A conversation between Inah Kim, Kattyayani Joag and Mihir Desai.
Kattyayani Joag (KJ): We are here today to talk about the Handbook of Urban Transformation, which is a part of the Urban Transformation and Placemaking project, fostering learning from South Asia and Germany. The Handbook initially arose out of interactions that we had between the students from Delhi, Kathmandu, and Heidelberg.
Although this started out as a conversation among students of Urban Planning, Geography, Transcultural Studies, Fine Arts, Art History, Anthropology, Architecture, and Cultural Heritage, we really hope that this becomes a possibility for Co-production across disciplines and methodologies, and facilitates a dialogue between researchers and practitioners.
This podcast stands in as a chapter in this Handbook, which will be made available online by December with an Obsidian plug-in that allows for it to be an open and ever-growing pedagogic tool.
Inah Kim (IK): So today we are here with one of our members, Mihir Desai, a man who wears many hats: Health architect, Marine biologist, and Cartographer.
Mihir, before we speak about your recent work on the epistemic conflicts in cartography and your particular focus on their reconciliation, we would first like to ask you: How have you, in your experience as a practitioner, encountered the link between Cartography and Urban transformation?
Mihir Desai (MD): Thank you, Inah. In my work as an Architect, who has made many maps on the matter of the Worli Fishing Village, and also the Forest in Bombay, Arey Colony, I have often seen that as a spatial thinker, primarily who works with designing spaces, Maps are very important in the sense that they are interchangeable with plans or architectural drawings, which you make to produce space; Whereas I understood that the entry point for cartography is to not make drawings that produce space, but traditionally, they are understood as drawings which are representing reality.
So, cartography is always seen as a Science of representation or visual communication, and the premise which underpins it is that there is a way to objectively represent a reality, or a space, or a territory, and that’s where most of the cartographic inquiry point takes off from. It’s trusted to be a science, which can represent space truly as is; But, the matter is a bit confusing, because not everybody believes the same, because even as an architect or a planner when you set out to map a city or a settlement, there are many attributes of space which are not adequately represented because the map might be of a certain theme, and a certain mode of production, which might not include certain aspects of reality.
So, this is called Cartographic Generalization, which is a very basic science of cartography, that is not possible to represent everything – which is why you choose to limit certain attributes of space. So, I would say that my work, then, was a bit interesting, because, on one hand, I am drawing maps. After all, they represent space as it should be in the future because it would get designed and built. Whereas if I think as a cartographer, I think more of it in a state, that there is an aftermath, and you are in a position where you are essentially mapping, or communicating, or visualizing how things have changed across time, and that’s where the idea of Urban Transformation would come in, that, in that sense, an architect is directly involved in active decision making of how a space must change, whereas the cartographer would be involved in this act of understanding how urban transformation happens. But, what is common in both practices is that you use drawings.
KJ: Thank you Mihir for that answer. I think this might also be a nice point to jump into your research a little bit and to understand how the discipline actually affects your praxis, and how the contestations within the discipline affect the way that you work in the field. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your projects?
MD: Yeah that would be a nice point to go a bit into more nuance. I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s a nuance, it’s more like an observation, but it helps to negotiate disposition between the architect and the cartographer.
For instance, when I used to work on projects where I was working with certain communities who were contesting their claim of land; For instance, the Fisher Community in Worli, in Bombay, when the coastal project was happening. The planning committee had their own imagination of what should happen in this land, so they are making plans, essentially maps, which show how the land would transform eventually. And, of course, when you make these reports along with planning, you also try to show the environmental impact. And it so happens that when companies are contracted to do existing Land Use Plans– which is the kind of mapping to make a map based on which a planning decision would happen– it’s very common to notice that a lot of these companies, when they get these contract,s they are mapping the land in a very simplistic manner or in a very general way. Whether it’s about showing biodiversity, or whether it’s showing about how communities use land, or like, a fine grain map of land use – They’re not represented very well, because they are generalized.
