Yes — it’s always a question of who’s doing the forgetting or the remembering. I don’t think I knew that space behind the Tate Modern, but it doesn’t sound like it was forgotten by the students who played football there, or others like yourself who valued its quietness.

The Mapping Forgotten Spaces project came out of a conversation with the RIBA’s London team about their Forgotten Spaces competition. We wanted to work with the organisers of the competition, while introducing some broader space for reflection and participation, opening up these questions of who is involved in the forgetting or remembering of spaces like this.

We did this through a series of workshops with people who were considering entering the competition. These focused on the possibilities of small interventions rather than bulldoze-and-build, and on starting from the histories, memories and current uses of spaces which might (at first glance) appear “forgotten”.

It felt like this was reflected in quite a few of the shortlisted entries. I wouldn’t claim that was all down to our influence — I think it reflects a mood among quite a few younger architects and architecture students, itself driven by the economic realities of the last two years. When economic growth slows, it leaves more room for smaller, quieter, more specific kinds of growing.

Almost a year after that competition, with The Shard rising on the London skyline, it could feel like that pause is over — yet there’s a precariousness to this recovery, a sense that people are not convinced. The conversations we’re having suggest that there’s long-term interest in ways of remembering and regenerating space which are not based on big, capital-intensive building projects, but on reuse and rediscovery of the overlooked and undervalued potential of a place and the people already connected to it.

The Mapping Forgotten Spaces site has been an experiment — a first step, maybe, towards a tool which might help with this kind of reuse and rediscovery. But it also raises the question of whether mapping things is always a good idea. Is it always appropriate for information to be open and public, or are there times and places where a certain obscurity is a good thing? I think that’s a real question that we’re starting to hit in all kinds of areas in the age of networked technologies.

As a minimum you should use OpenStreetMap as a base map (e.g. look at these instructions http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Maps_Example ) It’s better than google. More detail and more community ownership. For that matter it sounds you’d be interested in getting involved in editing the map too.

We put some event details on the OpenStreetMap site: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Spacemakers_Brixton_mini_mapping_party