'The Quantification of Urban Space' programme - Counter Mapping

 programme led by Dr Min Kyung Lee (Bryn Mawr College), currently Banister Fletcher Global Fellow at the University of London Institute in Paris 

We live in a world of numbers. Weight and length are measured before birth. Footsteps are tallied. Square footage is priced. Air temperatures are calculated. Ice melt is tabulated. From the most intimate aspects of our lives to the global scales of our planetary environment, our world and lives are quantified. This comprehensive quantification project began with the European Enlightenment when scientific communities in London and Paris raced to triangulate the surface of the Earth and to determine a universal standard measure.  

Mapping and Measures, explores the methods and modes in which urban space has been and still is quantified through mapping techniques, numerical measures, and visualization technologies. Beginning with ontological questions of what is mapped and what is not, or cannot be, this panel discussion moves from historical considerations of how space and lives were translated into quantitative values, how numbers gained authority, and the ways numbers mediate how cities and lives are shaped, to critical and counter methods of mapping, measuring, and narrating history.