African Airspace*

 

Compiled on Tableau Public 9, this project explores an arbitrary day (April 4th, 2015) of air traffic to and from the African continent. The project is designed using flight data collected from Flight Stats' archive and Plane Finder's list of African Airports. The aim of this project is to visualize Africa as a network of flights in order to grasp the nature of international transport relations across the continent. 

 

The project is based on Manuel Castells' Spaces of Flows, in which the sociologist explains that advancing technologies are not only shaping an atemporal relation to time but also forming a new type of space in which cities are closer, through links and connections within their networks, to cities far from them than those in their proximity. This space in its collective form, is a space of flows--it is movement that prioritizes cities with large networks. 

 

African Airspace is a rhizomatic mapping process and critique to this space of flows in African aviation. It is based on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome theory, as it supports the non-heirarchichal and diverse formation of complex connections through fissions and fusions . The maps presented on this site are all linked together in their a support open and equalized aviation networks across Africa free from tariffs. 

 

Visit irenedoesdata.tumblr.com where Irene Fubara, the project designer shares her process, the raw data and Tableau readable data.

 

 

*African Airspace is a portion of the course requirements for New Developments in Digital Media at the University of Sussex. It is a research project for educational purposes alone and is not affiliated with Flight Stats, Plane Finder or MapBox.