8/14/2019 Mapping Abdul Rehman Street (URBZ Mashup Mumbai)

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URBZ Urban Mashup // Mapping Abdul Rehman Street

Mapping Mumbais BazaarsMumbais central business district has traditionally housed majorwholesale markets for everything from metals and plastics to hairaccessories and playing cards. Having organically developed overthe years, these bazaars are extremely dense and have multiplelayers of form, function and meaning.

Although people living or working in these areas have precisemental maps of the whole area, traditional cartography has beenunable to map these bazaars (and their multiple layers) adequately.

Google Maps provides us new opportunities in cartography likezoomability, layers that can be turned on and off, imagery that canpop up or link to other places/websites, etc. We aim to use thesetechnologies to create a new cartography for this area.

This project uses Abdul Rehman St. as a prototype for this newplacemaking. Abdul Rehman Street and the streets that branch off

from it have been chosen because they have an extraordinarily highdensity of built form and usage that is a challenge to map.

This cartography is thus an exercise in using a virtual medium todepict the physical form of a mental map. This mashup of the virtual,physical and mental is what makes these maps interesting.

Directions or Pollution?Abdul Rehman Street has a fantastic variety of signage - oldhandpainted signs that have been around for decades, newer signsin wood, contemporary plastic signs that look out of place - prettymuch any kind of signage you can imagine, in multiple languages.

The density of signage here is absolutely overwhelming - there is somuch there that one just ends up tuning it all out. Also, the signagealmost doesnt matter when the whole street is selling the samething. We were just so captivated that our first response was tophotograph and collage this exuberance of signage.

Adding data to existing mappingsGoogle Maps already has street names of the chosen area in itsdatabase. In the spirit of user-generated cities, we look at addingdata using Google Maps as a base. We look at adding 2 types of datato start with, that dont yet exist in Google Maps adequately:

1. - Precinct level information - This can give a user informationabout the overall use of a precinct. A precinct can be as small as acouple city blocks or large enough to cover hundreds of acres. Thedefinition and branding of precincts can happen first in the virtualspace and then the physical space, or vice-versa. The information isseen both as a colored zone on the map, as well as in a textual blurbthat pops up when the user clicks on the precinct name.

2. - Street level information - In case of streets that are mostlydevoted to a single use or purpose, these can be iconographicallyindicated next to the street name. This lets people understand theactual functioning/use of an area, and not just see street names.

Again, clicking the icons pops up a blurb containing images andtext about the street. These can, in turn, link to text or images onexternal 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.

01. Mashing Google Maps 02. Street+Chaos Mashup

Comments?URBZ being a quick and dirty workshop, the work on this panel is byno means complete. It is just the beginning of an idea, to be takenfurther as time and resources allow.

If youd like to help us refine our thoughts and ideas, please pick upa Post-It note and leave us your comments anywhere on this panel.

Thanks for looking!

TeamBrainstorming:Chestha PapnejaKunal GhevariaRajitha VipparthiRenny VargheseSanobar GirapShruti Gaonkar

This Panel:Kunal GhevariaSanobar Girap

03. Type Mashup