Jai Sen: Mapping the Unintended City
(Unnayan, via)
Two quick things, after reading Jai Sen’s essay on his work with Unnayan in Calcutta. First, Sen notes the simple action of dwelling.
In all cultures, dwelling is one of the most basic actions we undertake as human beings and therefore one of the must fundamental parts of the act of building our world itself. Dwelling is an acting of building order in our lives and gaining some control over it—exercising power-to. Conversely, the denial of a place to live, and the denial that people live somewhere, is a brutal exercise of power-over. Dwelling, and the act of mapping dwellings (or human settlements)—and equally, the act of not mapping dwellings and instead labeling them vacant land-is therefore all about power.
Second, Sen admit that his own work with mapmaking (which, he says, was not the project’s central role) reflects traditional modes of thinking; he reflects that in using these modes, that were perhaps foreign to the “unintended” that were charted, the methods may have infringed on their society, his methods being implicitly more credible than theirs.
The questions nevertheless arise: What would the maps have been like if we had developed them with the settlers themselves? Did the settlers have a vocabulary of their own for mapping the world around them, as many folk cultures do? And would such maps have moved on, including through memory and oral culture, in ways that our maps could not a did not?
Jai Sen, “Other Worlds, Other Maps: Mapping the Unintended City.” An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aethetics and Protest Press, 2007.
