MEDIUM: Map, Data Visualization, Poster, Photography
DESCRIPTION:
This poster composites a set of guided-tour maps created by Atlas Guo for “Shanghai Dérive,” a public history initiative founded by Billy Yuan, a UW-Madison alumnus with a B.A. in History. Last year, we organized 13 sessions and 22 events, attracting nearly 400 participants across six districts and 13 neighborhoods in Shanghai, including the Bund, Xinhua Road, Longhua, Xujiahui, and Tilanqiao. The maps were created to support place-based historical walks and to connect specific routes and sites with broader urban, cultural, and historical contexts through a more structured visual framework.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
This project was created to support a form of public history grounded in everyday urban experience rather than casual sightseeing, simple nostalgia, or the idea that the present is always inferior to the past. Our goal was to accompany participants in studying Shanghai’s history from a global perspective and in examining the city’s past, present, and future through the lens of public history. We hope to make learning about and documenting history part of everyday life for more people, so that history can become a source of reflection, understanding, and strength at the levels of the individual, the community, the city, the nation, and the world. Within this broader effort, these maps were designed to provide clear spatial structure for each walk and to support closer engagement with place, memory, and historical context.
