanity. However, they cannot appropriately represent the actual operations or the peculiarity of everyday experiences. An alternative attempt to describe the complex urban reality has been made by Latour et al. (2004), who use digital media to describe the ‘sociological opera’ of Paris. They use an interactive web-based medium that allows users to actively follow the plot of images and text, enabling them to grasp both the commensurable and the incommensurable aspects of Paris. They contrast the desire for the totality of Paris with the peculiarity of places using a storytelling style. We see that providing the more tangible information, such as geographical references to the story could promote the bridging of such contrasting values.

This paper argues that an alternative mapping approach is needed to bridge the gap between the need to view the totality of the urban context and the peculiarity of everyday experiences and operations. It attempts to maintain the irreducible narratives of the urban experiences while also providing a certain level of overview to represent the totality of the context. The totality and particularity should be seen as complementary in constructing the discourse of urbanity. The integration of these two modes of viewing the city could be brought about through the interactivity of the digital as the important means of departing from the view of the context as a static framework. The approach developed in this paper is motivated by the irreducible nature of urban narratives as well as the potential dynamic quality of the digital medium. As the basis for developing a mapping approach that could capture the narrative of urban everyday, the following section will discuss the roles and structure of narrative as a means of representing the complexity of everyday events in an urban context.

Narrative and operation of the urban everyday

Everyday narrative is considered as an appropriate form to address the complexity of time–space (Till 2009; Benjamin 1969). Narrative has the transformative power in transcribing the spatial and temporal dimension of urban context into another form of representation (Havik 2012). The presence of narrative is embedded within everyday events. Thus, the architectural narrative becomes a mode of representation that allows the revealing of naturally emerged events. “Narratives arise spontaneously in the course of navigating the world… This reading of architecture doesn’t require an architect to have ‘written’ it” (Coates 2012, p. 13). In this way, narrative also gives “voice” to the actors, suggesting the agency of actors and acknowledging their role in the making of urban everyday experiences.

Narrative and its ability to reveal ways of operation

All of us have stories within us, be they descriptive of the past or fictional for the future, anecdotal or practical. Stories have within them elements that are both personal and social; they become a means of describing one’s place in the world, of locating the individual within shared spaces. Stories are the place where the imagination finds lines of flight. (Till 2009, p. 114)

Narrative possesses a transformative power because of its ability to convey everyday experience through storytelling. Storytelling is strongly correlated with the ability to exchange experience (Benjamin 1969). Stories include both elements of reality and elements of imagination. On the one hand, “the stories arise out of experience of the world, and thus have a grounding in reality” while at the same time it also has “suggestive and imaginative effects” (Till 2009, p. 114) that could bring the potential transformation. The transformative power of narrative lies in the ability to move forward and backward, to and from different times, within the story.

Narrative has an ability to articulate “ways of operating” or doing things which characterizes the urban everyday (De Certeau 1984). The articulation of the ways of operating is to “make explicit the systems of operational combination which also compose a “culture” (p. xi). In revealing the ways of operation, the study of everyday culture entails both the particular and the general (Highmore 2002). On one hand, the features of everyday life suggest particularity: “The agency of individuals in daily life, forms of resistance or non-conformity to social structures, a stress of feelings and experience” and, on the other hand, everyday life could be seen “as realm of generality tends to privilege social structures, institutions and discourses, and to see these as a domain of power determining the everyday” (p. 5). Everyday culture includes generality and specificity as narrative could capture both of them.

The particularity of the everyday may come in the forms of “the minute and the mundane” of the everyday as mentioned by Benjamin (in Keith 2003, p. 414). Benjamin further rejected the simplified view of the city and instead suggested to look into the “marginal detail of everyday life”, while at the same time Benjamin also acknowledged “the totalities of panorama” (pp. 414–416). The narrative potentially captures both detailed and panoramic views of the urban everyday and in this way could reveal the ways of operation of the urban everyday. In this way, the use of narrative becomes a way to avoid a simplified view of the city.

Based on the discussion above, there are two main components of everyday narratives which could reveal the ways of operating in the everyday urban context. First, its ability to move forward and backward through different time as the foreground against the static image of the city. Secondly, its ability to look into both the generality and particularity of everyday events. At the same time narrative could provide minute details of events and the totality of everyday experience through time. These two main components would become the basis for developing a mapping practice that highlights the everyday ways of operation.

