Critical Cartography Research Articles

Cartographies of poverty: Rethinking statistics, aesthetics and the law

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing ‘the poor’ in the urban landscape. Drawing on the fields of critical cartography and digital urbanism, and taking a 2013 controversy around Google Maps’ mapping of favelas in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, it investigates the aesthetic role of digital maps and data in the legal geographies of urban poverty. It is argued that sociospatial encodings give form to poverty in ways that activate antipoverty responses and continuously support correlations between poverty and criminality. This argument entails a post-representational approach to maps considering their inscriptional, propositional and normative functions. Cartography, statistics and law are interrogated as devices of global governance that work aesthetically to shape poverty and its modes of appearance in the city, i.e., as productive methods of documentation as well as world-making, through which geocodings simultaneously create images of poverty and become functional of spatial transformations. Poverty is thus conceptualized as it is made into an aesthetic category subjected to continuous geo-legal modulations.

Maps, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and the spatio-discursive construction of nature

This paper interrogates the role that spatial media such as maps and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) play in the construction and mobilisation of representations of nature. Drawing on poststructural political ecology, critical cartography, and GIScience, this article engages maps and VGI as discursive mechanisms that solidify and convey meanings and representations of nature tied to broader strategies of commodification. Particularly, we explore how spatial media reproduces and legitimises discursive strategies that rationalise the reconciliation of economic development and conservation through nature-based tourism by producing new ways of nature commodification. Drawing on evidence from Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, this paper examines the intersections between the discourse of nature encoded within institutional tourist maps and advertisements, and within the VGI platform for travellers, TripAdvisor. This illustrative case shows, firstly, how tourist maps and advertisements have contributed to normalising a discursive construction of nature as pristine, grandiose, sublime and wild that has not only secured aesthetics as ontological qualities of nature, but also as embedded values that protect ‘nature’ as a commodity to consume. Secondly, our findings evidence that TripAdvisor emerges out of this context as content that mobilises individual perceptions of and narratives about Patagonian nature that is already mediated by this dominant discourse. This dynamic suggests that VGI constitutes a new form of discursive power that digitally reproduces and mobilises a dominant discourse of nature, (re)producing what we term ‘discursive digital nature’.

"Ground Truth in the Loam:" Literary Mapping as Emancipation

In the late 19th century, Ida B. Wells, a black woman from the South, urged international powers to put American racism on the map (Alderman & Inwood, 2021). She used quantitative data to display lynching sites in her famous essay, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” written in response to Janny Addams article urging readers to give lynchers the benefit of the doubt. Ida B. Wells’ work may be the most notable example of counter - mapping, a cartographic practice that challenges institutional power by leveraging social data for activism. Countermapping is a discipline emerging from critical cartography in which individuals subvert traditional cartography by producing maps that provide alternative perspectives. Inspired by antiracist counter - mapping practices, this paper expands the notion of a map to reimagine not only the phenomena that should be mapped, but the cartographic form itself. Expanding the idea of what constitutes a map is in and of itself emancipatory, say some critical cartographic scholars (Alderman, 2021). I examine the novels, Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, to understand how authors configure and reconfigure space to confront injustices such as racism and exploitation.

New Spatial Imaginaries for International Curriculum Projects: Creative Diagrams, Mapping Experiments, and Critical Cartography

This article explores the complex relational landscape of international partnerships where local and transnational education objectives are entangled. We present a methodological practice for experimenting with diagrams and maps. Our emphasis on spatial rendering of local/global relationality is intended to invite discussion about the postcolonial context of international education work and the geopolitics of transnational curriculum. We pursue a diagrammatic and archipelagic form of creative abstraction, which we present as a posthuman cartographic practice. To illustrate this practice, we focus on a specific international curriculum development project funded by the World Universities Network.

