This course is about mapping as a process of selecting and plotting information to geographic base, it is about exploring the multiple realities of a city through its multiple maps. Thus it considers mapping as both a research tool for architects and urban designers and a tool of data visualization that would influence citizens and decision makers. Lately, crowd-maps that are charted collaboratively by anonymous internet users online have enabled citizens to become cartographers allowing other representations of the city that reflect other narratives besides the official ones produced by the state in the form of official maps) . These anonymous digital citizens made maps display an alternative narrative of the city of Cairo; some with a social issues discussed like Harassmap[1], or others that focus on mobility and traffic like Bey2ollak[2], or even those anonymous maps of street protests[3]. This course is interested in looking at the maps of Cairo as a medium of its representation. Students are encouraged to use this same medium and create maps that would visualize their own perception of the city.

The course starts with a theoretical base (4 weeks) that investigates the meaning of the map, the power of knowledge production and the rules of spatial politics and then moves into a research phase (4 weeks) where students are asked to define a research problem or a hypothesis, they are also free to choose the scale and the nature of the element mapped.  Finally, they reach a production phase (6weeks) where they work on their projects that could be maps or mapping applications.

 

Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of that course students are expected to gain:

  1. A theoretical foundation of:
  • The role of maps as an inscription in the history of Cairo and its evolution.
  • An introduction to spatial politics and theories of representation.
  • A brief introduction to critical theories and human geography.
  1. A research tool:
  • Students will learn different mapping techniques related to different research topics (for example mapping events in time and space, mapping behavior in public spaces, mapping literary works, mapping visual materials) and accordingly they will learn how to define a research problem and choose the appropriate tool to support their arguments.
  • Students will learn how to deconstruct the existing maps of a city, they will learn to decode the signs to understand the interests behind its production and accordingly understand its depth and practice data analysis.
  • They will also learn how to write a brief scientific essay that creates a logical argument of their research topic.
  1. Data Visualization techniques
  • Since maps are visuals that aim at transferring a certain amount of data from the charter to the expected audience, then students through the earlier analysis of maps and the earlier definition of their research problems will learn how to create an appropriate visual language to turn their verbal argument to a visual one.

 

Course Outcome

The students are encouraged to produce both a mapping project and a short essay explaining their projects. The mapping project could be a digital map or an analog map or even proposal for a digital mapping app (tool). The use of technological media will be encouraged more to give the students the chance to create multiple layers for one map (social, political, historical, architectural, etc.) The works of the students would ideally be exhibited in one place showing their possible representations of Cairo that would create a kind of an interactive atlas of the city.

 

Class readings

Coverley, M. (2006). Guy de Bord and the Situationists International. Psychogeography , 81-110.

Latour, B. (1985). Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together. Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Presesnt , 1-40.

Mitchell, T. (1991). Colonising Egypt. LA: University of California Press.

 

              [1] Harassmap is a crowd-map that gives individuals with access to internet a way to anonymously report incidents of sexual harassment as soon as they happen using a simple text message from their mobile phone or online mapping.

http://harassmap.org/en/

[2] Bey2ollak is an online platform (linked to a mobile application) that allows people to exchange info traffic through crowdsourcing. http://desktop.bey2ollak.com/

[3] The protest map of Cairo is a google map whose charter is anonymous and has been updating the map with news starting from the first sit in in Tahrir square 2011 till the clearing of the protests in 2013. https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zjgqqVT8mTC4.kMWhKNEk_94A&hl=en