Let me take you to the journey of of preserving historical trails in Walled City of Lahore. Read sections in order and I will explain you everything what we have been doing in our research project using Local Guides - Google Maps
Walled City of Lahore
The Walled City of Lahore, also known as Old City, forms the historic core of Lahore, Pakistan. The city was established around 1000 CE in the western half of the Walled City, which was fortified by a mud wall during the medieval era. The Walled City was bestowed with numerous monuments during the Mughal era, with some of Lahore’s most iconic structures being located in the Walled City, such as the lavishly decorated Wazir Khan Mosque, the massive Badshahi Mosque, and the Shahi Hammam. (source: WCLA)
Walking the City
Inspired from Anupama Rao’s work, ‘Bombay/Mumbai and its Urban Imagineries’, and Manan Ahmed’s ‘Walking and Colonialism’, the purpose of this project was to bring various strands together that helped produce and imagine Lahore in different ways. It is not the ‘Mughal splendor’ of the city alone that interests us. Rather than approaching the city as a site of Mughal heritage that signals appropriation of city’s past for the statist purpose of projecting a ‘rich’ history that can be museulized, we seek to understand Lahore through the lived experiences of its residents as they navigate it on daily basis and, in this process, ascribe new meanings, explore multiple avenues in pursuance of economic gains, daily survival, spiritual succor and political acts of everyday resistance. When it comes to the ‘Mughal heritage’, we are interested in the politics of heritage that empties the built environment of certain histories to enable a desirable image of ‘Mughal history’ as a precursor to the history of Pakistani state.
We believe that to understand the city with all its richness and complexity, we need to move beyond the idea of abstract space. As Tim Ingold has argued, throughout history, people have “drawn a living from the land, not from space. Their animals graze pastures, not space. Travelers make their way through the country, not through space, and as they walk or stand they plant their feet on the ground, not in space.” To arrive at an understanding of these terms, of dwelling in general as Heidegger puts it, requires connecting with the social and cultural aspects of being-in-the-world as we bring upon influences –material, spiritual and political –on the places we build and inhabit. An exploration of these processes open up rich possibilities of inquiries into the past and present, private and public, spiritual and material that can help us understand the manner in which people make sense of their lives and live it. (source: Dr. Ali Usman Qasmi (ali.qasmi@lums.edu.pk))
Bringing Google Maps In
Now that the context has been set, we needed to collect historical trails data by doing multiple (say 50+) surveys of the places physically. Here we brought Google Maps in. We drafted SOPs for 13 groups (3-4 members each) for 13 gates of Walled City so that they can collect data in organized way using Google Maps List. Map list are excellent on collecting organized data from Google Maps, being computer science students, we were able to extract data in the desired format. Since all the historical sites are not labelled in Google Maps therefore we had to drop pins by physically being there, localizing ourselves and verifying from different sources. Here the SOPs that we drafted and used for collecting data: SOPs
Responsibility as Local Guide
Being technical head of this project and a responsible Local Guide in my community I was verifying all the incoming data by revisiting places, editing many places wrongly marked in Walled City and adding new places/lists for tourist. The project is still going, I still have a lot of data to verify and publish and interestingly our app is almost ready which is built on Google Maps and data that we collected. We are still trying to contact Google Maps representatives and our government officials to acknowledge our work and improve Google Maps for narrow streets of thousands years old Walled City in Lahore.