Because for the planning committee, it’s not necessary to know what is the distribution of biodiversity, or how is it that the fishermen actually use their boats to weigh into the sea, like these details would not be represented. What would rather be represented is a very simple map, which does not convey these complexities– but that’s the very science of cartography, that it puts you in a position of power, where you can say ‘This is a thematic map of this particular theme, and in order to accurately represent reality, you would need many thematic maps’, but that’s not practical all the time; And especially, if there is like, a very hard vested interest to show that the land is not biodiverse, or to show that there are different ways in which land should be seen, not only from the fisherman’s perspective but also from the city planning perspective, then a lot of the reality that you choose to show is already biased. That’s where the idea of the map as a subjective representation comes in; But when you see these maps, they appear to be very objective, because it has a scale. It has a formal symbology and index, a legend and the stamp of the consultant, mapping consultant, and the stamp of the funding, you know?
So what I realized, is that in these cases, mapping is not in that sense a true form of mapping, you know, a mapping is always biased because you have someone funding and publishing commissioning, and consuming that particular map. So it’s a space of conflict then because land is common, it’s supposed to be common, but land is always seen as something that is private property and it’s seen as a transaction, that land can be substituted for money or like development rights, which the community can redeem somewhere else in the city – that’s what has been happening in Bombay also, so I would say, yeah, it’s like this tricky position where you, as a planner, are trying to change or transform how land ought to be used, based on certain value systems, or certain demands which come from the city. For instance, to make the city, like to make the city capable of transporting huge amount of cars through its western coast, as compared to, say, seeing the land as a biodiversity hotspot – So yeah, it always matters who is mapping for whom, and what is the utility of this ma,p and who is the audience for the map. And often within the cartography discipline, this question of Who and Why is not as much entertained. Traditional cartography, and even mainstream cartography always looks at it as a form of, you know, document, that you use to measure and represent and it’s very easy to miss some of these representations.
IK: When you are talking about your experience in the field and so on, you were mentioning different layers of conflict and whose interest it was, and who are the subjects that are being put on the map, and which territories are mapped, but, in which processes are not being mapped, and so on so, in your paper that we’ve read, as a little introduction to your work – you had a statement that said Contestations of maps like you were questioning whether “Maps function as a contestation of reality”. Could you explain a little bit more on that aspect?
MD: If you do a historical literary review of cartography, not through practice, but through what people have said about it, you will notice that people are usually contesting what a map is.
Is it an objective representation, or is it a subjective representation? I think I explained what is the idea of a subjective map and an objective map, and why a subjective map can become an objective map through the science of cartography. So basically, it’s the discourse of representation.
Cartography is just like image making, or painting, or photography, or visualization, you know, it’s like a form of representation, but it’s always nice to hit upon this inquiry within representation sciences that you have to understand that something takes proxy for reality. Like, a language is a proxy for reality, the same map is also a proxy; and in that sense what you would do as a cartographer interested in understanding this contestation of map definition would be then, to understand why is it necessary to define a map at all. I think I believe it only has value in how you approach the subject, based on what you assume it to be – because when it comes to the idea of contesting map conceptions, it basically means we’re talking, essentially, of a conflict in the concept of map, across various cartographic thinkers – and primarily, according to me, I think that the conflict has always been between whether a map is an objective representation or a subjective representation of reality, and primarily this position can be put in context from another point of view, which is called Epistemic Relativity; a term coined by Bhaskar in his book which he published in 1975, where he asks the question whether a subject can truly capture an object, which leads to a kind of healthy skepticism, in the sense that this means that probably subjects are not capable enough to capture, objectively, a reality, and therefore it would mean that there is a requirement to have formal science – and to establish guidelines – and an ethical premise under which the subject must capture the reality for it to be an objective representation; So whereas traditionally, cartography has its own logic of why it believes a map to be objective, it will still always be subjective – and that’s where I believe that in that sense, if all maps are subjective, then it probably is the fact that they merely appear to be objective, that they are subjective documents of reality, but they appear to be objective; which means that maps tend to gain objectivity if certain things are in place.
