"Participative cartographies"

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES TOWARDS A ONE TO ONE MAPPING “And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on a scale of a mile to the mile!(...) It has never been spread out, yet, (…) the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

“Sylvie and Bruno Concluded”, Lewis Carrol.

The production of maps is often regarded as a means of exercising power. We can perhapds think of colonial maps that precisely define and separate what is conquered from what is not, as a reflection of the actual process of colonization. Thereby the map acts as an agent of sedimentation of the (new) power relations that are being established, thus asserting them. Of course we can extend this features to any political map, where a non-physical geopolitical boundary becomes present and tangible to the persons that inhabit the territory it describes. Moreover, the very configuration of maps gives them a Foucaltian sense of 'act of surveillance1, a sensation we have all experienced when hovering over our cities via Google Earth.

My main interest while writing this essay lays in how these features of the map can be subverted, not precisely by changing the representation techniques (the never ending discussion around creative mapping) but by merely putting the process of mapping in the hands of those who normally don't exercise it. This practice has been widely used in the case of movements of urban resistance against processes of harsh gentrification or as a protest for a possible lack of citizen participation in the course of urban projects. I am very interested to see how the limitations and conventions that we normally categorize as tools of the powerful to exert power are here used to limit and counter them.

THE CONTEXT: RESISTANCE AGAINST THE CREATIVE CITY. To change and renew urban centers has been a major effort of most city councils in the current 1 J. B. Harvey links this term from “Discipline and Punish” to the implications of mapping in J. B. Harley, “Maps, knowledge and power”, from “The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments.” Denis Cosgrove (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p 279.

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

situation. Even though this situation is not new, I would argue that it has shifted and perhaps radicalized in some ways in the last few years. To help me describe it, I would like to link this presentday processes with the rise of a new social class according to Richard Serra: the 'creative class', which is defined as a group of professionals that are related to arts, design, media and which also include the knowledge-workers. 2 The book only explores their role in the United States, but I would say it can easily be extrapolated to a global scale. This sector of society, according to the author, have a distinct and well-defined lifestyle and set of values (what he calls 'ethos') which clearly characterizes them as a separate social class (a term that Neoliberalism has repeatedly tried to render as obsolete in the current situation).

The definition of this new social class in my opinion exemplifies very well the idea of the system re-inventing itself. We can find elements of classical liberalism, as it is the assurance that everybody is able to enter this new elite, because we all have creativity that we can exploit.3 The members of this group are, however, presented as non-conventional enfant terribles with tattoos and piercings which value diversity and openness4: an image which distances them from the unpopular world of the neocons. The fact that the new store of value lies in an immaterial good (creativity), which cannot be sold or bought, also tries to detach it from classical capitalism. It is, nevertheless, naive to think that because a resource has abstractly no economic value, it won't influence the economy (translated in wages, prices of creative work, etc) and thus is able to create economic inequalities. The very essence of the creativity (creation) is linked to the capitalist obsession with the new.5 There is, in fact, a stress throughout the book on how this new class will dramatically alter the world as we know it today.6 And of course, cities are not an exception. According to Florida's discourse, the newborn class “need to live in places that offer stimulating, creative environments.” 7 This 2 3 4 5

Richard Florida, “The rise of the creative class”, New York: Basic Books, 2004, Preface to the paperback edition.

Richard Florida, “The rise of the creative class”, New York: Basic Books, 2004, p 8.

Id, p 77.

Miguel Robles-Durán goes as far as to say that the never ending search for the new is the quality that best defines Capitalism. Miguel Robles Durán, The New Urban Question Lecture Series, 25th September 2008, TU Delft.

6 The full title of the book itself remarks “ How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life”.

7 Richard Florida, “The rise of the creative class”, New York: Basic Books, 2004, p 95.

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

is naturally a wake up call for city councils who want to attract creative individuals, well-respected professionals that have a profile of middle-high income, higher education, no problems with cultural and social integration (Western or Westernized) and that normally are consumers of specialized and expensive commodities. Serra states that “[c]reativity is the ultimate economic resource”8 and the effect it has on the real state market can be clearly seen if we compare a map of the United States showing the concentration of creative centers and another one of prices of property, to see that they are practically interchangeable.

