Rectifying Maps

For this week's assignment we needed to find a historic map of our city to rectify onto modern maps.  I learned that such maps of Durban are practically impossible to find online!  I was unable to find even one good historic map of Durban that I could access (free of charge).  Imagining what maps from the mid-20th century might look like, I would expect that there would be evidence of apartheid planning - divisions of the city into areas for different races and ethnicities, which often meant divisions of the city by wealth too.  I would expect to see residential areas with large houses conveniently located near key downtown areas, separated by roads or perhaps railway tracks from other sections with significantly smaller, more crowded housing.  Today, aerial views of Durban do show a great variation from one neighbourhood to the next, but wealthier-looking sections are mixed in randomly with sections that appear poorer, which is a change from the larger homogenous sections we might have seen in historic maps.  Using google earth today to view the Durban suburb below, we can see large houses with considerable properties and swimming pools very close to a series of much smaller, more tightly-packed houses.

Like historic maps, historic newspaper articles on Durban are also tricky to come by but I was able to find this short clipping, reposted on a number of websites, focusing on the development of the locomotive engine.  In the mid-19th century, A Leeds-based engine company produced the locomotive for the new Natal Railway in South Africa. The locomotive, appropriately named “Natal,” became, in June 1860, the first locomotive in South Africa to haul a public train.  The article below was printed in September 1860 in the Leeds Mercury. 

http://c9425687.myzen.co.uk/MRT/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=138

The article is an optimistic and excited report of the development to people back home in England.  It describes the opening day as one of “unprecedented rejoicing” and expresses pride in the fact that the colonists were able to organize such a feat “without external pecuniary aid.”  The article’s author does not miss a chance to compare this modern development to the assumed ignorance of the “natives,” as he describes the amusing sight of “wonder-stricken Kaffirs” chasing after the train but “of course” – these words emphasizing that they should have already known they did not stand a chance against the locomotive marvel – failing to keep up.

I had a little bit more success with rectifying historic maps of other cities, largely because I was assigned images to warp so did not have to hunt the pictures down first!  Below are two rectified historic maps of Nairobi, Kenya from 1955.  

 I was able to locate each historic map within the WorldMap by identifying roads and rail lines that remain the same nearly 60 years later.  Although some of the paths of roads and shape of intersections remained the same, the names of the roads had changed, often from the names of English cities to those of post-independence heroes.  Many roads and train tracks had been expanded or even truncated since 1955, making alignment even more challenging!  In the map above, the historic map only shows a small, concentrated portion of the roads that exist today, so the overlap of the two demonstrates the expansion that has taken place in the last half-century.

This map demonstrates that even if one identifies the correct location of intersections, the historic and modern maps may still not line up perfectly.  Quite frustrating!

 In addition to exploring the art of Warping, I’m beginning to plan ahead for my final paper.  As I’m planning to write my senior thesis on Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Shackdwellers’ Movement based in and around Durban, I’m hoping to explore the movement in this paper as well.  If the necessary information is available online, I would really like to map the location of informal settlements in Durban today and trace their history, focusing on their size and location at the initial establishment and following their growth and movement.  There have been several cases of forced removal of informal settlements by the government, so I’m interested in tracking potential patterns as initial readings suggest that removals have tended to shift informal settlements away from urban centres.  Ideally, I would also like to research the sites of major protests by the marginalized poor throughout Durban, comparing where the Shackdwellers’ Movement organizes protest today with the locations of major apartheid demonstrations.  This comparison would address interesting larger questions of the memory in space over time!