Map Love II
John Arroyo's thesis blog,"Culture in Concrete: Art and the Re-imagination of the Los Angeles River as Civic Space," came to our attention because of its relevant featured content based around the L.A. River.
"Map Love Part II" was one of many posts made by John. Click to view all entries from "Mental Maps of the L.A. River" or view John's blog.
Living in cities, we need a new way to think about how we move and what we notice
– Susan Salter Reynold, Los Angeles Times
I've always had a soft spot for maps, from the topographical maps of the U.S. my mom would buy for her fourth grade classroom to maps people drew on napkins showing me directions to their neighborhoods. Maps were the foundation of my keen interest in cities.
Now, as I prepare to graduate from urban planning school, I've returned to thinking about the importance of the traditions that led me to MIT. As part of my research, I looked at mapping projects, past and present, at the university. These are a few of the things I found:
1. It all started with Kevin Lynch's legacy of using cognitive mapping to inspire his city planning contemporaries to seek new ways to see city form and urban design in Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City as documented in Image of the City.
2. It continued with Dolores Hayden's groundbreaking Los Angeles-based project and publication, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, which proposed new ways for including community-based perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity in public art and historic preservation.
3. Today similar thoughts, processes, and activities on allowing communities to document and re-imagine their communities lives strong in a variety of mediums. In Los Angeles, they include the work of MIT/DUSP alum James Rojas' model-building workshops all across the world. Check out Re-Imaging Chinatown, a model-building James did to re-imagine LA's Chinatown.
4. Across campus at The MIT Media Lab Jeffrey Warren, a graduate student in the Design Ecology Group and a fellow at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, runs Cartagen, "a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way that allows for mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response." Sounds cool? It is! Jeffrey's has done previous work in Israel and is currently working in Peru.
5. Ryan O'Toole's No Park adapts Google Map's KML language to link to publicly accessible wikis, video sharing, collaborative mapping, and mobile interface for smart-phone integration to map the hidden politics of urban downtown Los Angeles through public art, hidden green space, and "weird architecture".
6. MIT's Mobile Experience Lab is developing and testing new mapping techniques through Locast. Locast combines the technology of the web and mobile applications to create "hyperlocal and highly-connected experiences by superimposing layers of collectively generated information within the physical space." Crazy awesome. Everything is user generated and allows for an interactive forum by real-time uses at a physical space and for online users. Locast's Open Source platform allows for it to be used in a variety of contexts including civic media, tourism, civic engagement, on-site learning, and urban games. The MIT Mobile Experience Lab is already seeing success in the use of Locast technology through work done in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Venice, Italy.
7. Perhaps I found the strongest example of innovative, decentralized, and collaborative mapping during the recent winter break, when I followed an email thread on the international Crisis Mappers listserv, which connected mappers in Haiti with universities like MIT to distribute important data in visual analytics and infrastructure after the earthquake.
Above copy on John Arroyo thesis blog
Narrative originally featured in John Arroyo's thesis blog: Culture in Concrete: Art and the Re-imagination of the Los Angeles River as Civic Space.
Thanks to John Arroyo and CoLab Radio