With the creation of high profile art (or creative) related institutions (the Bilbao effect) as a way of renewing urban centers, city scale administrations try to attract private capital for the creation of housing (either new built or restoration-transformation), which results in a desired urban renewal. The paradox is that the public administration (which is always in the city scale) is investing mainly in the creation of very expensive public buildings (with very timid social housing programs), which constitute a very small percentage of the city fabric, and leaving the in the hands of private developers. Moreover, the housing that is being privately created is not accessible for the gross of the population of the city that is pushed to the peripheries.

The social unrest and concern of a part of the Non-Creative class has led to the formation in most cities of movements of urban resistance, which see in the sprouting of creative buildings in their city centers a new and sophisticated way of urban dispossession. These gentrification processes are not new, but I would argue that in the last years the tactics of public administration have shifted from a passive approach to an active drive of urban renewal, which in the end is always related to displacement of certain dwellers.9 I will look at the work of Anna Sala, who is herself a graphic designer (profession that would qualify as a gold member of the Creative Class) and has developed her project “Alternative Directory” in Barcelona and Istanbul. This is where the map becomes relevant as a tool of uncovering, putting in common and communicating the problematics of the city, to “share awareness.”10 The aim is to provide “a dissident image of the metropolitan that wipes out the touristic map and the administrative map to replace it with a kind of pirate cartography.”11

8 9 10 11

Id, p xiii, Preface to the paperback edition.

Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The Fine Art of Gentrification”, October, Vol. 31. (Winter, 1984), p 98.

From the description of the Istanbulmap project, http://www.istanbulmap.org/?q=node/1 (27 Nov 2008).

Vicente Escolar, “Mapa de Barcelona 2004: ¿De qué va realmente el Fórum?”, Newletter from “Maps, Visualization and Social Information.”(27 Nov 2008).

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

THE LIMITATIONS OF THE MAP. THE CONSTRUCT OF THE ONE TO ONE SCALE MAP. If we think of how we perceive and use most maps, there is a sense of objectivity embedded in them that makes it difficult to acknowledge the presence of a tracer. In short, we consider that maps are just showing or rendering visible existing power relations, that somebody else has created. There is a certain technicality in cartography making, which instantly makes it impartial and neutral, for, as Langdon Winner asserts, there's “(...) no idea more provocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities.”12 It is, however, plausible to think that artifacts that operate in contexts of geopolitics and even in the production of warfare, may exercise some kind of soft power even though we most of the time take them for granted.13 Going back for a moment to the scale of the city, we can think of the representation of a new urban plan, which interestedly shows the improvements it implies, but perhaps covers up problematics that will arise only when built. The map is, inherently, partial and abstract, thus “the result of selection, omission, isolation, distance and codification.”14 It is precisely this abstractness what makes the map a good instrument of exercising power: “(...) the graphic nature of the map gave its imperial users an arbitrary power that was easily divorced from the social responsibilities and consequences of its exercise.”15 Perhaps the feature that more basically distances the map from reality is the issue of the scale. The geometrical reduction of reality is one of the basic features of classical maps, the one that allows us to have the notion of a territory, something that is not the map, but can only be rendered visible through its mediation, otherwise being to big to grasp. The superiority such a map gives and how it allows the exertion of power can be clearly pictured by imagining a warfare scene: Napoleon moving figures representing French troops over a vast map of Europe, mimicking the future attack. Scale is, thus, one of the most instrumental virtues of cartographies, and the map that has no reduction, the 1:1 scale map, looses its instrumentality precisely because it is too close to reality, and becomes an absurd. Borges, from the optic of magic realism talks in one of his short stories about a kingdom that attained such a perfection in the Art of Cartography that “a Map of the Empire 12 Langdon Winner, “Do artifacts have politics?”, from “The social shaping of technology” Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (ed). Philadelpia: Open University Press, 1988.p 26.

13 Id, p 28.

14 James Corner, “The agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention”, from “Mapping”, Denis Cosgrove (ed), London: Reaktion books, 2001, p 214.

