Archive for the 'Mapping Practices' Category
Community Geographic Information System (GIS)
Mumbai is one of Asia’s largest cities, in which urban spaces are the central arenas of political imagination and intervention. The past decade has seen the articulation of a new politics of space in Mumbai — through the contesting claims of the urban poor majority in slums and squatter settlements, assertive residents’ associations and civic reform movements, the prosperous construction industry and builder-politician nexus, and concerned practitioners in the design, architecture and research professions.
In spite of this increased awareness and concern with urban spaces, basic information on housing, land, infrastructure and environment — the right of citizens — remains largely inaccessible, because of bureaucratic obstacles and vested interests. This asymetry of information has given rise to predatory classes of builders and speculators, whose privileged access to information is transformed into “development rights” for construction, eroding accountability to local communities and urban stake-holders, and the planning policies meant to uphold their rights.
Existing applications of new spatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) for commercial services or scientific research remain distant from the needs of these grass-roots communities and local decision-makers. With the increasing demands of citizens for their rights to information on urban space — and recent legislative enactments and public interest litigation on freedom of information — we feel that communities can harness the power of new geo-spatial imaging and mapping technologies to strengthen their demands for secure tenure and housing rights, open and vibrant public spaces, and ecological conservation and sustainable development in the mega-city.
This proposal outlines a project to develop an open-access spatial data infrastructure, and a set of simple tools and applications in localised in Indian languages, for knowledge transfer and participatory urban planning by communities and citizens in the Mumbai Metrpolitan Region. Read the Community GIS Project Proposal and the Community GIS Project Addendum
Mumbai Bus Map Proposal
While local histories, neighbourhood relations and tactical negotiations create intimate webs of information exchange in the city, urban collective memory is also structured by publicly available representations of the city’s space. The concepts and practices of mapping connect the “soft” information of everyday spaces with the “hard” information of the city’s grids and corridors. Both literally — as a plan of a physical space — and figuratively — as a constructed image of a society or culture — mapping is one of the most direct representations and interventions possible in urban space.
What one maps, where one locates, how one names, are significant and subversive of existing images, ideas and representations. Maps both tell us where we are, where we can go, and how we can get there — linking the realities of space to the possiblities of movement, and offering new ways of understanding and widening our imagination of the city and region.
Mumbai can be clearly imagined through its railway corridors, but information on the bus system is largely elusive. This generates a perceptive amnesia of entire sections of the city which are not directly connected to the railway system. Whereas the north-south geographies of home and workplace dominate our imagination of movement in the city, the east-west geographies of inter and intra-neigbourhood exchange are marginalized. This lack of information on local and lateral transport allows the creation of distinct and separate enclaves not connected to the mass rapid transport system and left out of the public imagination of residents, commuters, visitors and tourists.
Our idea is to make a comprehensive transport map for Greater Mumbai, designed as an everyday object that can be inexpensively reproduced and widely circulated on a copyleft basis. This map can become the basis for future community information systems for neighbourhoods and regions in the city, particularly those not recognized by or connected to the suburban railway network, and subject to different spatial and developmental pressures.
The process of making the map will include:
I. Mapping the transport network — rail corridors, railway stations, bus routes, bus stops, rickshaw/ taxi stands
II. Mapping major public spaces on a city and neighbourhood scale
III. Delineating local precincts with distinctive histories. This will involve consultation with local historians, urban geographers and sociologists.
IV. Mapping major landmarks in the city. The choice of these will also involve dialogue with other actors and communities in the city.
Tactical City: Tenali Rama and Other Stories of Mumbai’s Urbanism
DOWNLOAD Tactical City: Tenali Rama and Other Stories of Mumbai’s Urbanism by Rupali Gupte (Flash)
This graphic novel is a fictitious history of Mumbai. The thesis sees the city as a playground of TACTICS and further formulates a manifesto of urban practice for architects and planners as one that learns from these tactics and in the process becomes TACTICAL/OPPORTUNISTIC.
The contention of the thesis is that conditions in most third world cities have gone beyond the means of any rational positivist planning. All through (Mumbai’s) political and economic history pervading elite power structures have ensured a lopsided distribution of resources. Through new structural adjustments and sometimes blind inheritance of the tools of the earlier modes of operation both in administrative structures as well as architectural/planning practices, this has carried forward with renewed vigor to the contemporary global context.
Contemporary global cities now face escalating problems of environmental deterioration, burdening of infrastructure, lack of housing, growing informalisation of labour coupled with declining bargaining capacity, and unemployment that go hand in hand with increasing polarization of economy, the spatialised imprints of which one sees in the burgeoning lifestyle stores, malls and gated communities housing the new global elite. With lack of access to wealth and power an increasing section of the city’s population is fighting a loosing battle over resources and urban space and is being rendered invisible. The Nehruvian developmental model has failed to address this subaltern mass and largely so has the Left. The sheer scale and extent of the problems now requires new EYES to see the present conditions and new TOOLS and perhaps a new IMAGINATION to operate in these contexts.