Space–time organization of narrative

Narrative contains both temporal and spatial constructs. The organization of narrative as a way to reveal everyday reality requires both elements of space and time. The organization of time–space in an urban context is projected in the narrative through the ideas of map and tour (De Certeau 1984). Spatial stories are always oscillating between “map” as “a plane projection of totalizing observations” (p. 119) and “tour” as an itinerary or a discursive series of operations. This idea may transform the practice of mapping, which should no longer works as projection, but as a representation of actions, which are the manifestation of operations.

Narrative does not stand alone, it requires the reader to read and understand it. The structure of narrative contains the movement of forward and backward within the narrative itself, and the relationship between the narrative and its reader (Friedman 1993). The reading and interpretation of narrative “involves an interpretation of the continuous interplay between the horizontal and vertical narrative coordinates” (p. 14). Thus, the way narrative is structured could not be independent from the way it is read and interpreted. This suggests the interplay among the story, its actors and its readers, and this interplay should become the important component of the mapping practice.

In the following section, we will describe how the narrative structure becomes the basis for mapping approach that could better represent the performativity of the urban environment, in particular to reveal the “ways of operating” of the urban everyday.

Mapping stories: narrative representation of urban everyday

This paper attempts to explore the practice of mapping in a digital medium as a way of representing the narrative of urban everyday. Map is a form of abstraction of the physical or conceptual world (McCarthy 2014). It is a device that has systems, rules and signs to make the abstract into being both tangible and known (Caquard 2013). As a form of abstraction with a particular system, the map has an intermediary nature between abstraction and the phenomenon abstracted (Vaughan 2009).

The practice of mapping is linked with our ability to handle such an intermediary nature. This could be achieved by relating the narrative of lived experience to its place and use the geo-referenced narratives to provide better understanding of lived experience or provide different interpretation of places (Kwan and Ding 2008; Bell et al. 2015; Joliveau 2009). There is a potential in design practices, that the geo-referenced everyday narrative could provide a performative reading of urban context. The everyday narrative, that brings “a chain of spatializing operation” (De Certeau 1984, p. 120), could be made tangible by grounding the everyday stories into static geographical references, creating a stage for its spatializing operation to perform.

The practice of mapping in performative digital medium

The mapping of everyday narrative into a geographical framework would propel the static location into a topological framework of narrative, situated by the operation that makes it “in function”. This dynamic quality could not be achieved in conventional geographical projections that provide static and stable representations. The digital medium provides the needed interactivity (Ishizaki 2003) in order to create the dynamics of representation of narrative and enable the better apprehension of complex social phenomena (Yaneva 2012). Digital medium allows us to work on different levels of detail (Cockburn et al. 2008) in both temporal and spatial dimensions, while maintaining its continuity that allow the interactive relationship, between the audience and the mapping medium.

The practice of mapping in digital medium follows the process of mapping that generally involves three basic operations: setting up fields, extracts and plotting (Corner 1999). However, the nature of digital medium is different from the common medium in which the map is drawn, which will affect how these three basic operations are performed.

Fields are the analogical equivalent to the actual ground; they represent the graphical system as the base of the map. “The system includes the frame, orientation, coordinates, scale, units of measure and the graphic projection” (Corner 1999, p. 229). In digital medium, the field is abstract and discrete. Unlike a piece of paper that records the stroke of pen directly onto its surface, digital medium reacts differently by transforming the analogue quality of things into discrete bytes of information (Allen 2009). The creation of the field in digital medium could be achieved through computer programming. The field creation process could elaborate on its ability to produce dynamic forms, to interpret gestures and behaviour, to simulate reality, and to integrate various media (Reas and Fry 2007).

The second operation is extract—“Things that are then observed within a given milieu and drawn onto field… they are selected, isolated and pulled-out from their original seamlessness with other things; they are effectively ‘de-territorialized’” (Corner 1999, p. 230). The extraction process becomes a systematic transformation from narrative into entities (Caquard 2013). In our approach, we use the series of localized events as entities that construct the itinerary that could be mapped within a geographical framework. The observed narratives were sorted out into a series of meaningful events before being mapped onto the field. The extraction of the urban narrative is conducted based on the acts of walking, on how the body moves through an itinerary (Vaughan 2009). In this way, mapping acknowledges the human scale measurement of time and distance when exploring the places and marks them accordingly. The observed narratives need to be recorded manually into field notes before being entered into digital medium.

