[multipliCity] new maps and mappings

[Tripta B Chandola]

It's been a long time since any activity took place on this list  
suggesting towards the processes, politics and engagements of setting  
up, running and sustaining conversations on a list. In the last few  
months, I have been occupied with drawing out theoretical frameworks,  
ideas for my PhD and that to some level explains the silence. That's  
no excuse, however.

The phase of theoretical abstraction has taken a definite life and  
form and I am proactively engaged with my fieldwork. As the PhD is  
within the context of the relationships, associations, contestations  
between City and the Slums, the city, its dynamics and dimensions,  
completely absorb me. I live in Delhi, a city that is witnessing  
change, architecturally, culturally, socially, spatially, so rapidly  
that if you allow yourselves absences of a few months, temporally and  
mentally, one encounters new protrusions, constructions, corners,  
routes, detours that the seemingly well established, elaborated,  
'static' map of the city fails to provide you with the clues. The new  
city, not surprisingly, demands that the maps be constantly re-drawn.  
In a car conversation with a colleagues about the constant- 
construction of the city, he remarked, 'this is what post-war Europe  
must have been like, only it a bit more organized'.

Within this expanding landscape of the city, through the new networks  
and connections, previously obscure places have made their presence  
felt on the maps of varying kinds. To me, Wikimapia (http:// 
www.wikimapia.org), is the first documentation of its kind of this  
ever-expanding city, especially in the South Asian context, as the  
following report also suggests, http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp? 
NewsID=1064751

Going through the places added on the map of Delhi was interesting  
for me, personally, but also to witness the expansion of the city out  
of its spatiality.

I would invite the members of this list to reflect on the following:

In countries where the development, at least overtly, has reached the  
stage from where each and every progress is well within defined and  
controlled parameters, is the mapping of the places of these  
countries on wikimapia different from the mappings of the developing,  
under-construction, cities.

looking forward to conversations,
tripta

PhD Researcher
Creative Industries Research Centre
Queensland University of Technology
Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059
Australia

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