WHY MAPs?
لماذا الخرائط؟
The evolution of Power Structures in Cairo through the critical reading of the maps of the city.
From Colonizing Egypt to colonizing the clouds.
Since maps are the representations of space produced by a certain power structure, then a critical reading of these maps might result in an insightfull understanding of the powers behind it. This study is trying to understand the connotations of power structures found in the maps of Cairo between a single authoritative/official set of analog maps and a subjective/individualistic set of digital maps. It raises the question of who draws the city? and whether digital maps could be a tool of creating a counter map that voices the individuals instead of the states?
This investigation requires a thorough understanding of the changes in the medium of the production of the maps in the first place. The shift from a paper map commissioned by a state to mark territories and set boundaries to a digital crowd sourced-map produced by hundreds and millions of anonymous internet users is placed under a microscope. Internet maps gave users the chance to detect the flow of traffic or the best restaurants or even the areas of highest levels of sexual harassment represents the changes in the power structures drawing the city.
This website works both as a data mining tool and a platform of sharing ideas and findings. Due to the expolrative nature of this research this website is always under construction.
Why it matters?
This study started by the taggling term Deleuze use to describe Foucault’s maps of power. He argued that Foucault in his writings about power structures controlling the disicplinary society he was charting maps that were never geographical but “Dynamographical”. He offered no clear definition for this concept yet if we start from Foucault’s assumption that power is cannot be possessed but practiced through a certain position within a network. And this position is under constant change. Then tracing these positions of power might result in the production of the so called “dynamo graphic map”.
It is worth mentioning that the term itself refers to an instrument for recording the amount of force exerted or (in medicine)the degree of muscular power according to the English Encyclopedia.