Data friction : mapping strategies on a (Peri ) urban Frontier – Chennai, India

Abstract

I am meeting Satheesh and Krishnan in a small room on the first floor above a dental clinic off Nungambakkam High Road, Chennai. It is late Novem- ber and the dark rain-laden sky promises imminent relief of the leaden heat that has pushed on far beyond summer. Monsoon rains will start any day now, or so everyone seems to hope. In mixed Tamil-English lingo Satheesh and Krishnan are getting engrossed in a technical issue on QGIS — how to close a complex multi-edge polygon and measure its surface. Satheesh is an uneducated fisherman from Vaithikuppam, a fishing village in the centre of Chennai’s urbanised coastline. Over the past few years he has been taking training classes with Krishnan to operate a hand-held GIS device, and he has been passing on that same knowledge ever since to other fishermen from his village and beyond. Satheesh has been ‘mapping’ fishing villages in and around Chennai, and he is instructing fellow fishermen how to map features within their own settlements. Krishnan tells me how Satheesh is trying to scale up that effort now. Through- out the hottest months of summer, Satheesh travels down the southern Bengal Bay coast, hopping from one fishing village to another, offering anyone who is interested teachings in the fine arts of geo-tracing, GIS, and self-mapping. As I sit in that office, I see data flying by that appear to exist only in the eye and the imagination of these fishermen and their handheld devices: sites and structures, edifices, and practices that, if not left out intentionally from most government-approved maps, certainly cast a different eye on what it means to occupy and dwell on those sites.