The final operation is plotting: “the ‘drawing out’ of new and latent relationships that can be seen amongst various extracts within the field… depending on one’s criteria or agenda… Plotting produces a ‘re-territorialization’ of sites” (Corner 1999, p. 230). The “drawing out” of the relationship within the narratives should not be static; it should allow the dynamic reading of the narratives. This could be possible through the use of digital medium, in which space and time could be represented as a network of trajectories (Virilio 2000). The plotting into the digital field could produce the landscape of events that are constructed by the urban narratives within its various contexts as represented in a geographical framework.

The development of Mapping Stories

Based on the understanding of the potential of digital medium as a performative mode of representation, we developed Mapping Stories with two main purposes. First, to attach the tangible, yet abstract geographical references into itineraries of everyday narrative as a way to understand its operational aspects. Second, to enable the way of reading that allows the reader to reach the particularity and totality of the narrative simultaneously. The development of Mapping Stories needs to cover both the content of information as well as the form of representation (Vaughan 2009) that together allows for the complete reading of the urban narrative.

The prototype of Mapping Stories was developed in Processing, an open source text programming environment that focuses on computer graphics and interaction techniques (Reas and Fry 2007). The interactive map and geo-visualization was created using the Unfolding library (Nagel et al. 2013) that enables the user to interact dynamically with geo-visualized data in different zoom levels. The prototype acts as a mapping field that allows the user to extract the observed narrative as a series of events. Each event contains detailed information, such as textual narrative, actors, date, time and location. The extracted narrative is directly presented on the screen as topologically connected dots on a given geographical framework to represent its geo-spatial dimensions. The basic principles of mapping are illustrated in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
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The process of Mapping Stories

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The interfaces were built into two modes: the input mode that allows the user to extract the narrative information into the map field and the reading mode that allows the user to follow the recorded narrative within a geographical map interactively. The interactivity is achieved by creating a simple graphical user interface that allows the user to plot the narrative information that is broken into a series of events in a geographical reference. The user could add more detailed information on each narrative entity on the input panels. Table 1 presents the elements and user interactions in Mapping Stories interfaces.

Table 1 Elements and user interaction in input and reading modes of Mapping Stories
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Mapping Stories employs multi-level visual strategy (Lam et al. 2007; Cockburn et al. 2008) through the interface that allows the narrative information to be displayed at the different levels of presentation. These strategies allow the users to work on different levels of details in terms of both temporal and spatial entities, enabling the user to focus on particular information within its larger assemblage, but maintaining the integration of information within the whole narrative.

In creating such multi-level interface, we deployed some techniques in separating the visualized narrative information, both spatially and temporally. The separation of narrative information allows the user to manage and navigate through different displays of presentation of the observed narrative. Spatial separation creates simultaneous displays on both a general and a detailed level of information (Cockburn et al. 2008). It enables different presentation of information on separated displays. The user interacts with each display independently, but the actions will be immediately reflected in the corresponding display. Temporal separation enables the presentation of information at different times (Cockburn et al. 2008) that occupy the same display space. It requires the user’s actions to unfold the desired information, in order to experience the temporal sequence of the narrative.

The multi-level visual strategy enables us to express the temporal dimension of the narrative. The user should interface with the maps interactively by selecting, following and reading the narrative, both temporally and spatially. By combining the separation of temporal and spatial elements of the designated interface, we attempt to bring the performativity aspects of the narrative into two-dimensional geographical map surfaces.

Mapping Stories also contains multi-level details of information. The detailed information is hidden within the series of points of events displayed on the geographical map, and they should be revealed by the user in order to access the complete information. The unfolding of information requires the user to explore the hidden narrative within the map, creating the connection between the medium and the audience. The map could not be experienced in a passive manner; the user should actively act and react toward the mapping medium in order to read the ways of operating that are manifested in the narrative information.

Mapping everyday stories of an urban neighbourhood in Jakarta

The developed prototype of Mapping Stories was then applied to depict everyday narrative in an urban kampung neighbourhood in Cikini, Jakarta. Due to the limitation of resources, the people in the neighbourhood tend to make use of any possible opportunities available around them to make meaningful experiences of their everyday lives, regardless of the functions and limitation of space. Their way of living highlighted the notions of tactics that is often overlooked because they are performed by ordinary people (De Certeau 1984). Nevertheless, these tactics are the ones that constitute the everyday lives of city.

