AN ATLAS FOR UPENDING THE WORLD

 

Urban areas drive global change.

Our cities are not only our cultural, political, and economic hubs, they have also become home to the majority of all people worldwide and those places where many of the present day emergencies and crises manifest and get negotiated. As the number of city dwellers surges by the day, the urban land cover expands along with them – increasingly threatening ecosystems: over 400 cities worldwide are situated right within the 36 globally recognized biodiversity hotspots.

Leaning on the CDS overarching research theme Forecast, this seminar investigates on spatially explicit probabilities and predictions for the so-called “hotspot cities”, the fastest growing of all cities in the most critical biological areas. It is not only a way of familiarizing with the concrete global and regional struggles and trends for those urban areas, but also of delving into strategies around potential positive links between economic, social, and environmental strengths of development planning towards the UN New Urban Agenda.

The seminar approaches the theme through the element of maps – a central tool of urban planning and graphic device to facilitate knowledge exchange around expectancy and phenomena in correspondence (or contrast?) with reality – across a reduced, perhaps selective, representation.

“The Atlas for the End of the World” by a research team at UPenn brings urbanization and conservation together, through essays, maps, data, and artwork. Building on this atlas, through this seminar we are aiming for a draft of the ATLAS FOR UPENDING THE WORLD, seeking for constructive and sustainably sensible strategies around the future of our urban habitat.

This way, the seminar becomes an attempt on how to free ourselves from cartographic manipulations, data classes, statistical thresholds, graphic code, and information hierarchy to underline our responsibilities in using the map as graphic information device between freedom and constraint ... 

 

... “Cartography is never merely about the drawing of maps: it is the making of worlds.” *

 

 

*Brian Harley, “Cartography, Ethics and Social Theory,” Cartographica 27, no. 2 (1990): 1- 23.

80% attendance, presentation, and final discussion.