serendipityoucity

I just watched this great brown bag lunch lecture by Ethan Zuckerman on mapping infrastructure.  His lecture re-affirmed something I have been thinking about for some time, that infrastructure determines - thus infrastructural determinism but it does not determine everything all the time but a ton of stuff most of the time.

Infrastructure determines where we go, how we get there, and where we wind up. And to some extent world view or geographic imagination.  Developing countries have poor and less reliable infrastructures.  In developed countries, infrastructures recede into the background until there is a malfunction. But, I am weary of determinism because it removes agency.  We are humans and we can trump the infrastructure, we can go and do what we want, not go at all for that matter or use the infrastructure in unintended ways.  Parcour is a great example of unintended uses of the physical infrastructure, providing an alternate route to a destination. The physical infrastructure does however remain present.

Ethan demonstrates, that what actually happens does not necessarily demonstrate intent.  The infrastructure may constrain you from doing what you want, what you intend, it will determine where and how, but not desires. 

At other times the infrastructure exists but it is un-used, invisible or circumvented.  And this is where the cultural, social and economic infrastructure comes to play, the infrastructures which override the physical infrastructure.  This is what he was getting at with the flow maps of taxi drivers in San Francisco not going to some parts of town.  The parts that are poorly served by transit - a social, economic political infrastructure - that rides on the physical infrastructure.  Transit will go where the roads are if the intent and will to do so are there.  In some cases need takes a back seat and will bypasses.

The infrastructure may determine the route you take but not the route you would have liked to take.  You can map movement, but not the intentions of that movement nor the desires to move somewhere else.  Now that is a really interesting question. Where would you go if the infrastructure provided the means to get there?

Ethan, talks about flow.  And he showed some great flight pattern maps.  Michael Peterson created some of the earliest flight pattern maps, in his Animated Atlas: Air Traffic Flow over North America.  He started developing some flow topologies and identifying flow patterns and labeling them.  I recall when he first showed these to us in 2002 in Ottawa.  We just stared at the things.  They were not pretty maps per say, but were they were mesmerizing.  Non cartographers were always asking What would you use these for? What use are these things? We did not care, and did not really know, we just watched. Michael Peterson also investigates animated cartography and interactive cartography particularly to map change across time.  This is also known as animated mapping.  Some of us group all of these under the term of cybercartography.  Mapping time is also a great cartographic holy grail, and Prof. Menno-Jan Kraak has dedicated his career trying to figure it out. He is investigating the visualization of spatio-temporal data - flow - modelling the data of moving objects.  This is a growing field in cartography and engineering with some data sources becoming available.

Ethan I think provides a great use case for these maps, mapping flow overlain upon infrastructure.  He would love to map infrastructure and animated flow maps to see what the patterns are.  Where is the infrastructure, where is it used and unused - south to south flights for example from Brazil to South Africa.  Again, the social, political, historical and economic infrastructure bypasses the existing infrastructure and impedes flow or reduces the will, intent or desire for that flow. Also, he wants to see where infrastructure is missing but yet see where there is flow in spite of a lacking or inferior infrastructure, as he demonstrates in his Africa examples. I also liked how he pointed out the old cartographic adage, that yes there are flow lines, but we do not see how difficult that flow is, only the line and direction.  So I think some interesting metrics and visualizations will have to be developed to render and measure these obstructions or flow impediments.  Sure I can get to Dharamsala, but I will get to Delhi and take an overnight bus in a crowded dirty station that will go along a treacherous mountain path and toss all my cookies while doing so!

More so, he wants to get at intent.  Sure the infrastructure determines, it determines allot, sure flow respects where infrastructure is, it mirrors allot of it, but cultural, economic and political infrastructure - the soft infrastructure overlain over the hard changes the model, the flow.  Both the soft and the hard infrastructure are time stamped artifacts, ones that persist and demonstrate infrastructural momentum, and determinism, old intent but not new will! 

He speaks to one of contemporary geographies greatest data gaps - flow data!  We have infrastructure data, if you have the mullah to purchase them, we can get data at different time points to show change, but we do not have mobile data that allows for the mapping of real time flow.  We see some GPS flow maps, we also have some animated maps, but these are early days yet.  Flow, to some extent can be inferred from the infrastructure, but only to a point, as we cannot see the magnitude of the movement, the frequency, and the time of movement, we can see some dependencies and hubs but not the flows and certainly not always the intent!

I hope some cartographers can step up to the plate here and give Ethan a hand, because quite frankly, this is just a great question.