The narratives were initially captured through participant observation, in which we were engaged in a variety of everyday activities that the residents perform regularly in their everyday life. In particular, we focused on the activities that they enjoy doing and that they find meaningful as a part of their life; these activities might occur during their free time as well as being a part of their daily errands; they might be brief, casual activities as well as elaborate, planned activities. The technique of participant observation allows us to see from relatively ‘close’ distance how participants performed various activities in the context of their neighbourhood and urban space. In total, we collected around 45 everyday stories from the residents. These stories may include regular events, such as playing soccer, practicing aerobics with friends, hanging around the neighbourhood, or certain events which occurred at special times, such as the celebration of Independence Day, a visit to night market, or a wedding ceremony.

For mapping purposes, we focused on the everyday experiences that occurred as a journey—a series of sequential events in a set of continuous spatial settings—as opposed to other experiences that tend to be static in a set of bounded spatial settings. For each story from the residents, we created textual narratives based on what the actors did and what the actors told us. These narratives contained the details of various events, which may involve various gestures, actions, conversations, and detailed descriptions of the settings.

The textual narratives obtained from the participant observation were then entered into the input mode of Mapping Stories. The context where the stories occurred were noted in the geographical references within the Mapping Stories input mode interface, along with a series of tags that represented the important elements of each one of the stories. The following sections will be discussed in more detail how the reading of urban narratives from the Cikini neighbourhood in Jakarta through Mapping Stories could reveal the ways of operating in the everyday narrative of the city.

Urban narrative as the constellation of events

Everyday narratives gathered from the neighbourhood and mapped into Mapping Stories could be seen as the constellation of events (Fig. 2). The relationships between places on the mapped narrative suggest the topological construction of different places that interweave with one another, making visible the narrative landscape that is constituted in its urban everyday. The whole constellation indicates the dynamic exchange within the community, and how their living experience could not be simplified into a single description (Fig. 3).

Fig. 2
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Input mode and reading mode of Mapping Stories

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Fig. 3
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Representing the constellation of events

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The idea of constellation suggests the complexity of the dynamic setting of the urban narrative. The graphical representation on the map is only an indication of the ways of operation behind the events. Embedding the narrative information into a geographical reference point becomes a way to bring forward what is often forgotten or ignored on the lines and points of a map.

..But this thick or thin curves only refer to the absence of what was passed by…, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map.. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. (De Certeau 1984, p. 97)

Mapping Stories attempts to bring forward the narrative information that suggests how the operation takes place. The whole constellation of events suggests the unfolded operation that could continue to be followed individually.

The next section will describe in more detail the reading of the urban narrative by following three parts of the stories from the Cikini neighbourhood. Each one of the stories becomes the part of the constellation of events that make up the whole everyday narrative. Each story will be discussed in terms of how it could contribute to the understanding of the ways of operating within the urban everyday context.

Following narrative #1: the story of children picking coconuts

In the first story, we followed the activities of a group of boys adventuring outside their neighbourhood to climb coconut trees. The story began when the boys were walking along the riverside; then they just stopped for no particular reason, while intermittently doing playful things like making sounds out of found empty cans or talking and yelling at one another. Then they felt thirsty and someone suggested finding coconut water. Along the way, they decided to stop and climb the fences; they found a nail on a tree, which they later used for making a hole in a used can. Then they finally managed to arrive at the location of a coconut tree and then they tried to climb it to get the coconuts. Eventually, they did not manage to get any coconuts, so afterwards they decided to play around the antique shop nearby. They tried to bang the gong hanging outside the shop, which made them have fun and lots of laughs.

The series of parts from the Mapping Stories followed the movement of the boys from one location to another, and from one activity to another (Fig. 4). Each location is attached to a particular part of the story, with particular tags that represent the important elements of the story. Reading the story on the map allows the reader to experience the dynamic nature of the story, by following the itineraries interactively. The itineraries represent the temporal aspects of mapping; they suggest that the map could not be perceived as a single image, and the audience should actively engage with the performative aspects of urban everyday reflected in the collected narratives. At the same time, the map becomes the journal record for the mapper and the storyteller for the audience.

Fig. 4
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Following the itineraries of the actors

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By presenting the narrative in such a way, the map becomes a medium of storytelling and not just as an artefact of recorded activities. The map does not reveal all the stored narrative information at once, which is also practically impossible. It shows the relationships between constituting places within narrative. The map shows the movement of the boys from one part of the story to another as a form of improvisation of activities. The context that derived the movement between the range of various activities might be the condition of the actors (feeling thirsty), the existing objects (the fence and the tree), the predetermined goal (drinking coconut water), or the attraction (the gong in the antique shop). The map shows how the actors respond to the possibilities that are given by the spatial order of the context. It indicates the multiple possibilities that go further beyond the determined function of the places and objects.

