Every day we commute to different places, while we are on the road we perform our choreography layout. Roundabouts are being circumnavigated every day, shaping the traffic flow. Unlike squares, the roundabouts are not designed for people to gather on. They are untouched urban islands, surrounded by moving vehicles that make them inaccessible on foot. Regardless of this, the roundabouts are often embellished with monuments, statues, and fountains, but also nicely curated plants and flowers, teaching us how beautiful the land is when untouched by humans. Roundabouts were invented to change the pace of the traffic flow, used to decelerate it in the presence of roadways frequented by people and faster alternatives than stoplights. Our migratory movements seem to be influenced by the focus on the needs of modern society.

Eyas Weizman in the book Roundabout revolution notes that the creation of the roundabouts in the twentieth century coincides more or less with the invention of another circular movement, the moving image with innovations such as the Zoetrope, the Phenakistiscope, or the cinematograph.

This rotational movement can also waste someone’s time, as in Amy Heckerling’s European Vacation, where the Griswald family in London fails to reach the second exit off the roundabout and becomes trapped in it for hours. In European Vacation the camera is fixed on the car, following its movement, showing us the family as it spins through the roundabout. 

The Arc, on the contrary is a camera movement that orbits around the subject as it incarnates the monuments on the traffic circles. In this movement, the camera embodies the view from the car window. The Arc is usually a horizontal orbit such as the traffic flow through roundabouts, but as cinema assimilates reality and goes even beyond that, it is also possible to observe a vertical orbit as in the baptism scene in Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (min 36.7) in which the camera starts from under the water. Lately, the Arc movement is being used as a video effect, such as in Easy life’s Daydream music video, where each scene is linked to the next one every time the camera finishes a vertical orbit around the singer. During the Arc rotatory movement, the subject remains still while the camera creates motion, and in this distinct shot, the viewer’s attention is focused on the main character.

The movements of the camera within the cinematic space can be imagined as the movements of our daily migration, following the script and storyboard the camera creates new narratives by detaching itself from the main plot of the film. The camera thus embodies the mind of the dailytraveler who revolves around the roundabouts during the migrations. While the drivers follow predetermined street laws, our minds can spatialize through the landscape that surrounds us while moving in the city. The development of the moving image invention overlaps also with the invention of cars (1880/90), and so with the recreational looking out from the window, which can be intended as a screen showing live footage.

During our daily migration, we encounter many roundabouts, as an architectural structure, they force the car drivers to orbit around them. While the Nucleus of the roundabouts is motionless and unused, we can observe it at 360° as it creates circular movements in the traffic flow. This particular movement suggests idolization and so we must dodge and respect them. They occupy a central role in the urban organization; rather than creating congestion like stoplights, they are like energy pumps that let the traffic flows. The roundabout is a node, a conjunction between places, according to Kevin Lynch in the book The Image Of The City, conceptually the nodes are very small points to which one has to pay more attention; as those are places where decisions have to be made.

Looking from the sky the circular movements create a machine dance pumping the flocks of people inside and outside of the cities. From a plane or a high building we can taste what is like being a bird and scan the city from above, the traffic resembles an organism, not anymore formed by different cars, but one big network interconnecting cities.

Despite the importance of the functions of the roundabout, these are invisible to the humans engaged in their daily migration. The roundabout is an urban island in which almost no one has any interest in conquest, it is considered useless, and it is avoided. By being positioned at the beginning or end of junctions across different roads, roundabouts silently interconnect entire cities. As Weizman suggests, by blocking a roundabout it is possible to freeze a whole city, starting from the jammed point the congestion moves like a wave, flowing through the converging streets. This can disclose how the roundabouts are essential for our city migration.