Abstract

In our tech-saturated contemporary world, digital mapping has become a globally available technology that is radically reshaping how we position ourselves in communities and neighborhoods be they local, national, or international, physical or virtual. It has vastly altered the way we locate ourselves in the world at large. In the context of the proliferation of interactive online mapping sites of various degrees of complexity that are available in real time, and the parallel emergence in the academy of the Digital Humanities as a formal field of inquiry, this article discusses an embryonic digital mapping project located in Johannesburg, South Africa. Provisionally titled JoziQuest, this project aims to unwrap the intricacies of space and memory in a city that remains structured by legacies of apartheid and exclusionary urban planning. The project aims to disturb conventional approaches to urban research by offering a nuanced scholarly and creative engagement with a series of sites and spaces related to the almost forgotten legacy left by the architect Hermann Kallenbach who was a close friend of the global icon of passive resistance and Indian independence Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.