The reading mode of the Mapping Stories (Fig. 5) allows for the construction of the story into a collage that depicts the dynamic of the story. The constructed images from all parts of the story show both spatiality and temporality of a particular narrative. The ability in creating both spatial and temporal aspects of maps as well as handling the rich narrative information suggests the strength of digital medium in extending the dimension of mapping practices, while at the same time allows us a method to unfold the ways of operation within the narrative.

Fig. 5
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Constructed images from different parts of the story

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The story reveals the importance aspects of playing performed by the children. The map shows the whole performance of playing that involves various urban elements: trees, fences and neighbourhoods and shops as arenas for playing. The map indicates how the children created their experience of playing by altering the temporal and spatial aspects of the context, by utilizing the available settings and resources. This alteration is temporary, leaving neither traces nor evidences. The story thus reveals the temporal shift of the neighbourhood setting, through the appropriation of the context. The creativity of making fun out of the existing contexts could provide vital ingredients to the well-being of the community by bringing the value of lived experiences.

Following narrative #2: night market on Cilosari Street

In the second story, we followed the activity of Mrs. P and her children attending the night market on Cilosari Street. The night market is a regular event held in the neighbourhood in the evening, where a series of stalls are erected temporally and people from surrounding neighbourhoods are gathered for buying things, tasting foods or just looking around. In this event, Mrs. P and her children strolled from one end of the stalls to the other, looking at things on sale, enjoying the activities offered, and talking to other market visitors.

The event of night market was characterized by its multiplicities. It involved the massive flows of people in and around the local night market to buy, eat, watch, play and perform. There is the plurality of roles taken by the actors—as observers and as participants; as sellers, players and performers. In this event, different excitements were generated by various activities, for instance, the delicious, yet cheap foods, the door prize, the performance during dance competition, and various kinds of games that the visitor could join in. Those elements promote possibilities of sensory experience that could be enjoyed by the actors. The event also triggers multiple possibilities of interaction among the actors—the exchange and negotiation between the seller and the buyer, the interaction between performer and audience, the shared excitement among the players, as well as casual conversation among the visitors coming from the same neighbourhood (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6
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Narrative of night market on Cilosari Street

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The maps capture the narrative of experience of Mrs. P and her children in-between these multiplicities of roles and elements of experiences. The map described the stages of their experience when moving from and to different parts of the night market setting. They moved in between the changing intensity of experiences and were engaged with different forms of interactions and elements. The map also has the capability to depict the different ingredients that make up the whole narrative, in which the actors have the deliberate act to select the elements of experience that they wish to enjoy and engage with. The context provides possibilities of engagement and experience as indicated by the tags attached to each part of the story in the map.

Following narrative #3: aerobics in Cidurian

At this event, a group of housewives led by Mrs. W. conducted weekly routine aerobics exercise class in a field located quite a distance away from their neighbourhood. The event began with the journey of Mrs. W. and friends heading towards the location of aerobics exercise class. The journey became a medium for Mrs. W., as the initiator of the event, to gather people who wished to come along and join the event. Her journey in turn generates a route in which interactions among the actors emerged. The sequence through the journey was defined spatially by the series of interactions along the route (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7
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Narrative showing the path of journey

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While the aerobics exercise became the main goal of activities and the field became the main destination of the journey, what happened in this event was that the journey toward the field became the condition for the main aerobic activity to happen. The journey was filled with greetings, conversations, persuasion to join, jokes and laughter. The map demonstrates how the action of walking along the journey toward a certain destination produced the experience of the city.

Mrs. W., as the main actor, created the possibility of spatial experience along the route. As the initiator of the event, she promoted the urban collective activities. The paths were not initially determined for this event, but Mrs. W. and friends opened up the possibility to alter the directions that serve as multiple connections along the moving body, the neighbourhood spatial setting, walking activities and interactions. The map generated by the Mapping Stories indicates every points of stopping along the journey in which different kinds of interactions and conversations occurred, as depicted by the clouds of tags in each point. It demonstrates multiplicities that constitute the urban everyday narrative.

