Critical GIS Research Articles

Neogeography and the Delusion of Democratisation

Within the academic and popular discussion of neogeography, it is routinely argued that the process of producing and using geographical information has been fundamentally democratised. Neogeography, in contrast to ‘established geography’, especially uses the argument that it is for anyone, anywhere, and anytime. Similar arguments have been used to praise the growth in Web GIS since the mid-1990s and seem to be persistent in the conceptualisation of these technologies. However, what is the nature of this democracy, and to what extent do the technologies that are used in neogeography fulfil this democratisation promise? In this contribution the framework offered by Andrew Feenberg in his critical theory of technology, and especially his call for ‘deep democratisation’, is used to provide a critique of these assertions of the nature of neogeography. The analysis shows that, unlike early critical GIS and the literature on participatory GIS, the analysis of neogeography adopted an instrumentalist interpretation of the technology and its applications. This view claims that technology is value free and that there is a separation between means and ends. This type of argument ignores and disguises the values that are integrated inexorably in advanced technologies. Once the values are exposed and discussed, neogeography becomes far less exciting and transformative. It becomes clear that there is a separation between a technological elite and a wider group of uninformed, labouring participants who are not empowered through the use of the technology. There are also multiple obstacles that limit the democratic potential of neogeography. The analysis progresses by considering the hierarchy of hacking, understood here as the ability to alter and change the meaning and use of a specific technological system. This hierarchy further explains the democratisation potentialities and limits of neogeography. Because of the reduced barriers, neogeography does offer some increased level of democratisation but, to fulfil this potential, it requires careful implementation that takes into account social and political aspects.

Critical Geographies with the State: The Problem of Social Vulnerability and the Politics of Engaged Research

Abstract: State interventions to govern social vulnerability highlight the complexity of contemporary states, marked by neoliberal agenda but also by progressive interventions and the desire for effectiveness. This paper draws on collaborative research with government agencies on social vulnerability in the Hunter region to assess the desirability of undertaking critical geographies with the state. We see states as contested terrains invested with the institutional capacity to mobilise diverse political projects. We argue that critical research in partnership with states is possible, as are mobilisations of the agency of state institutions to promote progressive policy development. The paper explores how we might use engaged research to intersect with the production and circulation of texts, technologies and practices within the state apparatus to achieve desirable change. While critical research with the state involves uncertainties and compromise, with no permanent resolutions, we conclude that states must remain centred in our critical conversations and praxis.In this paper we advance the case for the critical possibilities of policy‐oriented research with the state. We reflect on experiences of an engaged research project with state government agencies in the NSW Hunter Region involving the production and use of the texts and technologies as state interventions in social vulnerability. Working through the project's reflexive, collaborative methodologies and our use of critical GIS, we highlight the creation of opportunities to change how the components of social vulnerability were conceptualised, contest policymakers’ view of what was “relevant”, and shift framing rationalities and resultant state practices. As such the paper contributes to our knowledge of strategic research practices for pursuing critical, progressive projects with the state. Such engagement involves uncertainties and contingent compromise. Yet, as terrains of contestation wherein diverse political projects are assembled and propelled, states must remain centred in our critical conversations and in our critical praxis.

Making Maps That Matter: Situating GIS within Community Conversations about Changing Landscapes

Geospatial analysis and mapping has tremendous potential to inform community-scale deliberations about land use and growth management, but that potential is rarely realized. This article introduces an iterative, participatory research approach to generating maps about landscape change and development trends rooted in local experiences of place and therefore well positioned to contribute to civic dialogue and action. The research process involved collaboration with community partners; ethnographic interviews to identify salient local issues and perspectives; geospatial analysis, mapping, and visualizations of development trends; focus groups to refine information and imagery for local audiences; and deliberative meetings designed to encourage public discussion. Through a case study from a rapidly growing Southern Appalachian county, we show how this process aided the development of maps and visualizations that were relevant and accessible to local stakeholders, made visible local concerns about landscape change, and increased stakeholders' awareness of landscape-scale processes. We argue that this interdisciplinary approach can help to bridge between critical and analytic GIS traditions, provide a mechanism for integrating research agendas with local policy deliberations, and help foster successful civic dialogues and collective action in communities with histories of contentious debate about land-use planning.

