Can Digital Mapping Re-Politicize Urban Mediation in the Indian Context?

This article examines the transformative potential of practices in the fields of digital mapping and DIY environmental monitoring as a means of incorporating alternative conceptualizations of urban space into official and commercial representations of cities. Using a recent media art project entitled Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies as a case-study, I argue that the political potential of digital urban mediation is shaped by an array of under theorized forces arising out of the intersection between issues of data motility and governance, soft power and livability initiatives of governments and urban planners, and the marketization of sensory, locative and media technologies more broadly. I suggest that despite the readily found celebratory accounts that accompany projects that aim to model alternative urban epistemologies, map the 'unintended' city and explicate hidden aspects of the urban environment projects like these are indicative of new and unexpected dimensions of urban politics relating to new media materiality in particular. These new dimensions result from the antagonistic nature of civic epistemologies relative to linear histories and the planned order of urban modernism and the internal tensions and transient nature of alternative spatial schematics produced through interventions made with networked digital technologies. In order to maintain and enhance the radical potential of civic-led digital mapping and environmental monitoring initiatives these dimensions demand consideration throughout their conception, planning, execution and documentation phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]