Vernacular legibility in counter-mapping: Assembling the geo-body of an indigenous socio-territorial movement in Honduras

Critical cartography has called attention to the ways in which resistance and governmentality intersect in counter-mapping projects aimed at supporting Indigenous communities in their land claims. Mapping responds to the communities’ intentions of becoming legible to achieve legal recognition, but it also facilitates their insertion into a grid of intelligibility. Less understood is the role that mapping can have on transforming internal organizational dynamics and how this restructuring may alter their capacity to act as socio-territorial movements. Drawing on a case study in Honduras, this paper seeks to analyze the legacies of counter-mapping through the lens of organizational theory. This analysis involves tracing organizational practices before and after a mapping intervention. Applying this organizational analysis in Honduras shows that cartography contributed to the formation of a geo-body that enabled the standardization of political representation, bringing more political intelligibility between the leaders and constituents of the Miskitu socio-territorial movement. This cartographically enabled standardization is referred to as vernacular legibility because it repurposes technologies of governance to facilitate the formalization of community politics. Vernacular legibility shows how organizational analysis combined with critical cartography advances our understanding of different pathways in the formation of socio-territorial movements.

Thinking Imaginatively via Generative Vitality in Tourism Studies (After Deleuze)

This manuscript covers the commonplace restrictions of institutional thought within ‘tourism’ and ‘the field of Tourism Studies’. It critiques Deleuzian ideas concerning the contretemps between emergent and open forms of nomadic conceptuality and established (or dogmatic) images of dominant understanding. In providing a synthesis of the Deleuzian conceptualities of rhizomatic thought, it offers three important and refreshing planes of thought on (i) the limitations of institutional ‘knowledge’; (ii) the constancy of life as ‘becoming’; and (iii) the brooding juxtaposition between the actual and the virtual. Thereafter, it builds up to six open ‘Deleuzian paths’ for reflexive action for those who work in travel, tourism, and related-mobilities. These personal considerations address the conceivable need in Tourism Studies for critical cartographies that suit the posthuman and interversal imperatives of today which demand an understanding which is often ‘otherwise’ and ‘spiral’ in its conceptual trajectory. Together, the six reflexivities constitute a Deleuzian call for researchers/practitioners in Tourism Studies to resist the hegemonic forces of mere ‘knowledge-production’ that tend all-too-easily to deny creative and unfettered ‘thinking’. The manuscript thus seeks to widen the affirmative possibilities of thinking about the world and its different peoples, its different places, its different pasts, and its different presents.

Eliminating white spots

This article reflects on the construction of Curt Nimuendajú's “Ethno-historical map”, an exhaustive work that sought to map the native groups of South America. This map was one of the most widely-used representations by researchers since its creation in 1944. The theoretical framework adopted in this paper stresses maps as rhetorical constructs that should be read as texts. The article also discusses the limits and possibilities of a visual vocabulary to understand explicit and implicit theoretical and methodological decisions in cartography. Digital cartography will be employed to bring out the differences between what the author of the project intended and what was presented in the "Ethno-historical map". The text starts with a description of the work and its most evident options, showing a relative selectivity in Nimuendajú's choices. In the last part, technical procedures will be abandoned to interpret the results considering the new critical cartography and ethno-geography positions.

(Counter)mapping renewables: Space, justice, and politics of wind and solar power in Mexico

The ongoing expansion of renewable energies entails major spatial reconfigurations with social, environmental, and political dimensions. These emerging geographies are, however, in the process of taking shape, as their early configurations are still open to democratic intervention and contestation. While a recent line of research highlights the prominent role that maps are playing in directing such processes, the potential effects of countermapping on these evolving geographies have not yet been explored. In this article, we present a countermapping initiative promoting a dialogue between critical geography, political ecology, and environmental justice. Our work is the result of an alliance between Geocomunes—a collective of activist cartographers based in Mexico—and the EjAtlas—a global collaborative project tracking cases of grassroots mobilizations against environmental injustices. We take the case of Mexico's low-carbon development strategy to dissect the spatial expansion of wind and solar mega-projects at both national and regional scales. Our project consists of a series of databases and maps aimed to “fill” the spaces and relations otherwise “emptied” by the state's cartographic tools designed to promote investments in the sector. When presenting our results, we highlight how renewable energy projects in Mexico have so far juxtaposed with local territories, peoples, and resources, in ways that trigger instances of environmental injustice on the ground. We close this article by discussing the role of critical cartography and countermapping in building alternative political–economic projects for the energy transition.