For instance, these certain things could be your audience and the publisher, the land, the context, and the time in which you’re mapping. If certain parameters align, it would give you the illusion that a map is objective, even though it is essentially a subjective representation of reality. So it is within this contestation that many things are then questioned, you know? Because it would mean that if the planner claims that his mapping consultant has created an objective map, it is also unquestionable – which makes the authority of maps difficult to be dislodged, because the moment you see a map it has certain visual elements like the stamp of the publisher, or the mathematical connotations which are there on the image – these elements come together to create this impression that this subjective document is, in fact, objective; so that’s where maps appear to be trustworthy, and that’s where the power of maps also lie– in the fact that they’re trusted to be objective – but that’s not the case when you do a thorough literary review of these things.
In order to negate or to neutralize this contestation or conflict, the best way, I believe, is to then find how these positions – that the objective and the subjective map – are interchangeable through certain relationships. So, it would be simple to say that maps are subjective representations, but they appear to be objective; which would satisfy both the ideological inquiries of mapping, as well as its scientific inquiries.
KJ: Right. So, now that we’re engaging a little bit more with your with your thesis in particular– and before we get into the nitty gritty of your thesis – I think maybe it would be fitting to come back to the notion of the Glossary, which is something that we’ve also been engaging with quite intensely, and the Handbook as well, trying to talk about how to make terms speak to each other across fields and so on; Could we also get into How you understand the three terms that you use in your thesis? Specifically: Cartography, Epistemology, and also Reconciliation.
We’ll talk a little bit more about reconciliation more towards the end, but could you then please tell us a little bit more about how you understand these three terms in your work, specifically for those who are not familiar with the field?
MD: So this means the three words of cartography, epistemology and the reconciliation?
KJ and IK: That’s right, yes.
MD: So if you take out the word ‘Cartography’; ‘Epistemology’ and ‘Reconciliation’, I believe, can be applied to any body of philosophical inquiries. This is because, yeah, every object would have its own epistemology, and therefore, its own set of epistemic conflicts; and once you look at the world in that way, it becomes very clear that every philosopher, or every practitioner, for that instance, would have their own unique way of understanding the world, because they are subject to it before they have their own professional or academic portfolios to deal with the object, and this subjectivity could be very varying.
The motivations or the underpinnings could be related to identity in nation-state, religion, gender and sexuality, but also like other philosophical notions, whether, for instance, of what does the cartographer truly perceive the map to be, if the cartographer believes that the world can be put into a matrix, into a grid, and if they believe that every aspect of reality can be measured – that is to say– If you consider reality as a measure, then it is kind of looking at reality through a particular lens, that you begin with a premise, that yes, reality could be mapped, and we could take an example by saying that ‘Okay, we can measure rainfall, therefore we can map rainfall’ – because you map it in relation to its geographical distribution, but also its temporal distribution. ‘How much did it rain yesterday versus how much it rained today’ – so you would say that there is reality of rain, but it’s abstracted as a measurement; So it’s not to say that there are other ways of mapping rain, maybe it’s through text, or through pictures, or through photographs, or through videos, or through experiences of rain – these all would be in that sense, ways to measure the reality of rain, but what cartography does or what we know of it to be, is the fact that it represents it on a piece of paper, or on a screen, you know? It’s very different from, say, story telling, or painting, or photography in that sense, because you have a formal way of a formal argument as to why your representation of reality could be considered true.
So if we consider that one aspect of representation of rain to be one epistemological entry point towards the object, this would mean that there should be and will always be many different ways to approach the method of making a rain map, and this is going to the different subjectivities.
If I’m a person who lives in the village or the city, my experience, and therefore my mapping of rain would be very different; also more personal, and domestic, and fine grain as compared to a planner, who is entasked to make a flood resilient map of the city. How would I make a city flood proof if I don’t have my data of how the flood distribution happens during the high tide monsoon, for instance?
So that’s why the word reconciliation comes in, because it’s not proper to say that this is the only way to map rain, because, yes, you do map rain in terms of ‘How many cubic meters, how many cubic centimeters has it flooded over the last 10 years’, but it’s also equally essential and valuable to understand ‘How rain could be mapped through other, softer attributes’, say, through memories, or through dreams, or other tangible measurable attributes, such as mapping rain – but through an alternative parameter, you know? Something like that.
