Upcoming Talks! Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013

I'm showing up at Stanford Oct 24 to present a talk called "Can Participatory Maps Save the World?", an audit of the successes and failures of crowdsourced maps and appropriate technology between 1968, when Marxist development officers started using participatory maps to help villages in India manage their water.

I'd love it if you could come, bring folks, and share the announcement!  Hope to see you soon!


AT STANFORD
"Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013"
Thursday, October 24, 2013, 4:15pm, Lane History Corner (Building 250, room 303), Stanford University

"Introducing Paper Machines"
Friday, October 25, 2013, 12pm, Lane History Corner (Bldg 250, Room 307), Stanford University
A talk on Paper Machines, my digital toolkit for analyzing large corpora of digitized texts. The organizers have asked for RSVPs as lunch will be served.


AT BROWN
"Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013"
Thursday, November 7, Time TBA, Rockefeller Library, Brown University




"Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013"

A talk by Jo Guldi, Asst Prof. of History, Brown University

Since 2006, the New York Times has boasted that participatory technology is on the cusp of solving  the problem of access to city government.  Questions about the allocation of infrastructure, the riddles of which have been one of the primary stamps of the failures of the infrastructure state since the eighteenth century.  

In these debates, technology often appears as the magic cure for these problems, promising to deliver democratic consensus into the process of infrastructure building promises to correct nothing less than the problems defined by Timothy Mitchell as the "rule of experts," the inherently hierarchical structure of decision-making that has governed civil engineering and urban planning projects since the invention of those professions in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  But what works?  And what fails?  Can maps actually reverse dramatic failures of participation, and dissolve the barriers of privilege between rich and poor?

This talk will audit the experience of appropriate technology and map-making in particular back as far as 1968, when maps were first trumpeted as a way to overturn lines of class and culture, and up to 2013, when lightweight Indian startups promise to deliver infrastructure for cities like Bangalore and Kibera that lack the centralized bureaucracy to manage water and sanitation in traditional ways.