Accuracy, veracity, and theological truth in the 16th century atlas Theatrum Terrae Sanctae

Abstract. The characteristics and appearance of an authentic map (in conformity with reality), together with the convention about how authenticity should be obtained in a map, continued to change since the beginning of modern cartography along the centuries. As Critical Cartography has emphasised, the authenticity of a map was in many cases just a convincing appearance, hiding intricate ideologies. However, the political role of maps is just one aspect of their significance, which does not exclude the existence of genuine beliefs and ideals which were guiding cartographers and map authors in the creation process.With a long tradition of understanding maps as illustration devices, Renaissance geography blended intimately with the assumptions and debates of the artistic domain of painting. Among these, veracity was a much praised ideal, signifying the ability of the art work to make present the absent things or giving a new life to people or events gone long ago, a perspective which allowed for rich metaphysical implications. In his theological atlas Theatrum Terrae Sanctae, Christian Adrichom used a variety of formula through which he expressed his view on the evocative power of maps, deriving from contemporary theories concerning truth, vision and representation. In this article we will employ the textual analysis of Adrichom’s affirmations, approaching them through the filter of the Intellectual History methodology. This method allows us to discover that the author explored the metaphysical implications of painting realism in order to present and use his maps as Christian devices, equating the veracity of the cartographic medium with the authenticity of Christ’s life and with the theological understanding of truth.

Power of blank spaces: A critical cartography of China's Belt and Road Initiative

A variety of maps depict a usefully approximate but inexact network of roads, rails, sea lanes and other infrastructures to represent something called China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And yet, for a global programme that reflects and advances Beijing's new position as a leader of international development, BRI maps remain largely imprecise and unofficial. Taking this as a starting point of critical cartography, I ask why BRI development throughout the Tibet‐Himalaya region remains conspicuously blank on most maps, and what work is accomplished by such cartographic silences. In contrast to this apparent invisibility, however, the BRI is very much present in Nepal – discursively, materially and cartographically. Chinese development programmes are widely anticipated, embraced and promoted as grand and spectacular things throughout Nepal. Following this friction of representation in the case of Chinese development in Nepal, I argue that the apparent paradox between the BRI as invisible thing and BRI as promised future reveals the manifold ways in which infrastructures articulate politics and, vice‐versa, how politics articulate infrastructures.

Online activism and street harassment: Critical cartographies, counter-mapping and spatial justice

Social media and activist sites have provided an avenue to contest the dominant framing of street harassment as “trivial” and have sought to make street harassment and its harms visible. To date, digital activism has been analysed and conceptualised in relation to its potential as a counter-public forum that enables collective action and resistance, political mobilisation, “speaking out” and consciousness raising, and as a site of informal or innovative justice. I aim to build on this literature by examining the potential for the activist sites Hollaback!, @catcallsofnyc and @dearcatcallers to function as a form of “counter-mapping”, contributing towards broader social justice efforts to disrupt and transform dominant productions of space/place. I examine the tensions created by these digital practices, particularly with regards to whether they disrupt the production of space/place or, rather, reinforce urban space as a gendered “threatscape”.

A critical cartography of domestic violence policies in Mozambique

BackgroundDomestic violence (DV) affects millions of people worldwide, especially women impacting their health status and livelihoods. To prevent DV and to improve the quality of victims’ lives, Mozambican governmental and non-governmental entities are making efforts to develop adequate policies and legislation and to improve the accessibility of services for victims of DV.However, a critical review of whether or not current policies and legislation concerning DV in Mozambique are in agreement with international guidelines has yet to be examined. Therefore, this paper aims to map the Mozambican legislative and policy responses to DV. It also strives to analyse their alignment with international treaties and conventions and with each other.MethodsThrough a critical cartography, documents were selected and their content analysed. Some of these documents were not available online, printed versions were not available on the field and some were not up to date. Therefore, we had to search for them via physical office visits at governmental institutions with a responsibility to deal with DV aspects. These documents were listed and analysed for key content applying a framework inquiring on recommendations of international agencies such as World Health Organization. Subsequently, we compared these policies with international conventions and treaties of which Mozambique is signatory and with each other to identify discrepancies.ResultsOverall, six institutions were visited assuring identification of all available information and policy documents on DV. We identified a total of fifteen national DV documents of which five were on laws, one on policy and nine institutional strategic/action plans. Most of the national DV documents focused on strategies for assistance/care of victims and prevention of DV. Little focus was found on advocacy, monitoring and evaluation.ConclusionsMozambique has demonstrated its commitment by signing several international and regional treaties and conventions on DV. Despite this, the lack of consistency in the alignment of international treaties and conventions with national policies and laws is remarkable. However, a gap in the reliable translation of national policies and laws into strategic plans is to be found particularly in relation to naming type, beneficiaries, main strategies and multi-sectorial approach.

