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Published : 08 May 2025, 11:04 PM
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) School of Architecture and Planning has said it established an art installation based on the informal methods of transport around the world, called the Atlas of Popular Transport.
The installation will be presented at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti, opening on May 10, according to a media statement from MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU).
The Atlas began as the school’s effort to map public transport in cities where transportation methods deviate from the benchmarks set by developed countries, LCAU said.
It added that many cities in the Global South lack a map of the route taken by popular transport such as minibuses, tuk-tuks, shared vans, or repurposed school buses. The Atlas of Popular Transport takes it upon itself to change that, creating detailed visual records where none existed before.
The installation has been described as a “beautiful map for an unmapped city” on the Atlas’ website. It tells the story of 16 cities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where students, civic hackers, artists, union leaders, and riders used GPS and smartphones to map these widely used but poorly documented systems.
Along with the map, the exhibition features audio-visual scenes, so the viewers can immerse themselves in the sounds, stories, and rhythms of everyday life along these transport routes.
Art aficionados can find themselves revelling in the vibrant artwork covering Filipino jeepneys, or grooving to the music-blasting matatus of Kenya, it said.
The installation also includes a printed Atlas, filled with stories from the teams that led data collection and implementation efforts, for those eager to look beyond what meets the eye.
“The Atlas of Popular Transport is a manifesto for collective intelligence,” the statement quotes Sarah Williams, faculty director of MIT's Norman B Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, and the Civic Data Design Lab, as saying.
“The knowledge needed to create data isn’t behind closed doors or waiting to be generated by expensive equipment – it’s in the streets, in our hands, and with the people who use these systems every day,” she said.
The Atlas highlights the growing movement to democratise data for empowerment and action, allowing countries to reclaim ownership of their culture through the vehicles born from frugal innovation, the statement read.
Its attempt to include these routes on mainstream mapping platforms like Google Maps allows the residents to move beyond the conventional transportation systems such as buses and trains, validating one of the most intrinsic aspects of their daily lives, it added.
Today, platforms such as Digital Transport for Africa, the DATUM project in Latin America, and the Global Network for Popular Transportation provide tools for making informal transport systems visible, it concluded.