E-Planning Through the Wisconsin Land Information Program

Through the lenses of Critical GIS and political economy, this paper examines the history of the Wisconsin Land Information Program (WLIP), which was created in 1989 and provides an early US example of the adoption of GIS at the local government level. Using a mixed methods approach and a case study design, the authors focus on the cooperation and conflicts among various actors and networks, at and between scales, during times of plentiful and lean resources. Catalyzed by the 1978 Larsen Report, the WLIP was unique in its inclusiveness of everyone involved in land records management. University academics brought together all the stakeholders to create a thematic and territorial network with political power and a unique funding mechanism. As land use planning and state budget deficits became prominent, the program became a target, leading to conflict and power struggles, particularly with the state Department of Administration (DOA). What began as an egalitarian, grass-roots, socially just, forward-thinking program has shape-shifted, and while the WLIP is still a viable and functioning program, its egalitarian goals have been subverted by economics.

Social Constructions of GIS in China's Changing Urban Governance: The Case of Shenzhen

GIS technologies have developed rapidly in urban China, particularly within local governments, over the past decade. However, such GIS practices in non-Western contexts have not been investigated in depth. The present study attempts to address this gap, drawing on insights from critical GIS and political economy. Scholarship in critical GIS has underlined the importance of power relations in constituting organizational GIS practices, and vice versa. Moreover, perspectives from scalar politics and network analysis provide a useful way to delineate and analyse the spatialized social relations shaping and embedded in GIS constructions. In particular, scaled networks conceptualize social connections and power relations in terms of networks of actors embedded in different spatial extents; within this synthesized framework, we contend, local government organizations serve as both sites and nodes in developing and employing GIS. Through an in-depth case study of the city of Shenzhen, we investigate in what ways both territorial conditions and interrelations across organizational and city boundaries influence governmental GIS development. Such an investigation helps to politicize the constructions of GIS in China's changing urban governance, which will contribute to ongoing discussions in critical GIS aimed at understanding the mutual constitution of GIS and society.

「GISと社会」をめぐる諸問題

「GISと社会」をめぐる諸問題

Geographic information science: emerging research on the societal implications of the geospatial web

This review examines emerging research on the geoweb, particularly recent efforts to assess the social, political and disciplinary shifts associated with it. The rise of the geoweb is associated with shifts in the processes and power relations of spatial data creation and use, reconfigurations in previously bounded disciplinary knowledge sets, and shifts in the subjectivities and social relations that are produced through the geoweb’s technologies, data, and practices. This early research on the societal implications of the geoweb is drawing productively upon conceptual frameworks from critical GIS, public participation GIS, and spatial data infrastructure research, but must also theorize beyond these existing bodies of work.

Critical GIScience in Canada in the new millennium

Critical GIS (CGIS) is an approach to evaluating GIS technology that draws upon multiple intellectual tool kits—from geography, social theory and computing science. While its roots are in the battles between human geographers and GIScientists in the 1990s, CGIS has emerged as an independent, constructive approach to enhancing the power and appeal of GIS. CGIS is also beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate component of the broad tent that is GIScience. This short article reviews the emergence of CGIS, discusses its influence on the discipline of GIScience and finally explores the state of CGIS in Canada.

