Life After Warfare: How a Digital Map Could Help Revive Mogadishu
Think "Mogadishu" and you probably picture Black Hawk Down, a feral city of bombed-out buildings patrolled by thugs in machine-gun-equipped pickup trucks. And until a couple of years ago, you'd be right. Today the Somali capital is at peace, but decades of war destroyed its informational -- the systems that keep data on tax collection, property ownership, road repair, and so on that let a city function as a city. Mitchell Sipus is trying to recapture that data. He's an urban planner running a municipal project to digitally map Mogadishu, encoding not just geography but also businesses, infrastructure, and people. The technology works, but can a map tame what's arguably the most dangerous city on earth? Sipus thinks so.
Photo: Feisal Omar/Reuters