Twin city -- Seattle

LIjunqiu

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#developed process

#datasets

#outcomes

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Portfolio.pdf

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Final Video

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Final Video

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Blender video

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Pike Place Market： A Core Node of the City’s Cognitive Map

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YOLO-Based Emotional Scene Detection

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Emotion-Driven Cognitive City Map

Visualizing how cinematic emotions reshape Seattle’s spatial identity—transforming real urban form into a collective mental landscape.

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Emotional Changes

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Emotional Map

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3D scatter plots

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In the next stage, I will train a YOLO model to label different spatial and architectural elements of the Market. The three-dimensional urban environment surrounding Pike Place Market will be abstracted into a point-cloud model using Blender. The motion and transformation of this point cloud will then be driven by the activities and dialogues of film characters, allowing the interaction between people and the city to be dynamically visualized.

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Building upon this theoretical framework, I aim to construct a cognitive map of Seattle by integrating three representational layers: cinematic scenes, historical archival memory, and the contemporary urban environment (as visualized through Apple Maps). Specifically, the activities and dialogues of film characters set around Pike Place Market will be used to shape and transform its urban image, revealing how cinematic narratives influence the perception of this iconic city space.

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Comparative Analysis of Pike Place Market in Seattle-Set Films

I used CLIP models to extract all film frames featuring Pike Place Market, sourced from four genre-distinct Seattle-set films.

Singles (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), The Vanishing (1993), and Disclosure (1994)—Pike Place Market emerges as a dynamic cinematic space whose meanings shift with changing urban narratives and socio-economic conditions. Rather than serving as a fixed backdrop, the Market operates as a spatial agent that participates in storytelling and urban identity construction.

The filmic representation of Pike Place Market can be summarized along three conceptual dimensions:

From everyday public space to branded city symbol Singles portrays the Market as an ordinary social environment embedded in the daily lives of local youth and within Seattle’s grunge cultural context. In contrast, Sleepless in Seattle transforms the Market into a romanticized and highly recognizable icon, aligning with the city’s global place-branding efforts in the early 1990s.

From convivial social hub to a site of vulnerability Whereas early portrayals emphasize openness and sociability, The Vanishing reframes the busy public setting as a site of fear and existential precarity. The film highlights anonymity within the modern metropolis, revealing how communal spaces can harbor hidden threats.

From cinematic fantasy to economic realism Disclosure introduces Pike Place Market as a counterimage to corporate interiors and technological workspaces. The Market represents labor, everyday survival, and the socio-economic contradictions produced by Seattle’s transition into a technology-driven city.

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Rationale for Selecting Pike Place Market as the Focus of Seattle’s Cognitive Mapping

Grounded in Kevin Lynch’s theory of the city image and informed by the findings from the SOM visual analyses, Pike Place Market demonstrates a central and sustained representational role in Seattle’s urban identity. It operates simultaneously as a tangible public living space and as a key emotional setting within cinematic narratives.

1. Integration of Lynch’s Five Image Elements Pike Place Market exhibits a high concentration of landmark visibility, path intersections, nodes of social activity, district identity, and waterfront edges. This spatial configuration makes it a particularly strong anchor within residents’ and audiences’ cognitive maps of the city.

2. A Core Symbol of Urban Life Across Media and Time The film SOM shows that the Market frequently appears in comedies and romance films, where it is associated with warmth, social interaction, and everyday liveliness. Historical archive images cluster around themes of market trade, street-level sociality, and public festivities, representing collective memory and grassroots social life. These findings together reveal an evolution of the Market’s imagery from labor-related functions to emotionally rich depictions of urban living.

3. A Key Platform for External City Image Construction Pike Place Market functions as a readily recognizable representation of Seattle in global media and tourism promotion. It thus serves as both a repository of citizens’ everyday experiences and a primary symbolic interface through which Seattle communicates its identity to broader audiences.

4. Strong Suitability for Dynamic Cognitive Mapping Due to its dense public activity and frequent interpersonal interactions, the Market provides an ideal environment for modeling human–city relational dynamics. Its scenes can be abstracted into point-cloud representations that respond to the movement and dialogue of cinematic characters, allowing for a dynamic visualization of cognitive mapping processes.

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Theoretical Foundation

Kevin Lynch’s concept of the cognitive map or mental map is not a literal picture of the city, but rather a symbolic structure constructed in the human mind. It enables people to organize, retrieve, and process information related to urban space, thereby forming a visualized and spatial understanding of the city.

Through interviews and sketch mapping, Lynch found that people’s perceptions of the city are highly subjective, fragmented, and often ambiguous—shaped by personal experience, memory gaps, and cognitive distortions. For example, in Boston, distant landmarks were often perceived as having no base, appearing to “float.” In Los Angeles, residents tended to ignore the physical presence of freeways, as if they could simply “walk across” them mentally.

Lynch categorized the city image into five core elements: paths, nodes, landmarks, edges, and districts. This system functions as a kind of visual grammar of urban space, helping people distinguish figure from ground and improving the legibility of the city.