Contours of a \u2018Post-Critical\u2019 Cartography\u2014A Contribution to the Dissemination of Sociological Cartographic Research

Since the 1980s, ‘critical cartography’ has been developing. Its merits lie in its awareness of the socially constructed nature of cartographic representations, the power relations involved, and the process-bound nature of cartographic practices. The ‘post-critical’ cartography proposed here takes up these merits but does so without following the categorical rejection of positivist ‘traditional’ cartography or the moral demarcation of what can and cannot be represented as well as the subordination of theories to the ‘critical’ paradigm. Instead, the ‘post-critical’ approach relies on the struggle for suitable theoretical frameworks—the normative reference horizon within the endeavor of cartography is the enhancement of life chances. In this respect, the prefix ‘post’ refers not only to a temporal ‘after’, but also to the perpetuation of central concerns of ‘critical’ cartography, simultaneously freeing it from such limitations.

Normalized Alterity: Visualizing Black Spatial Humanities

This article aims to envision more just visual representations of Black spatial collectivity. In light of transformative work in critical cartography and recent turns to narrative cartography, digital mapping has arguably come to offer an opportunity for radical and democratized visualizations. However, the historical and contemporary anti-Blackness of mapping urges caution. Moreover, prominent critical cartographic urges to eschew normativity risk advancing diminished and distorted representations of historically Black communities. In turn, this article questions the extent to which visually countering the ongoing anti-Black work of dominant maps (e.g. erasure of Black communities) might avoid altogether appropriating the medium. Presented are animations created with audio clips from oral histories collected in rural Southern (US) communities. Created in collaboration with a professional animator, these brief animated clips do the work of countering historic erasure without reinforcing the hegemonic legibility of dominant cartographic productions.

Megaproyectos y conflictos ecoterritoriales. El caso del Tren Maya

Al amparo de la globalización neoliberal, actualmente los procesos de despojo transforman de manera recurrente territorios indígenas en América Latina. En este artículo, se propone analizar la oposición que se da entre estas prácticas de acumulación por desposesión de las empresas transnacionales (ETN) y las cosmovisiones de los pueblos originarios a través del análisis de los conflictos ecoterritoriales. Tomando el concepto de Rocío Silva Santisteban, se trata de conflictos que nacen de la pugna por el uso y gestión del territorio, entendiendo territorio como concepto holístico, donde interaccionan múltiples violencias. El objetivo de este artículo será desgranar el choque entre estas dos visiones antagónicas del mundo de la mano de perspectivas como la ecología-mundo de Jason W. Moore, que permitirá leer los megaproyectos como un producto más del capitalismo que explota sistémicamente seres humanos y naturaleza al servicio de la acumulación, o el ecofeminismo, que aportará luz a la interdependencia entre territorios y cuerpos como espacios vulnerables. Asimismo, se tomará como ejemplo el caso del Tren Maya, el megaproyecto estrella del actual presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, para evidenciar el falso desarrollo que promete la obra ferroviaria para el sureste del país en el marco de la llamada Cuarta Transformación. A través de este conflicto ecoterritorial, que ha despertado la oposición de movimientos sociales e indígenas, se plasmará este choque de visiones y se corroborará el avance de las fronteras extractivas gracias, entre otros aspectos, a la vulneración de derechos humanos como el derecho a consulta del Convenio 169 de la OIT. Por último, el artículo invitará a mirar el Tren Maya desde una mirada de las cartografías críticas, que lo interrelacionarán con proyectos mayores y que revelarán México como un país laboratorio de los tratados de comercio internacional que han propiciado la expansión de megaproyectos en el país.

Dots versus density: the impact of crime mapping techniques on perception of safety, police performance and neighbourhood quality

ABSTRACT President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing advised law enforcement agencies to ‘[e]stablish a culture of transparency and accountability in order to build public trust and legitimacy’ (2015, p. 12). Such transparency and accountability may be promoted through increased public access to crime data and measures of police activity. The inherently geographic nature of crime has made online maps one of the more popular strategies for disseminating this information to the public. As more agencies deliver crime maps on their own, or hosted websites, it becomes important for social scientists to evaluate how these communications affect public perceptions. Crime mapping is a complex process requiring many decisions. This includes choices about the type of crime to include or exclude, the type of map used, and numerous design features for the map itself. The field of critical cartography argues that all of these decisions have the potential to shape perceptions about a given geographic location, the people living there, and, in the present context, the people charged with maintaining public safety in the area. This study investigates whether different types of maps (i.e. dot vs. density) affect individual perceptions of safety, police performance and neighbourhood quality. Results indicate that the type of crime map viewed does alter perceptions, illustrating a need for careful and consistent decision-making when preparing crime maps for public access.

