Poli-Plex-Icon
COMPLEX CITY IMAGE MAPPING
Poli-Plex-Icon maps the Complex City Image
Based on the work of scholars in urban planning and geography, such as Prof. Michael Batty (CASA, The Bartlett, UCL), the city today is described as a system of organized complexity. Contemporary mapping practices deal with urban complexity, which means they take into account the way people perceive urban space, as an infinite data transmitter.
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Poli-Plex-Icon is an interdisciplinary tool, it combines ideas from architecture, urban planning, psychogeography, mental mapping, radical and critical cartography, fine arts, linguistics and visual semiotics. The outcomes are 'urban palimpsests', multilayered map-like visualizations that are based on spatial data mapping. As they present artistic properties, they can be described both as maps and artworks. The tool was developed in my Ph.D. Thesis (School of Architecture, NTUA, 2018) and its current applications include research, cultural projects, seminars, and workshops.
Hi. I'm Efrossyni
Dr. Efrossyni Tsakiri, creator of Poli-Plex-Icon method, is an architect and urban theorist, specialized in urban data mapping and visualization.
She was born in Athens, Greece, where she currently lives and works. Her academic research mainly focuses on the conceptualization of the city as a system of organized complexity and thereby the exploration of mapping and visualization practices in history and today.
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She got her Diploma in Architectural Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (1998), has been a visiting student at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla, (1996-7), did postgraduate studies in Town Planning at the School of Planning and Urban Design at the School of Architecture, The Bartlett, UCL (1998-2002). She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, School of Architecture, NTUA, (2018). Her thesis “From Multiplicity to Complexity: The Image of the City in Its Representations” explores the historical evolution of the city image through its visualizations in plans, maps, and paintings. Based on complexity science and the contemporary description of the city as a ‘system of organized complexity’, she explored a visualization method (Poli-Plex-Icon) that creates ‘Visual Palimpsests’, that is to say, layered visualizations of complex city images.
Efrossyni works now as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Urban Design, School of Architecture, NTUA. From 2013 onwards she has been teaching as a contract lecturer Urban Design, Architectural Design and Interior Design at several universities in Greece, such as the Department of Interior Architecture of the School of Applied Arts and Culture, UNIWA, the School of Spatial Planning and Development of the Faculty of Engineering, AUTH, the School of Architecture, TUC and the School of Architecture, NTUA.
She organizes workshops on city image visualization, holds lectures on urban data mapping and visualization practices in the context of urban complexity, presents her research at conferences in Greece and abroad, publishes papers in international peer-review journals, and writes book chapters.
Her recent works include the publication of Chania. Psychogeographic Guide of the Old Town (2019), E. Tsakiri, S. Yiannoudes (author and editor), the curating of the visual art exhibition APOPLUS (2019), organized by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports (Interreg V- A Greece-Italy Programme 2014 2020) and the coordination of Revolutionary Palimpsest research programme funded by the H.F.R.I.