CityTraces - mapping the 2011 State of Design Festival

In an age of satellite navigation and Google Maps, we now have the opportunity to show that our cities are as much about everyday events and social life as they are about buildings and streets. By showing these social movements, new maps can be used by urban planners and designers to better understand the workings of cities as social spaces of movement and interaction.

CityTraces is a collaborative platform for ongoing experimental projects that use spatial mapping technologies like GPS smartphones to generate new ways of seeing Australian cities. The project is soft launching at the State of Design Festival happening in Victoria on Saturday july 30th. We're running a collaborative mapping activity for festival-goers to map their day as they explore festival sites in and around melbourne. There's a citytraces iphone App that takes care of all the data gathering, participants can simply download and run it for a few hours as they're out enjoying the festival.

Different map visualisations will be be promoted through the CityTraces website as well as here on culturemap in the coming months

So Get involved if you’re interested in how digital mapping techniques can be used to provoke new ways of visualising your city. You can check out the CityTraces action on Facebook.

CityTraces is a research initiative of CAMRA researcher Dr Chris Brennan-Horley, a geographer from the University of Wollongong