Capturing Transformations of Place: The adaptation of a geographic information systems program for the creation and analysis of a large database of housing plans

THIS PRESENTS A methodological account of the application of geographical information systems (GIS) in the field of architectural research. GIS have been widely used, for example to record the incidence and distribution of diseases, in the mapping of land use, the planning and monitoring of infrastructural networks such as roads, pipelines and electricity grids, for disaster response planning and to record the location of crime. The process described in this paper is the first use of GIS in the development of a package linking graphic and database interfaces to represent, manipulate and analyze data on built form and its inhabitants giving rise to a database which is a record of human settlement. The main purpose of such a database is to understand how residents of social housing individualize their dwellings. The author touches on the problems of capturing floor-plans in graph form relating internal to external spaces, “georeferencing” aerial photos with plans and of digitalizing the information in his investigation of “user initiated modifications and extensions (or ‘transformations’) of government built, lowcost housing.” Socio-economic and plan data were collected for approximately 1,200 properties in four countries (Ghana, Egypt, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh). Details of who lived in which room, when each extension was built and the domestic and commercial activities taking place in each space were assembled and related to the relevant floor-plans in order to analyze what affected people’s ability to transform their dwellings. A code of practice to guide and support future development is developed to help facilitate sensitive housing policy. However, the author also underlines the present limitations of these tools which require sophisticated programming skills, significant data-capturing resources and high speed computer networks. Whilst they may be useful in assisting land use planning, the author also raises the question of whether or not the costs are justifiable in the South. The second half of this paper is an appendix which reviews the literature on abstracting plan data for digital capture. It investigates the theoretical need to measure space and to interpret the meaning of space so measured in a variety of analytical contexts. The author points to several issues, including those of appropriateness and replicability, which need addressing if the methods described in this paper are to be more widely applied but is, nevertheless, excited by the possibilities raised by the development of the package.