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PROJECT BACKGROUND
Methodological Approach Counter-Mapping | Counter Narratives question their role in reinforcing normative relations that shape racialized and heteronormative societies. That is the set of normative and administrative practices of exclusion and oppression that create inequalities the discipline pledges to right. In this context, what are possibilities for emancipatory practices?
By collectively documenting the living heritage of these communities, Sheffield Otherwise emphasises the continuation of communities’ intangible connection to place, rather than the preservation of urban fabric for itself. Methodologically, Sheffield Otherwise proposes a counter mapping approach to help make visible broader relations of power and collaboration within communities and between communities and other urban actors. We chose this approach to challenge logics or ordering and fix geographies by documenting experiences, practices, and relations that are at the centre of the production of space.
For new narratives and practices to emerge we need to unmake what we know, to look for radical approaches and practices that allows us to understand our responsibility, to reframe our stories, and to finally reconstruct histories. Urban Design practitioners urge to understands their responsibility in the reproduction of colonial, racial and heteronormative inequalities and the symbolic and physical violence it entails. Thus, working otherwise is an imperative to center the political agency of traditionally marginalised collectives to contribute shaping spatial imaginations for more just urban futures.
Research-based design is an iterative process of systematic engagement with a core urban challenge guided by collective reflexivity and informed spatial imaginations. While discursively innovative, mainstream urban design theory, practice and pedagogy rarely
Fig 2.
Methodological Diagram (Image Source: BUDD 2022 OPE Organisers)
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