Kathy Waghorn stands before a map of Auckland etched in 1885 by George Treacy Stevens. Each building in the bird's eye view of the young town is painstakingly drawn, each tree detailed. Waka and ships sail in the Waitemata.
"Even in Google maps, there might just be a footprint of a building. But here, buildings are drawn as though they are little buildings. People will stand here for hours and try to identify buildings that they know," she says.
The senior tutor at Auckland University's School of Architecture was working on a project with her colleague, Unitec product design lecturer Cris de Groot, when someone suggested they mount an exhibition at Auckland War Memorial Museum.
The result is You Are Here: Mapping Auckland, open now at the Auckland War Memorial Museum - a year after the Auckland Council election changed the city once again.
"Getting the maps out and showing them is a way to show how the city was thought of by different people at different times," says Ms Waghorn, explaining what is shown on some of the maps, such as buildings or a reef. "But some of them are about planning for the future or dreaming of the future and making a picture of it."
For instance, the maps show the idea of laying out a town in a series of circular streets from the hilltop, which is now Albert Park. Practicality overruled surveyor-general Felton Mathew's design of 170 years ago. But some parts remain, such as Waterloo Quadrant.
"The other thing maps do ... is they draw boundaries and constitute a place by drawing lines around it. So in the exhibition you can see the idea of Auckland. What geographical space Auckland would encompass has been thought in different ways, lots of different times."
Each of the museum's 10,000 maps of Auckland document its history in a different way. "There have been really great histories of the governance of Auckland and its councils. But we wanted to make a way that people could think about this stuff and look at it and engage with it without being so reliant on reading."
"One of the things we've noticed about the exhibition is that when we're standing around the maps, people tell stories about the maps all the time, what they know about that place or they wonder aloud about it," she says.
Ms Waghorn observes, as the Auckland Council again maps out its spatial plan, that there have been many maps.
"The vision of the city that we have now - this municipality that stretches from the top of the Kaipara to the bottom of the Manukau, that's arranged in a certain way - is only one point in time. The chances are it won't stay forever how it is now.
"It's a really good thing, I think, to remember to have a long-term view." rowena.orejana@theaucklander.co.nz
YOUR CITY, YOUR STORY
A huge interactive table map of Auckland stands in the middle of the exhibit at the Auckland Museum.
The table is the work of nine Unitec undergraduates and keyboards attached to it allow people to plot their anecdotes about different parts of Auckland.
"The idea is that people's memories can be put into this map," says Cris de Groot. "People could think about their stories in Auckland as a geographical region and contribute. It can be a psycho-geographic map."
There are different headings where stories can go: love, celebration, family history, adventure.
"I find the stories really touching and some are quite funny," says Kathy Waghorn. "Some people even share their secret places in Auckland."
See http://tinyurl.com/3v2wdyt for more on the You Are Here exhibition.
Shape of the city
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