The 21st Century has brought about an intensifying entanglement between urbanisms and digital technologies. This relationship presents innovative tools for connection and communication, while simultaneously generating new modes of extraction and marginalisation. However, the costs and benefits of this formulation are not distributed evenly on a planetary or urban level. Many Asian cities, as the epicentres of much of the world’s techno-industrial transformations, face new challenges and opportunities at this convergence of increasing connection and disarticulation. Two cities in particular, Hsinchu, Taiwan and Chennai, India have come into unanticipated proximity at the centre of these new global flows of material, capital, and labour.
This project facilitated two public engagement workshops in Chennai and Hsinchu and the creation of this, a web-based Techno-Urban Atlas to bear witness to and promote inter-Asian comparison regarding the socio-spatial reconfigurations emerging within these urban areas. The workshops were in collaboration with local cultural organisation partners, the Chennai Photo Biennale and Hsinchu City Art-Site. The workshops trained participants in 3D-scanning methods before venturing on a walking tour through key techno-industrial areas within Chennai and Hsinchu. The participants 3D-scanned sensorial traces, surfaces, and artifacts of the urban landscapes which are now aggregated into this Techno-Urban Atlas website.
This project employs participatory photogrammetry as its primary methodology,
a mode of 3D-scanning that uses photographic data taken from multiple angles
to generate three-dimensional models. As one of the most lightweight forms of
3D-scanning, most smartphones can serve as the primary instrument through in-built
cameras and off-device cloud computing for model construction (Chmielewski et al., 2019; Tait et al., 2016).
Two workshops were conducted in the Spring and Summer of 2024 in Chennai, India and Hsinchu City, Taiwan drawing
20 and 15 participants respectively from diverse backgrounds including local students, professionals,
artists, activists, and architects.
Each workshop followed a two-day multimodal structure: the first day paired technical training in photogrammetry
with conceptual introductions to techno-industrial peri-urbanisation through lecture, discussion of relevant
art and research practices, and group worksheets; the second day comprised a walking-sensing-scanning session
along a pre-planned route through public areas near the factory sites, where participants worked in pairs and
recorded their socio-political, agentic, and sensorial observations using structured worksheets.
The outputs of both workshops were subsequently brought into digital proximity through a web-based platform
featuring interactive 3D models deployed using three.js, written participant reflections, and looping
soundscapes recorded at the scanning locations, enabling user-led navigation and thematic comparison
across the two research contexts. This methodology is positioned within broader debates on comparative
urbanisms (Robinson, 2016) and inter-Asian knowledge production (K.H. Chen, 2010), seeking to generate
embodied encounters with peri-urban landscapes that hold in tension place-based
specificity and cross-contextual comparison.
