Presenter
Roy Aman - Graduate Center, City University New York, New York City, United StatesPanel
Abstract
Cartography is the gaze of modernist planning regimes, a tool of settler-colonial political power, a set of cosmological signs and a networked bureaucratic process. This paper seeks to hone in on the social life of digital maps, state actors and affected workers and urban residents in Nagpur, frequently ranked the best smart city in India by a hazy ranking metric. Although IT parks, SEZs and gated communities have blossomed in the last decade – these actors remain ambivalent about how to situate in a cartographic sense – where development is taking place
I hope to explore the role maps play as non-human actants in mediating processes of slow dispossession. Nagpur has served as a site of experimentation with new technologies of urban planning – the shift from paper to digital bureaucracies (Mathur and Bear 2015), the installation of city-wide surveillance cameras and the GPS-tracking of municipal waste management workers. The role of representation in urban politics is frequently marked as a measure of its democracy, whereby maps, like votes, are circulated and counted on as tools to establish consensus. I hope to explore how maps that traverse this world exemplify an “ideology of precision” (Kurgan 2013). If they are not necessarily accurate images of a city, do they reveal a set of orientations towards its future? Simultaneously, do such entanglements of cartographic practices with futurity produce a new ethics? (Knox 2021)
