ARTT 006H. ARCH: Mapping and GIS (Mapping Infrastructural Movements)

With discourses of infrastructure making their way from engineering into the social sciences and the humanities, the workshop equips students from across these and other disciplines with tools to think infrastructurally and is oriented around three main axes. First, is an engagement with the “shape” of infrastructural systems through an introduction to digital, GIS mapping techniques. These techniques will be used to construct drawings that spatialize infrastructural dispositions. Second, are readings from across disciplines that situate infrastructural thinking within a framework for the diversity of this thought and its potential application. Third, these two abstracted modes of considering infrastructural thinking will enter into relation with visits to thenodal points of multiple Philadelphia infrastructures and discussions with the people who ensure their upkeep. Over the course of the semester, each student will identify a mapping project that puts infrastructural systems - for example, drainage networks, urban farms, or elder care centers - in relation to social, economic or temporal forces that help situate the movements and exchanges they make possible.
Arts and Humanities.
1 credit.
Fall 2025. Devabhaktuni.
Catalog chapter: Art
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/art

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