A Map & Other Parts

‘I imagined watching every planning zone burn, the bureaucratic skeleton of the city, in the hope that I’d find something in the ashes to build something new.’

Vacant food courts, sustainability policies, a maze of planning zones and mixed-use apartment complexes. A Map & Other Parts speaks to the shadows that haunt city life in an era desperate for First Nations empowerment. Writer and urban planner Timmah Ball sardonically documents and dissects urban spaces under colonial capitalism, asking what our cities are – and what they could be.

In an expansive blend of fiction and poetry, A Map & Other Parts critiques planning policy, examines urban history and asks vital and unnerving questions about how we might finally make cities work.

Timmah Ball is a writer based between Boorloo/Perth and Narrm/Melbourne. Her career spans the urban planning and arts industries, specifically focused on First Nations approaches to placemaking informed by her own Ballardong Noongar heritage. Recent publications include essays in UQP’s Shapeshifting: First Nations Lyric Nonfiction, Words to Sing the World Alive, Giramondo’s Critic Swallows Book: Ten Years of the Sydney Review of Books and a range of essays in Meanjin, Griffith Review, Artlink, The Architectural Review, Overland and in anthologies published by UWA Press and Pan Macmillan.

If you enjoyed A Map & Other Parts, we suggest:

• Going back to the source on Australian cityscapes with The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd

• Convincing your mother you’re not a lesbian by picking up a copy of I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

• Experimenting with other hybrid collections, like Cotton-stuffed by Arantza García Ferrand

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