So, I think when it comes to epistemological reviews of cartography, it makes more sense to see them holistically, rather than in contrast to each other, so to say that the differences between the epistemologies could be creatively integrated, rather than using one to strike down the other – because every object would have multiple subjectivities involved in it, and these could be translated as stakeholders, you know, of a particular piece of land.
IK: I think you answered a lot of the points that I was wondering personally, before we had this discussion on the points like, how do you distinguish the discipline of cartography and the act of mapping?
MD: So the point where you ask about a distinction between What is a map? and What is mapping, like Map versus Mapping, and I would say that like recently there has been like an attitude within cartography to distinguish it from GIS, Geo-visualization and Representation science, and Communication science – these all seem to be very overlapped and interlinked to each other, but I would say the distinction, as it appears, is only because there are certain academic fences built around these disciplines, you know? Which is why they tend to overlap or conflict.
But, I would say that it’s better to see these disciplines in a spectrum, rather than to see them in classification, and therefore, in conflict – primarily because whether it’s visualization, communication, or cartography – they all involve certain basic building blocks within the discipline, you know?And when it comes to map and mapping, I would say that a map is often considered to be colloquially static. You make a map of a place, and if this map is widely distributed among everybody who engages with this land or reality, this would be the dominant picture of the land, it would be the objective picture of the land. That’s what happens with the Mercator’s map or any map which does not go revised or checked for a long period of time, that the more you see it, the more it appears to be as such. So, even though you change a few buildings, or maybe there is a change in the lay of the land, if you don’t update it in your map, you see an outdated map and this outdated map, you could say, is an objective map, but simply because of the effect of time, it’s not accurate anymore.
This desire for accuracy within the discipline is very critical in cartography, because as you’ve seen over the years, more diagrammatic or free-hand map drawing got evolved into very crisp, mathematical charts, where you would use instruments and different devices to accurately measure space, to now, say, satellite imagery, or laser scanning, radar, and sonar, which give you a much more accurate picture of cartography– so this conquest of accuracy has been very critical to cartography because it is seen as an objective science, and the premise is that if something has to be objective, it also has to be highly accurate; So that’s where the underpinning for a static map comes from, and the idea of mapping more comes from GIS, or, Observation participation and Participation observation, where there is a need for real time mapping – like self-driven cars, or real time data, or fresh data– is more achievable when you engage with reality continuously, and you mine the data from reality continuously, and then, represent it.
So whereas a map is like a static representation of reality, mapping is like a constant high-speed, highly updated map of reality, which means that you can imagine thousands of maps combined together to form a mapping of a space. Now, when you see this at a larger time span, you could say, Bombay, it was a set of seven islands; and at every epoch of Bombay’s Urban Transformation, you had a map. So when you see Bombay, as a city, you see it through its set of different mappings, where every mapping commission had its own bias, own particular standard to visualize space, and therefore they would also represent space; so the social construct of space would then get encoded into a map but multiple mappings.
IK: So when you are making the contrast between the map and the act of mapping, you are highlighting the aspect of Spatialization as practice, and then. in the act of mapping, the aspect of temporality also comes in – but then there’s a problem, or this conflict, that you’ve mentioned, that in reflecting the reality that the visualization of space is more put forth in the act of cartography than anything else. I guess that’s where the conflict is coming from.
MD: Yeah.
IK: Yeah, because I find that quite interesting, that we try to visualize our text-based knowledge, but you primarily deal with the politics of visualization, and I’m wondering, how do you approach this method of active visualization all the time?
MD: Of non-spatial things.
IK: Yes, of non-spatial things.
MD: Yeah, this is a very interesting question, and I didn’t write much about this in my thesis because of reasons, but I can help you to illustrate in this one way – this is very interesting; it will touch a bit upon what we understand cartography to be colloquially, and what we understand visualization to be in its general way.
For instance, cartography has a burden of history in the sense that people say it’s a colonial subject, it was charged with enabling imperial crimes, and even today with a modern state complex, It’s like mass surveillance, and tracking, and geodata being easily available, easily produced, and sold for profit-making, or like making data lucrative across various companies to track you and formulate planning policies for different things, so cartography is evolved, in that sense, under its technological ambit– But its ethical grounding is very impoverished.
