A first of its kind initiative by Mapunity to build a heritage information system for the city region has started. The project has been initiated to inform people about the heritage structures in their area.
It is being done through an online open forum in which general public can share the heritage structures of their localities and can share photos and videos of the structure. This will help in raising awareness among Bengalureans and would help in conserving such structure. “There are two things that we are trying to do. The first task is to document which are the historically important places and why these places are important. INTACH has prepared a list of 700 heritage spots in Bengaluru but the problem is that the places are not geocoded. So now we have started mapping the locations of these buildings. There will be history of each neighbourhood in which more things adding to its value can be later attached to the documentation. We are creating an open forum where citizens can also share a heritage place in the list. The documentation of these heritage structures will be an elaborate one with its history, location etc,” said ABIDe member Ashwin Mahesh.
However, there are no particular criteria for which a building can be tagged as a heritage structure. “There are multiple reasons why a building can be recognised as heritage. The structure can have historic importance or it can be more than 150 years old because of which it is termed as heritage. There are no particular criteria for listing a structure as heritage. Documentation of such structures will make it easy to communicate its value to people and by doing this citizens will be more inclined towards conservation of such spots,” said Mr Mahesh.
Mapunity is also trying to see if it can accelerate the exercise by crowd-sourcing the latitude and longitude of the different places. This will help in locating the heritage structure in a much better way. The second thing on their list for the heritage platform is to collect small photos/videos of different locations that can be shown as part of a series in schools.