15 J. B. Harvey links this term from “Discipline and Punish” to the implications of mapping in J. B. Harley, “Maps, knowledge and power”, from “The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments.” Denis Cosgrove (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p 282.

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” 16 This map, even though accurate, was later regarded as useless and unpractical and abandoned in oblivion.

In architectural practice, it is a custom to draw in certain scales, which range from the general layout to the constructive detail, but the 1:1 scale is very rarely used. A department in the Barcelona School of Architecture proposed as an exercise to students to draw a chosen chair in scale 1:1 to fit in an A1, with all the necessary views and measurements (plan, section, elevation) in it. After the first shock of drawing from reality into the same scale (and seeing how the projections differed from the object itself), came a new problem: the chair did not fit into an A1 sheet of paper, so it had to be dismantled in pieces, rearranged in a Tetris fashion, and all the redundant information had to be discarded (mainly through symmetries). The exercise ended up as an interesting struggle to see an object can be defined accurately with the minimum amount of information.

MAPPING AS A PARTICIPATORY PRACTICE. OLIGOPTIC17 VS. PANOPTIC. However the cartographies we are used to seeing are very distant from a one to one relation with reality. New media has given us the illusion of a panoptical world. Through Google Earth we can see every spot of the world from the comfort of our homes, enabling a false 'continuous zoom' 18, a construct of reality in which we can scroll from the Earth's globe down to the very rooftop of our house. This all-seeing top-down view is, however, missing vital information. To make operative the concept of the 'irréduction' 19 of reality, the fact that every representation is reducing, and thus manipulating reality, we can perhaps bring to the table the notion of the 'oligoptic'' as opposed to the panoptic, which gives us many views on reality, each of them seeing fairly well but too little. By combining as much of these 'oligoptic' views as possible, we will be able to process reality in a more accurate way, never being able to have the whole picture, but more reassured the more views we include in it.

That's where the idea of participatory mapping seems to fill in a gap, attempting to merge different 16 Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”, in “Collected Fictions”, New York: Viking Penguin, 1998.

17 Term extracted from Bruno Latour, “Paris, ville invisible: le plasma.”, from http://www.brunolatour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/P-123-BEAUBOURG-PARIS.pdf (04 Dec 2008). “(...) the narrow windows that allow us to connect (…) only some aspects of beings (…) to the compound whole of the city.”

18 Term extracted from Bruno Latour, “Paris, ville invisible: le plasma.”, from http://www.brunolatour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/P-123-BEAUBOURG-PARIS.pdf (04 Dec 2008).

19 Term from Bruno Latour, extracted from Isabelle Doucet's lecture in The New Urban Question Lecture Series, 6h November 2008, TU Delft.

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

views in the frame of a defined document. Through her experiences in Barcelona and Istanbul, Anna Sala has tried to map the realities of the conflicts taking place in this cities via collective workshops in which the neighbors of the affected areas add their one to one experience. In the case of Barcelona, the map was focused in how the celebration of the Fòrum, an international event held in the city in 2004, would affect the city.20 The project's aim was to unveil the hidden interests behind the Fòrum event, which was presented as a kind of update of the Expositions Universelles of the 20th century, in which debate about peace, sustainable development, human rights and respect for diversity would be held. Its materialization included spectacular buildings signed by international architects, office towers for the supporting companies and a program of urban renewal which resembled the Olympic plans of the nineties. After reunions with the local neighbors, debates and public lectures, a map was produced which tried not only to explain the problematic of the urban setting of the Fòrum, but also to show the utter contradictions between the rhetoric of the event and the actual urban policies by expanding the Fòrum's three axis of action (conditions of peace, sustainable development and multiculturalism) into the city. The mapping project became widely spread and is cited as being one of the few movements that attempted to stand up to a major urban renewal intervention. The producers of the map wanted to escape from debating the intentions of the Fòrum and instead posing questions about the consequences it would have on the city, a wise move which allowed them “not to be trapped in the stickiness of a collection of good-hearted wishes that nobody denies.”21 In Istanbulmap22 a new layer showing urban conflicts is set on top of the touristic map of Istanbul we are used to. These points of tension appear represented through very naive icons which identify different kinds of urban problematics, and which remind us of the signalization of metro stations. The contrast between what we identify (the base of the city map, the style of the icons) and the new layer of information that we are being provided makes us somehow involved in the debate. The readability of these maps is crucial for their purpose of creating awareness in as much people as possible, as they will be given out freely in the street. That is perhaps what interests me the most of these examples: the ability to use representational conventions, which we usually recognize as traces of power-exertion and dominance, as tools to precisely invert those processes in the setting of contemporary cities. The limitation and 20 Retrievable at http://www.sindominio.net/mapas.

