How has cultural mapping emerged? Its roots and allied areas

In her video presentation “Can Participatory Mapping Save the Commons?” (2014), Jo Guldi provides a comprehensive history of participatory mapping practices that foreground community resources, sort “social information into … local, regional, and global patterns,” and give “activists the tools to target particular places with investigation or protest.” This video (Video 4:3 in this chapter) and the accompanying academic essay (Guldi, 2017) should be required watching and reading for anyone interested in the participatory roots and crowdsourcing potential of cultural mapping. For, as Guldi details, contemporary cultural mapping, beginning in the late 1970s, “flies in the face of the traditional logic of the map”:

[M]aps were originally disseminated across the world in the seventeenth century as a tool of privatization, in the “I-mapped-this-so-now-I-own-it” logic of Lockean property law exercised by European squire-settlers traveling the globe. Conveniently, settlers typically traveled with surveyors to make the maps, along with armies to back up the documents. So, when native peoples began making their own maps of ancestral territory in the 1970s, pooling the testimony of hundreds of inhabitants to prove to courts that they were not dead and they were, still, in fact, inhabiting the places deeded to their ancestors, those maps amounted to a reversal of the logic of colonization. Private maps made private property; they were invented for that purpose. Crowdsourced maps were invented to unmake it, and have been used successfully to that end ever since. (Guldi, 2014, no page)

Video 4:3. “Can Participatory Mapping Save the Commons?” A presentation by Jo Guldi, Brown University, 2014. Read more.

The contemporary roots of cultural mapping intertwine academic and artistic research with policy, planning, and advocacy contexts. Its current methodological contours have been informed by six main cultural mapping trajectories: (1) community empowerment and counter-mapping, (2) cultural policy, (3) cultural planning and municipal governance, (4) mapping as artistic practice, (5) academic inquiry, and (6) literary, music, and film mapping (see Figure 4:2). The complexity, strength, and vitality of cultural mapping arises through interconnecting these perspectives, sources of knowledge, approaches and methods, and trajectories of work.

While these trajectories can be distinguished in terms of their relative emphasis on the instrumental or the immediately pragmatic, they inevitably overlap, as suggested by the involvement of artists or social activists or academics in counter-mapping, cultural policy, and municipal cultural mapping initiatives. At the same time, each trajectory establishes a definable rhetorical purpose for mapping from the ground up. For example, the public documentation of land claims, the public representation of authentic cultural resources and traditions, the public inventorying of tangible and intangible cultural assets, the public and private deployment of cartographic techniques and sensibilities for aesthetic practices, or the public and ongoing interrogation of the visual and spatial turns in disciplinary research. The common challenge for cultural mapping in each context is the garnering of deep community involvement and the affirmation of local knowledge.

The main trajectories informing cultural mapping practice

Community empowerment/counter-mapping. This trajectory includes cultural mapping in Indigenous communities and territories as well as broader community development and collective action traditions concerning counter cartographies or ‘alternative maps,’ citizen cartographies and people’s atlases, and mapping for change. These counter-mapping traditions generally seek to incorporate alternative knowledges and senses of space and place into mapping processes. The goal of these types of cultural maps is not only to oppose dominant perspectives but, potentially, to build bridges to them as well (Crawhall, 2007). These foundations have propelled practices of cultural mapping in contexts of uneven power relations and in the service of articulating marginalised voices and perspectives in society.

Cultural policy. Influenced by these community-empowerment traditions, Tony Bennett and Colin Mercer (1997) identified cultural mapping as a key vector for improving international cooperation in cultural policy research in a report for UNESCO. Cultural mapping, with its incorporation of both qualitative and quantitative mapping of cultural resources, values, and uses, was seen as a catalyst and vehicle for bringing together the academic, community, industry and government sectors. Since that time, two avenues of work have developed from this: (1) growing attention to defining and mapping the presence and development of cultural and creative sectors (see Redaelli, 2015); and (2) more holistic inquiries about local culture and place development.

Local cultural planning and governance. As cultural planning has become more established in local governments and as culture has become more integrated within broader strategic development and planning initiatives, there has been growing pressure to identify, quantify, and geographically locate cultural assets (such as facilities, organisations, public art, heritage, and so forth) so that they can be considered in multi-sectoral decision-making and planning contexts. This activity has been propelled, on one hand, by rising attention to place promotion in the context of tourism and the (often related) attraction of investors and skilled workers. On the other hand, it also has included participative initiatives regarding community development and the improvement of quality of life in particular neighbourhoods or other target areas. Altogether, these considerations have given rise to a municipal cultural mapping framework with three main purposes: To build a knowledge base, to mobilise community collaboration, and to strategise or make decisions.

Artistic approaches. Mapping has long informed the work of artists, particularly those involved in public works and socially engaged art practices. Artists have internationally demonstrated critical and creative interest in maps, mapping, relational aesthetics, issues of urbanisation, and social engagement, and have participated extensively in cultural mapping initiatives. The role of artists and the arts as agents for enhancing community self-knowledge and sustainable community development has emerged from this as a significant area of research interest and artistic practice.

Academic inquiry. The so-called ‘spatial turn’ has influenced almost every area of academic work, and the early postmodern preoccupation with space, place, and spatiality laid the groundwork for the practice of contemporary cultural mapping. Currents of academic inquiry closely tied to mapping and map production also inform current theoretical approaches and practices. We can observe a shift from ‘inquiry into the cultural nature or embeddedness of maps’ to ‘maps as agents of cultural inquiry,’ propelled and influenced by a variety of academic discourses and critiques, including those about the subjectivity of map-making, the use of maps to better understand human-environment relations, the nature of space, place as a contested site of representation, and map-making as both symbolic and social action.

Literary, music, and film mapping. Cultural products such as literature, film, and music draw from and contribute to the cultural meanings of a place. This trajectory focuses on mapping cultural products to their places of making, influence, and imagination. On one hand, this includes mapping geographical references within cultural works/expressions onto territories and exploring the navigational dimensions (including the use of maps) within cultural works. On the other hand, it also identifies sites associated with the lives of authors and artists, and spatial aspects of cultural practices.