The Naked City by Guy Debord, 1957, an unplanned journey through a landscape of Paris drawn as a photographic psychogeographical diagram
13-16 March 2016: Workshop: Critical Cartography and the Informal Settlement
Timmy Aziz Urban maps not only provides Architects with physical information about buildings, streets and public spaces but they also provide a way of seeing. This workshop took the examination of an informal settlement in the Dhaka City area as an opportunity for creative map-making and ways of seeing and searched for what to the eye and mind of the Architect is revealing.
The goal of the workshop was to visually reveal spatial structures and relationships that may not be otherwise seen and offer a fertile ground for architectural concepts that may otherwise not be possible. And to arrive at ‘maps’ that integrate classic and unconventional data alike that reveal the urban characteristics of the site in ways that traditional urban maps would not.
Comparing and contrasting the classic methodology of urban analysis laid out in the book “The Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch and the experimental mapping by the Situationist activist Guy Debord, the class developed its own strategies of assessing and mapping the site.
The groups of the participants were divided into the tasks of gathering information in the field, gathering data from existing sources and mapping. Participants learned to work on QGIS software to analyze and map some given sites. They worked on Beribadh Slum, Abdullahpur; Ansar Camp, Mirpur; Geneva Camp, Mohammadpur; Godown Slum, Mohakhali with extensive analytical mapping.
Informal settlements may be seen as a paradigm of our time that is characterized by unplanned urban growth, rather than an outlier of contemporary urban form. It may thus be argued that analyzing and understanding its urban structure and sense of place is of great importance. Certainly such an understanding offers a critique of practices based on planned and ordered urban spaces rather than ‘wild’ and unplanned ones.