So, that is one aspect based on which you can enter this cartography versus visualization debate, but I like to see it from another angle – going back to the idea of what we consider cartography to be.
Historically, what has happened, is that we have always thought of maps as the representation of space, like real tangible space, like material space, whether it’s a room, or a city, or a country, or the solar system, maps have been charged with this idea that, yes they represent real, tangible space, whereas if you look at visualization of any sort – data visualization, geo-visualization, art visualization, literature visualization – they are all non-spatial data sets.
Rain could be considered a spatial data set, and therefore you can make a map out of rain – but, how do you make a map out of text? Or how do you make a map out of thoughts or dreams? These are all non-spatial visualizations. But, the problem is of the fact that when you have a data set, whether it’s spatial or non-spatial, you use certain methods of visualizing them; whether it’s through a ma,p or a pie-chart or a bar graph; So visualization is nothing but communicating data in a 2D format, where you use lines, symbols etc. It just so happens that maps happen to be visualizations which show you lines or colors, which tend to represent the earth, or it tends to represent the political boundary of a city, you know?
So the only difference between visualization and cartography is then, I would say, that you call it cartography because it deals with land and you call it visualization because it doesn’t deal with land – but in principle, both are sciences of representation. Both can be charged or judged along the same ethics that you apply to representation because both are essentially representations in sciences. (Something) More nuanced would be that because cartography is a subset of geography, formally speaking, the laws of geography– you know that everything is related to everything– but nearer things are more related than further things.
This law kind of dominates all of cartographic theory and research agendas, which is why this little silo of geo-visualization or cartography gets stronger and stronger and it seeks to cut itself off from larger visualization or representational sciences because they claim that cartography is a science in itself.
KJ: So coming back to your thesis a little bit, you are speaking about three theoretical contestations within the realm of cartography. Speaking about the positivist standpoint, the deconstructionist standpoint, and also the hermeneutic standpoint and these are largely non-spatial datasets which you’re also mapping and visualizing.
Could we maybe talk a little bit about the contestations that you look at in the thesis, and also about how you visualize them, and what were the what were the limitations of visualization, and maybe what were the strengths also in terms of how you did things and also your method a little bit?
MD: Here, I would say that it involved a bit like the thesis, you know, it’s more like a heavy theoretical literature review, basically, which involved finding some of the most influential pieces of cartographic theory. That’s the thing about the thesis, in terms of its methods and how one approaches the subject of epistemological conflicts within cartography, and here I think, in the case of the thesis, what I did is first try to look at the most influential texts through a citation analysis, and also to look at them critically through a method of induction – which is very random.
First, one has to read and map out what is what, who were the people; But as you are doing this method of induction where you’re just reading, randomly sifting through papers, it’s important that my own subjectivity with the matter was very different, because I was more involved in finding a common thread – so even my own subjectivity, when I read it, was not to favor a deconstructivist argument over the positivist body of thought. It was more to see why they are in conflict, and to see is there a common denominator within conflicting theories.
So, I think my subjectivity, in that sense, was to restore connections rather than judge which one is better than the other, and this can be a bit uneasy because it would mean that you would have to align opposite thinkers into one particular boundary, you know? So to say a unity of opposites kind of a situation, which also sounds very difficult and uneasy, but if you talk about it through an example of science, what Einstein says (is) that light is both a particle and a wave, so similarly, the map, I thought is both objective and subjective – it’s not a question of ‘or’, it’s that it ‘is, and’, you know?
It is a subjective and an objective representation of reality, but then the question is how is it both? Because Einstein shows that E is equal to mc square, that light can be expressed in terms of matter, and that’s where I say you need to find a theoretical formulation. It’s just as simple as imagining a sentence which has both the words, but they are put in a sense that they flow and become complementary to each other – and that’s where I state that a map is a subjective representation, which appears to be objective; and there, everything is myriad, it talks about a map always being subjective because it is a subject, capturing the lay of the land, but using a scientific method – which is abstraction, generalization, symbology, projection systems, mathematical scale, the guide box, the north arrow, and the publishers logos – these are active agents, superimposed on top of the subjective representation, and therefore it becomes objective or it appears objective.