21 Vicente Escolar, “Mapa de Barcelona 2004: ¿De qué va realmente el Fórum?”, Newletter from “Maps, Visualization and Social Information.”(27 Nov 2008).

22 Retrievable at http://www.istanbulmap.org

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

selection in the information here becomes crucial and necessary, because otherwise “the map would turn unintelligible”23 All this discarded information is, however available in their web pages, where the maps are expanded virtually. This new medium also opens the possibility for the virtual maps to change through time as the city evolves and add more information as more voices get involved in the project. This is an interesting notion which challenges the classical notions of maps as freezers of reality.24 These cartographies don't constitute innovative examples of mapping per se, but the way they were elaborated makes them relevant as an example of bottom-up mapping, producing necessary alternative documents to official cartographies. The information they contain should also be part of the 'oligoptic' view of architects when analyzing cities. While making them, the neighbors are suddenly assigned the difficult task of re-presenting an everyday object, paralleling the Barcelona students (here they have their neighborhood instead of a chair) and being forced in the process to look at their city from a totally different perspective. At the same time, they are sharing their experiences with other neighbors and thus getting to know better their cities, creating a sense awareness, an expression of citizenship. By adding each of them their one to one reality, they are producing an artifact that resembles more a patchwork than an unitary product. It can perhaps be seen metaphorically as an unfolding of the one to one scale map.

BIBLIOGRAPHY James Corner, “The agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention”, from “Mapping”, Denis Cosgrove (ed), London: Reaktion books, 2001.

J. B. Harley, “Maps, knowledge and power”, from “The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments.” Denis Cosgrove (ed), Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. 1989.

Langdon Winner, “Do artifacts have politics?”, from “The social shaping of technology” Donald 23 Vicente Escolar, “Mapa de Barcelona 2004: ¿De qué va realmente el Fórum?”, Newletter from “Maps, Visualization and Social Information.”(27 Nov 2008).

24 J. B. Harvey links this term from “Discipline and Punish” to the implications of mapping in J. B. Harley, “Maps, knowledge and power”, from “The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments.” Denis Cosgrove (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p 294.

PARTICIPATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES CARLOS GARCÍA-SANCHO THE AGENCY OF MAPPING/ KAMINER.

MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (ed). Philadelpia: Open University Press, 1988.

Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The Fine Art of Gentrification”, October, Vol. 31. (Winter, 1984), pp 91-111.

Isabelle Doucet, “Negotiation and connectivity: a boundary approach to multi-layered landscapes.”, from “De-/signing the Urban.” Patrick Healy and Gerhard Bruyns (ed), Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006.

Bruno Latour, “Paris, ville invisible: le plasma.”, from http://www.brunolatour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/P-123-BEAUBOURG-PARIS.pdf (04 Dec 2008).

Richard Florida, “The rise of the creative class”, New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Beatrice Galilee,“If you want to change society, don't build anything.” Icon, November 2008, p 98-106.

Vicente Escolar, “Mapa de Barcelona 2004: ¿De qué va realmente el Fórum?”, Newletter from “Maps, Visualization and Social Information.” http://www.euromovements.info/new/newsletter/articles/mapaforum.html (27 Nov 2008).

Adriano Botelho, “La otra cara del Fòrum de les Cultures S.A.”, Biblio 3W, “Revista bibliográfica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales.”, http://www.ub.es/geocrit/b3w-514.htm (27 Nov 2008).