Unfolding the ways of operation in the everyday narrative

The three narratives above illustrate that the urban context can provide some underlying order for certain actions to happen. Some of the order could be seen as physical spatial settings, such as the paths for walking, the fences, the trees and the river as boundaries of the space which define the spatial characteristics of the context. Mapping Stories reveals the way of operating within that context, which not only demonstrates the realization of some of the underlying order by “acting-out” the events, but also creates the possibilities of its actualization beyond its default mode of utilization (De Certeau 1984, p. 98).

The different modes of actualization could only be achieved by the presence of the actors. The actors creatively discovered the relationships amongst differentiated conditions within their spatial–temporal context, thus creating an active dialogue with its pre-existing order and improvizing it. The boys’ story of finding the nail as a tool to open the can could only be made possible by the creative action of the children in relating the accidentally found nail on the tree with the can, held in their hand. The temporary night market becomes an improvized order from the pre-existing condition of an empty street, through the acts of the actors selling, buying, walking around, playing and dancing that made the experiences of night market become possible to be perceived as such. The journey to the aerobic field implies a sort of collective order that could only be found within the existing structure of the community. The journey extends the narrow walkway of the neighbourhood into a stage of collective actions.

The practice of mapping as described in the Mapping Stories demonstrates an alternative way to represent urban everyday experience into a time–space narrative as an attempt to extend the concept of performativity beyond the pre-existing order. The stories of the performative actions within the context suggest how the re-appropriation of the context actually happens to conform to the existing structure. Reducing the idea of performativity into conceptual order would only limit the improvisation that always happens as the actual ways of operation in the urban everyday context.

Mapping Stories as an alternative mapping practice

The mapping practice as demonstrated in Mapping Stories suggests the idea of narrative mapping through the spatialization of narratives in a digital medium. The mapping contains both the general views of the constellation of topological relationships in the urban everyday context and the detailed reading of the individual narrative which shows its particular performativity. Mapping Stories suggests a shift in the way the urban environment is read and understood. It highlights the reading of the performativity by revealing the ways of operation. Mapping Stories also demonstrates the possibility to reveal the topological relationships, suggesting the importance of connectivity among urban sites as a whole context of urban everyday operations. The mapping attempts to bring forward the idea of time into spatial practices, highlighting the importance of temporal aspects in conceiving the performativity of urban spatial context.

The development of Mapping Stories demonstrates the capability of interactive mapping to capture the plurality of events within a dynamic urban context, as complex, particular narratives. This becomes important to counter the tendency of the large development in the current economy which usually imposes a single master narrative which does not allow the natural dialogue between future development and the present context (Childs 2008). The diversity of urban narratives to counter such dominating development is increasingly crucial for creating an urban environment that has its own identity (Childs 2008; Filep et al. 2014). The collection of local, multiple narratives could be used to destabilize the dominant cultures, paradigms, discourses and processes, thus suggesting the inclusivity of planning (Sandercock 2003; Bulkens et al. 2015). Mapping Stories become such an attempt to bring out the everyday narratives of urban environment, which are diverse and informal, to be readable and to become relevant to the practice of urban design and planning.

The use of digital medium for narrative-based mapping allows the shift in the mode of representation from abstract and static to the more interactive way of mapping. It promotes the engagement of the audience with the everyday urban particular boundaries of the neighbourhood activities and events. While in the more complex urban setting, there are more events and stories to be revealed as the multiple and multi-layer narratives, overlapping to one another. Further development of this mapping approach could benefit from the availability of voluntary geographical information (VGI) and social media to provide the means for participatory narrative collection (Poplin et al. 2017). There is also the limitation in the use of layers to represent the collected stories, which are less effective for viewing the large number of stories. The capability to organize the large collection of data such as sorting, tagging, cataloguing, grouping and coding borrowed from qualitative research methods will provide further analytical possibilities from the collected narratives. The development of interactive GIS interface to enable the understanding of large number of narratives can be the further direction for urban narrative mapping research.

Mapping Stories demonstrates the open-ended nature of urban everyday narratives which should be the basis for the deeper analysis of urban context and its experience. The mapping also suggests the important roles of the actors in the performativity of the urban context. Such roles need to be fully considered in urban design practices. The development of mapping practice and its medium should be able to embrace the actors. Following the everyday stories from the people who actually live in it, and seeing how their everyday experience actually happens without predetermined conception, should be the basis for more open-minded urban design practice.