So, I was more interested to put things in a relation, or sort of an equation – that’s what I meant by formulating a lens with your own subjectivity; and then starting to read the text, because the moment you express the map as something that gains objectivity, you start to read the text also very differently. So you automatically understand that in the traditional or the mainstream sense, only the aspect of science or visual communication has been heightened, whereas in the deconstructive side, it is a matter of fact that the ideological question of mapping is more heightened; but that’s not to say that these two bodies of sciences need to be weighed against each other, but rather, they are very much complementary.
IK: So just by listening to your methods and approach, and how you are so aware of creating the visualizations, and then how you’re so aware of the political implications in these visualizations, it’s quite interesting for me, as a person studying Art history, I always start from visualized end products or –I can’t say end products – but then objects, and then deconstructing the political implications these objects or art objects and so on could have, and it’s quite interesting to be in conversation with you, when we’re thinking about the Handbook situation as well.
It’s not like we are trying to offer a guideline that people should hold on to, but in a way, we are trying to pose something where we deconstruct the way we talk to each other, or in the way that researchers and disciplines should communicate with one another, and you are kind of doing that in your practice in a very aware way, but yeah- there are parallels and differences simultaneously, and I think that’s quite interesting!
KJ: And also to add to what Inah’s saying about the notion of knowledge production, through the Handbook – even though we’re calling it a Handbook – I think that’s a misleading term in some ways because it’s not an instruction manual. It’s an open-ended kind of thing that you just have on the internet, that people can keep adding more and more knowledge to. I mean, we’re also thinking about a tangible output here, whether it’s an object or not, and I mean what we’re doing here between three of us also is that we’re trying to talk about the ‘politics of making’ and yeah… this has definitely been very interesting.
KJ: To end though, Mihir, we want to ask you a final question, and to come back to the idea of reconciliation as we promised. The term reconciliation is, of course, a super potent one, because even in anthropology and art history, when we talk about reconciliation, we speak largely from within the discipline. Then that comes down to questions of decoloniality, and that, on its own, becomes a transcultural venture, but the reconciliation that you speak about is more about reconciliation within the theoretical paradigm, and to refer back to your glossary in your thesis, where you speak about reconciliation as restoring fraternity among conflicting entities by bringing them into an agreement.
Could you, for our listeners, maybe delineate how you propose to reconcile with these contestations, both in theory and practice? Because we’ve spoken about it theoretically; just wondering if there is a more praxis-based answer? We can think about it a little bit, and a small follow-up would also be: How does the notion of Begumpura and Ambedkarite perspectives fit into the larger framework of a quote-unquote “reconciled cartographic practice” because you also do speak about Begumpura in your other work.
MD: I can start by saying the fact that (with) every discipline, you can backtrack how it is now, to what it was, but that would be like a very simplistic historical review in a chronological manner. What I instead think, (is) it’s nice to take an Ambedkarite position here, that history is also chronological, but it can be very much seen in a non-chronological manner, because time, linear time is the lens under which you try to deconstruct a particular body of work, and that’s the classical way in which most historical studies ought to happen in a general manner; But you could do a historical analysis also, from a non-temporal perspective, which would be about, for instance, writing a history of maps, with respect to how its relationship with the body has changed, rather than studying it through the history of revolutions that it went through, because a Marxist-Ambedkarite perspective would look at understanding cartography from a lens of the revolutions it underwent, and that’s a pretty novel exercise in itself, and I think it’s unexplored and it requires a lot of academic collaboration and scholarship to be actually done.
In the thesis, what I instead do, is try to propose a history of maps through its evolution of embodied use, wherein I say that: Okay, maps were in the mind, then they went into the hand, they were transferred on the body, they were transferred to speech, and eventually into people becoming maps themselves- or training an AI to become a map.
