Kabul Urban Survey - Groupe URD

• Outdated Kabul mapping process
“It is a long-overdue process. Every map of Kabul until now has been based on aerial
photographs taken in 1986 that were hand-plotted on drafting tables by the governmentbased
AGCHO and then digitised by the international community. The coordinate system
was based on manual geometric techniques that have been used for nearly five hundred
years, and countless roads, settlements and landmarks have gone unmapped since the
original version.” AIMS is updating a forty year-old process which consisted of drawing maps
by hand on transparent paper placed over AGCHO aerial photographs. “AGCHO workers
would hand-trace the lines and contours, using different thickness of pens to delineate
altitude. […]
- A 1978 city Master plan produced by Kabul Municipality is written in Cyrillic letters. The
Soviets used the Kabul map to present grand plans for zoning and road planning.
- In 1986, AGCHO updated the city map based on new aerial photographs and groundtruthing.
- In 1994, the NGO ACTED updated the map yet again. It still had numerous problems,
among them its inclusion of buildings that had been destroyed and its exclusion of new
roads that had been built. However the map had been used since then for town planning
and security issues.” 41
Since the launch of the reconstruction process in 2001, there is a high demand for new
updated maps for coordination of physical building works and infrastructure, and upstream
for coordination between the different stakeholders, surveys and programmes and projects in
a number of fields, such as “historical conservation, road clearing, water systems and tourist
sites”.
• Outdated spatial background data
Two satellite databases have been used by AIMS to establish maps of Kabul
- One source is a 2000 satellite photo of Kabul produced by Spaceimaging.com. This
image shows only the north side of the city with several landmarks such as the airport,
Akbar Khan Hospital, Pashtun Square, Royal Palace and Blue Mosque.
- The other source is a satellite image produced by Ikonos Image from 2002.
“The first limitation that AIMS faced in addressing these new demands was the lack of
updated aerial photographs of Kabul. The bombing of the city in the early nineties destroyed
AGCHO’s camera-equipped plane, along with its entire storehouse of map negatives and
prints. Through the European Commission, AIMS was finally able to secure the rights to use
satellite photographs of Kabul taken in 2002, and has negotiated for the right of the
Government to own these images.” 42
• Need for modern topographic tools
“…The Government … travelled the city with the AIMS team, gathering Global Positioning
System (GPS) satellite coordinates and verifying the presence of new buildings and
settlements. The GPS coordinates were overlaid onto the digitised satellite images, and then
the district boundaries outlined using the 1978 city master Plan” 43
• Standardisation of different languages
In the quality control process, the names of every road, neighbourhood and park had to be
verified. “… AIMS had to request the participation of Afghan government employers who
knew well Kabul city to for standardize the spellings of the English names on the map. It was
41 idem note HEGLAND, UNDP
42 idem note HEGLAND, UNDP
43 idem note HEGLAND, UNDP
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