The impetus for travelling with our eyes to any corner and spatial scale, it was shown as a social attitude with the advent of the Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Virtual Earth satellite views. Since then, the mouse wheel is used as a quick virtual elevator which easily entertain us for hours.

Un gaditano en Sillicon Valley has reminded me this 70’s documentary, and now it provoked me a thinking about this scale changing pleasure.

The same video footage have already been removed for copyright problems elsewhere in youtube so it’s very likely that this would last rather little too. The Simpsons made his own parody worth seeing.

Juan Pablo Puerta (Cádiz) cited this documentary speaking of Universcale, a new online interface from Nikon that allows to navigate through different spatial scales in a similar way that the video shows, but this time in an interactive mode and comparing dozens of objects widely known that serve as reference.

What kind of desire we hide behind this pleasant zoommming action? Can it say something about how we experience our space environment? Going to the top of a mountain, bending over for a while or walk watching the clouds are common scaling attitudes that allow us to project our thoughts to different scales and social contexts. We need a bit of both rural and urban as naturally and integrately happens in Tokyo because, among other things, every relationship has its scale. This point us to the fact that the urban environment should be able to act as a rich residence for thoughts, preventing the degradation of the symbolic diversity of public spaces. Diversity here would refer to the different mental, and not only social, appropiation we can manage on them. In other words, the city should be designed keeping in mind that it will serve as a multiple mirror for our scaled thoughts.

This post is also available in Spanish