On Doing Relational Research: Participatory Mapping as an Emergent Research Process

AbstractAn approach conceived in the field and fine‐tuned later, we discuss our “emergent research process” as a way to do relational research. Inspired by critical cartography, we conducted an evolving series of participatory mapping workshops to complement ongoing research on poverty in rural Morocco. Through an iterative expansion in the scope of work and methods used, we broadened our field of inquiry and made discoveries that departed from our original research question. This process brought to light “emergent insights” that we and our interlocutors strategically reconstructed into data that challenged the status quo and challenged decision‐makers to recognise the importance of remoteness as a critical dimension of poverty. Conducting relational geographical research using an emergent workflow entailed expanding definitions of fieldwork and combining methods in ways that summoned us to rethink the boundaries of our own field of inquiry and speak back to dominant spatial ontologies of poverty.

An Art School Schizologue [George Floyd, Rest in Power

This critical cartography surveys seven moments in critical practice/art pedagogy, which oscillate around the protests of 1968 and diffract the contemporary possibilitiesof art education in association with Halberstam’s (2019) notions of evacuation and wildness. The article reads across Deleuzoguattarian (1994 and 2007) schizoanalysis and Baradian (2007) intra-action to articulate struggles for racial justice as instances of Harney and Moten’s (2013) undercommons, operating as alternate sites of knowledge production and collective self-experimentation outside the neoliberal university. These moments of practice—Black Lives Matter protests in Bristol, the UK, the writings of Aimé Césaire, Audre Lorde, Mohamed Melehi, Benjamin Patterson, and Howardena Pindell, as well as a student occupation of Central Saint Martins, also in the UK—are aligned in series allowing the reader to appropriate each one in resonance with each other as a proposal for an art-pedagogy-to-come.

The mapping behind the movement: On recovering the critical cartographies of the African American Freedom Struggle

Responding to recent work in critical cartographic studies and Black Geographies, the purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework and a set of evocative cartographic engagements that can inform geography as it recovers the seldom discussed history of counter-mapping within the African American Freedom Struggle. Black resistant cartographies stretch what constitutes a map, the political work performed by maps, and the practices, spaces, and political-affective dimensions of mapping. We offer an extended illustration of the conventional and unconventional mapping behind USA anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlighting the knowledge production practices of the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute’s Monroe Work, and the embodied counter-mapping of journalist/activist Ida B. Wells. Recognizing that civil rights struggles are long, always unfolding, and relationally tied over time and space, we link this look from the past to contemporary, ongoing resistant cartographical practices as scholars/activists continue to challenge racialized violence and advance transitional justice, including the noted memory-work of the Equal Justice Initiative. An understanding of African American traditions of counter-mapping is about more than simply inserting the Black experience into our dominant ideas about cartography or even resistant mapping. Black geographies has much to teach cartography and geographers about what people of color engaged in antiracist struggles define as geographic knowledge and mapping practices on their own terms—hopefully provoking a broader and more inclusive definition of the discipline itself.

Making maps of records: what cartography can teach us about archival description

ABSTRACT This article explores maps as a conceptual metaphor for archival description. Drawing on insights from some classic works in the field of critical cartography, we examine five ways in which maps can help us to understand the nature of archives catalogues: (1) as tools for orientation and sense-making of interconnected archival landscapes; (2) as involving abstraction, selection and privileging, not direct reproduction, of information; (3) as making propositions or claims about records; (4) as ongoing archival labour, where metadata and description have mixed or multiple provenance and continue to evolve; and (5) as intrinsically interdisciplinary. Inverting the metaphor, we propose that the moral defence of the record as an ethical framework is also insightful for cartography. We further suggest that thinking of finding aids as metaphorical maps can help to reinvigorate archival description and inspire better catalogues.