URBZ Urban Mashup // Mapping Abdul Rehman Street
01. Mashing Google Maps 02. Street+Chaos Mashup
Mapping Mumbai’s Bazaars
Mumbai’s central business district has traditionally housed major
wholesale markets for everything from metals and plastics to hair
accessories and playing cards. Having organically developed over
the years, these bazaars are extremely dense and have multiple
layers of form, function and meaning.
Although people living or working in these areas have precise
mental maps of the whole area, traditional cartography has been
unable to map these bazaars (and their multiple layers) adequately.
Google Maps provides us new opportunities in cartography like
zoomability, layers that can be turned on and off, imagery that can
pop up or link to other places/websites, etc. We aim to use these
technologies to create a new cartography for this area.
This project uses Abdul Rehman St. as a prototype for this new
‘placemaking’. Abdul Rehman Street and the streets that branch off
from it have been chosen because they have an extraordinarily high
density of built form and usage that is a challenge to map.
This cartography is thus an exercise in using a virtual medium to
depict the physical form of a mental map. This mashup of the virtual,
physical and mental is what makes these ‘maps’ interesting.
03. Type Mashup
Adding data to existing mappings Directions or Pollution?
Google Maps already has street names of the chosen area in it’s Abdul Rehman Street has a fantastic variety of signage - old
database. In the spirit of ‘user-generated cities’, we look at adding handpainted signs that have been around for decades, newer signs
data using Google Maps as a base. We look at adding 2 types of data in wood, contemporary plastic signs that look out of place - pretty
to start with, that don’t yet exist in Google Maps adequately: much any kind of signage you can imagine, in multiple languages.
1. - Precinct level information - This can give a user information The density of signage here is absolutely overwhelming - there is so
about the overall use of a precinct. A precinct can be as small as a much there that one just ends up tuning it all out. Also, the signage
couple city blocks or large enough to cover hundreds of acres. The almost doesn’t matter when the whole street is selling the same
definition and branding of precincts can happen first in the virtual thing. We were just so captivated that our first response was to
space and then the physical space, or vice-versa. The information is photograph and collage this exuberance of signage.
seen both as a colored zone on the map, as well as in a textual blurb
that pops up when the user clicks on the precinct name.
2. - Street level information - In case of streets that are mostly
devoted to a single use or purpose, these can be iconographically
indicated next to the street name. This lets people understand the
actual functioning/use of an area, and not just see street names.
Again, clicking the icons pops up a blurb containing images and
text about the street. These can, in turn, link to text or images on
external sites like Wikipedia or Flickr.
Over time, as users add more data, these maps can become a rich,
information-dense source of all kinds of data about this area.
Comments?
URBZ being a quick and dirty workshop, the work on this panel is by
no means complete. It is just the beginning of an idea, to be taken
further as time and resources allow.
If you’d like to help us refine our thoughts and ideas, please pick up
a Post-It note and leave us your comments anywhere on this panel.
Thanks for looking!
Team
Brainstorming:
Chestha Papneja
Kunal Ghevaria
Rajitha Vipparthi
Renny Varghese
Sanobar Girap
Shruti Gaonkar
This Panel:
Kunal Ghevaria
Sanobar Girap