The territories – cities and landscapes – of South Asia are under
incredible transformation due to man-made and natural conditions.
Globalisation is spatially leaving its imprint as cities and landscapes
are progressively being built by an ever-more fragmented, piecemeal and
ad-hoc project modus – funded by established and new-found fortunes of
national and international developers and lenders, development aid
projects and (often corrupt) governments. At the same time, ‘natural’
disasters are increasing in severity and frequency – due to climate
change and the flagrant disregard of the environment in the relentless
dive to impose imported terms of reference for modernisation and
urbanisation. The challenges and strategic importance of realising urban
design in South Asia’s contemporary context of borrowed visions,
abstract land-use planning and a diminishing political will are,
obviously, innumerable. How to qualitatively intervene as an urbanist in
such a context? This paper will argue that an understanding of
contexts, based on fieldwork, is necessary in order to project feasible
urban visions and strategic urban design projects that can make more
evident particular sites’ inherent qualities and creatively marry
ecological, infrastructural, and urbanisation issues by solutions that
cut across multiple scales and sectoral divisions. Interpretative
mapping is a first step to transform a territory. An understanding of
the context and the reading of sites are necessary in order to create
modifications that have logic and relate to the particularities of
places and situations. Three scales of mapping (territorial, urban, and
tissue) will be presented. The territories/cities investigated are the
southwest (Galle-Matara) coast of Sri Lanka, Mumbai, the economic engine
of India, and Khulna, the third largest city in Bangladesh.
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motw/The 'Agency of Mapping' in South Asia_ Gal - Kelly Shannon.pdf

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Memory of the World Librarian: Dorothy Porter

2025-10-27