Impossible Maps : Insights into Communitry Group Responses

This blog post is my response to thoughts from various community groups in Boston (Sisters Unchained, Hyde Square Task Force, Urbano Project). We, the Impossible Maps team are collaborating with these communities and Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum to create something inspiring!

So I..

• watched Eternally Misunderstood by Sisters Unchained,
• read HSTF’s vision, their cultural district map, and notes from their youth group
• watched Square Roots of Boston by Urbano Project (could not access their responses on space and maps)

And I found some concepts that penetrated most of these projects. The notion of “gathering” along with cultural engagements, interactions, activities seemed very intersting. I found that both the videos and the written responses focused on the “stories” of people belonging to these communities while visual representations like maps focused more on the buildings and locations of the businesses and organizations within the region of their interests. I felt a disconnect between the uniqueness of their person stories and the representations of their culture. While stories describe these diverse cultures using senses like “taste”, “smell”, “welcoming vibe”, the visual representations do not posess much of these human feelings of those communities. Perhaps issues like gentrification are easier to represent on a map. Nonetheless, I felt like portraying our “human senses” might be an intersting path to invesitgate. But how do we bridge the gap between the stories and the spaces?

Here are a few things we could try:

• Map different tastes of a space. I imagine a map full of food smells embedded onto a map’s surface, and people can interact with the map?
• Represent the “vibes” of a space using sound effect, noises, people’s conversations, etc. (Make it fully immersive and 4D). This could be either virtual or a physical installation.
• Story maps of a community that represent an area from human perspectives.
• Map the gatherings of people for different seasons, time of the day, and etc. Show how vibrant the community is with engagements, activities, and interactions.

Many of these ideas are blue-sky, but technically they could be all implemented provided the data, time and resources. I’m excited to see what you all think about these ideas and looking forward to read more responses from these groups!