So, you could say that this framework is a non-temporal framework because your scale is the shifting position of the map, with respect to the body. It’s not like decades or years, you know? And that would instantly give you a new reclassification of cartographic theory; Because then you classify theory– not according to time spans – but according to where the map was situated around the body, and then you would instantly see a mix of various epistemological arguments under each classification within the map in the hand, a deconstructivist, positivist or hermeneutic would have an answer. If the map was in the speech or on the body, you would again have three arguments from the same enterprise. So, I like this attitude of trying to just restructure everything and seeing it in a holistic manner, because when you take it from a historical perspective or from the perspective of authorship, and silos, and academic gateways or academic fences, then that meaning cannot be integrated.
I think that’s what I try to do, when I propose the reclassification, was to take bits of what is most compatible within one field, rather than severing and separating them. This also kind of means that the practice of cartography is threefold; If we accept the classification, it’s not that the cartographic discipline is divided in three manners, it’s just that it’s layered in three manners– And then you would kind of argue that, okay, the epistemologies are best seen in aggregation rather than in strict classification, so that is an answer to the first part.
The second part, (is) about how to make this reconciliation practical: I don’t have an answer to this, because the work was theoretical. What I show through the theoretical work is that there is a real, theoretical premise for reconciliation and it’s also written by cartographers before me, like there have been many interviews or articles which talk about reconciling the differences, because otherwise, what has happened, is that every new author who comes in sets up a claim that ‘Okay, cartography is this and this, and maybe it should head in that direction’, rather than trying to have a reconcilery attitude and seeing ‘Okay, what went wrong and what could be done?’. In participatory planning, you see a bit of this reconcilery attitude where the power is with the planning committees, or the private developers, etc, but there is a voice, like (a) claim voice, that okay, even the people participate, so you see there a bit of back and forth, in the sense of who produces the data, and therefore you could say okay – at some level, some principles are reconciled; but once you take the data, you make a representation out of it – you make a map and (it) goes up the ladder. Its meaning changes so it’s like “the ladder of citizen participation” The essay, it talks about tokenization, you know, because reconciliation is not through the pipeline- it’s at certain levels, or at certain spaces, to give the impression of the process itself being participatory or conciliatory, and as the whole game of representation. It’s the same thing as ‘This process is subjective, but we make it appear objective’, because of token participation, and that’s why I said that cartography is not just about maps, it’s really about how you represent the world in all its processes, and in all its different aspects.
Coming to the last part of the question about my article, on the cartographer from Begumpura, here I would say that yeah, it’s like an intersection between architecture and cartography because in this piece, I talk about what would be a map that shows the location of Begumpura – if this utopia doesn’t exist – Because there I talk about a map of a place which cannot be reached; But the place itself is conceptualized or could be formalized, but theoretically is it possible to show a map of a place from the future? A map of a place which probably never existed? So again, unfortunately, Begum’s theoretical again. It’s not like a practical endeavor, but there I see some real possibility for this collaboration between cartography and, say, other disciplines like design and planning, because then I would argue that cartography is not really a subset of geography or planning, but rather geography, planning, architecture, design and cartography, are, not just to say interlinked, but they’re pretty much the same, you know?
I don’t see a difference between making a map or making a plan, it’s just that traditionally speaking, maps are charged with a responsibility to reflect reality, because maps are considered as mirrors of reality and not texts or reality, and I think once you start dissociating objects and disciplines from their preconceived notions, then you realize that it’s not that this discipline is very special, rather its contents are very special, its structure is very special and its structure is very much interlinked – so the entire world appears to be interlinked when you do a reading of it through a reconcilatory lens, and you then step back and realize, okay, this part of the net structure is cartography, this part of the structure is architecture and that’s why you see parallels and overlaps, because we have often defined boundaries around knowledge, and that’s the whole idea of epistemology, that because you create a boundary there is an inside and outside, and that is why there is a cartography and there is an architecture of this space, but are they really mutually exclusive? I don’t think so
IK: Yeah I think that was a really condensed discussion. Ao many things were mentioned, but I guess we have to end it here with Thank you, that you came all the way from Vienna to have this podcast with us, and we thank you so much!
KJ: Thanks for coming!
MD: Thank you for inviting me as well. It was great fun and I’m excited to see where the Handbook also goes, with the other contributions from other people. Thank you!
IK, KJ, and MD (Chorus): Bye! Bye! Bye-Bye!