Theory, Practice, and History in Critical GIS: Reports on an AAG Panel Session

Extending a special session held at the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Boston, this commentary collection highlights elements of the critical GIS research agenda that are particularly pressing. Responding to a Progress report on critical GIS written by David O'Sullivan in 2006, these six commentaries discuss how different interpretations of ‘critical’ are traced through critical GIS research. Participants in the panel session discussed the need for a continued discussion of a code of ethics in GIS use in the context of ongoing efforts to alter or remake the software and its associated practices, of neo-geographies and volunteered geographies. There were continued calls for hope and practical ways to actualize this hope, and a recognition that critical GIS needs to remain relevant to the technology. This ‘relevance’ can be variously defined, and in doing so, researchers should consider their positioning vis-à-vis the technology. Throughout the commentaries collected here, a question remains as to what kind of work disciplinary sub-fields such as critical GIS and GIScience perform. This is a question about language, specifically the distance that language can create among practitioners and theoreticians, both in the case of critical GIS and more broadly throughout GIScience.

The New Brave New World: Geography, GIS, and the Emergence of Ubiquitous Mapping and Data

office at the University of California, Santa Barbara.(1) We spoke of the debates that were raging in geography about the role of GIS with an emphasis on identifying productive ways of engaging GIScientists with their critics from human geography. Among the issues that emerged were individual privacy, epistemology, infrastructural changes wrought by localized data collection, and Big Science. Ten years later I interviewed Professor Goodchild again. Since then,Web 2.0 and the ubiquity of data and mapping have radically altered the intellectual landscape of GIS. In this new interview we discuss the possible eclipse of GIS by free, web-based technologies that include Google Earth, mash-ups, and data scraping. Not surprisingly, issues such as individual privacy and critical GIS remain relevant, but they are joined by a host of previously unimaginable phenomena that bear scrutiny by geographers. Web 2.0 is the host for the emerging technologies that have so altered our environment in GIScience. Web 2.0 broadly refers to a new generation of Internet services and technology. `The participatory web' as opposed to the `web as static information source' is frequently attached to descriptions of Web 2.0; user-created content and collaboration are its hallmarks. The concept that the average Internet user can create content is considered an essential element of Web 2.0 (Hendler and Golbeck, 2008). Web 2.0 promises to democratize the Internet to a degree not seen (Barsky and Purdon, 2006). Recognizable applications include wikis, blogs, mashups, and, more recently volunteered geographic information and citizen sensors (see also Elwood, 2008). Overall, the target of Web 2.0 is a richer more complete Web experience available to all Internet users. The implications for geographers are, however, extensive. Neogeography is one term that has emerged to describe a set of Web 2.0 techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional, proprietary GIS such as ArcGIS (Turner, 2006). Neogeography is bringing traditional cartographic and GIS skills to the masses. It is democratizing a once exclusive domain (Boulos et al, 2006), but in the process removes authority and certainty (unwarranted in some cases) associated with GIS maps. GIS and geography have to adjust to this dynamic technical and social landscape. Mapping has evolved rapidly from paper, to GIS, to web-based mapping. Each transformation is associated with profound social impacts. We face scenarios, previously unimaginable, of human beings as sensors gathering constant information with their cell phones and reporting back information to central, web-based data-collating sites. These data could be as innocuous as snow quality on ski hills or animal deaths on the highway with GPS locations. Or they could include The new Brave NewWorld: geography, GIS, and the emergence of ubiquitous mapping and data

GIS Development in China's Urban Governance: A Case Study of Shenzhen

AbstractGovernment agencies have been an important actor in using GIS and other information technologies across the world. However, contextual examinations of government GIS practices over time within non‐Western contexts remain sparse in the existing GIScience literature. In particular, little is known with respect to China's significant growth of using GIS in its urban government amidst its rapid urbanization and enormous transformation. This article presents an in‐depth investigation of the case of Shenzhen city, one of the China's leading cities in urban government GIS development. Drawing upon critical GIS research and GIS implementation studies, a synthesized theoretical framework is developed to interrogate the nature and evolutionary process of Shenzhen's government GIS practices. The analysis is focused on examining the role of broader social conditions, local contextual factors and organizational characteristics in shaping GIS development in Shenzhen's urban governance. Situated in this contextual analysis, this article also illustrates the three major transformations of GIS development in Shenzhen's planning agency over the past decade. The findings show that GIS development in Chinese urban governance has been influenced not only by the instrumental functions of GIS, but also by the interactions and relationships among different actors and institutions with various vested interests in the process of structuring and governing the urban spaces. This study will contribute to the ongoing discussion of understanding the interwoven relationship between GIS and society in GIScience research.

