Data friction : mapping strategies on a (Peri ) urban Frontier – Chennai, India
Autor
Beelen, Karl
Institución
Resumen
I am meeting Satheesh and Krishnan in a small room on the first floor above
a dental clinic off Nungambakkam High Road, Chennai. It is late Novem-
ber and the dark rain-laden sky promises imminent relief of the leaden heat
that has pushed on far beyond summer. Monsoon rains will start any day
now, or so everyone seems to hope. In mixed Tamil-English lingo Satheesh
and Krishnan are getting engrossed in a technical issue on QGIS — how to
close a complex multi-edge polygon and measure its surface. Satheesh is an
uneducated fisherman from Vaithikuppam, a fishing village in the centre of
Chennai’s urbanised coastline. Over the past few years he has been taking
training classes with Krishnan to operate a hand-held GIS device, and he has
been passing on that same knowledge ever since to other fishermen from his
village and beyond.
Satheesh has been ‘mapping’ fishing villages in and around Chennai, and he is
instructing fellow fishermen how to map features within their own settlements.
Krishnan tells me how Satheesh is trying to scale up that effort now. Through-
out the hottest months of summer, Satheesh travels down the southern Bengal
Bay coast, hopping from one fishing village to another, offering anyone who
is interested teachings in the fine arts of geo-tracing, GIS, and self-mapping.
As I sit in that office, I see data flying by that appear to exist only in the eye
and the imagination of these fishermen and their handheld devices: sites and
structures, edifices, and practices that, if not left out intentionally from most
government-approved maps, certainly cast a different eye on what it means to
occupy and dwell on those sites.