Volunteered geographic information: future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS

New interactive web services are dramatically altering the way in which ordinary citizens can create digital spatial data and maps, individually and collectively, to produce new forms of digital spatial data that some term ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI). This article examines the early literature on this phenomenon, illustrating its shared propositions that these new technologies are part of shifts in the social and technological processes through which digital spatial data are produced, with accompanying implications for the content and characteristics of geospatial data, and the social and political practices promoted through their use. I illustrate how these debates about VGI conceive of spatial data as socially embedded, and suggest ways in which future research might productively draw upon conceptualizations from participatory, feminist, and critical GIS research that have emerged from similar foundations.

Formalization Matters: Critical GIS and Ontology Research

There have been several obstacles to an embrace of critical theoretical work in GIScience; chief among them is the barrier between conceptualization and formalization. Early critics of the technology were not cognizant that technological change must be implemented within the language of code. While critics expressed their concerns in a theoretical and esoteric language, increasingly GIScientists are at pains to address the same issues so that solutions can be incorporated into software technologies. Indeed an implicit recognition of the important divide between informal and formal environments has aided GIScience researchers in developing strategies to represent multiple epistemologies in GIS. The article begins with a review of early critical GIScience, examines the degree of its acceptance in the light of a content analysis of GIS journals, and then illustrates that the issue of multiple representation of the same reality is being addressed under the rubric of ontologies. New research in this area has had significant impact on GIScience because it has been articulated and addressed at both the conceptual and formal stages—a criterion for real changes to both GISystems and GIScience. The article concludes with an examination of why critical GIS remains relevant to the discipline, in spite of efforts to address issues of representation within GIScience.

Knowledge Production through Critical GIS: Genealogy and Prospects

Over the last decade, a new research program has emerged at the interface between geographic information science and geographical social theory, now called critical GIS. In this article I analyse the emergence of critical GIS as an example of knowledge production in geography. I examine its genealogy, highlighting the key debates, events, and individuals instrumental in facilitating a rapprochement between two initially opposed scholarly communities and tracing the directions that this has since taken. Addressing its current incarnation as critical GIS, I relate it to the critical theory tradition in the social sciences and assess the pertinence of the term “critical” for describing the epistemology and philosophy of critical GIS. I examine how technology, the geography of GIS research, and politics are shaping the future trajectory of critical GIS. Drawing on Helen Longino's vision for strong knowledge production, I argue that the future of critical GIS will depend on the ability of its practitioners to remain conscious and reflexively critical of their own emergent presuppositions.

A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan's law of the media

The social implications of GIS have been debated over the past five years among scholars in several disciplines. GIS have been either conceived by practitioners as value‐free, neutral tools for problem‐solving or castigated by critical social theorists as socially biased technologies serving only corporate and state interests. Neither of these polarized views is very helpful in understanding the complex relationship between GIS and society. This paper argues that GIS are increasingly becoming media for communicating various crucial social and environmental information to the general public. By reconceptualizing GIS as media, the paper conducts a detailed tetradic analysis on the social implications of GIS using Marshall McLuhan's law of media. The analysis reveals the paradoxical and ambivalent nature of GIS technology. To make GIS fulfill democratic ideals in society, this paper calls for a shift of perspective, from viewing them as instruments for problem‐solving to viewing them as media for communication. This shift from instrumental to communicative rationality enables us to examine more critically and holistically how space, people and environment have been represented, manipulated and visualized in GIS and thus promotes a more critical and democratic GIS practice.