especially the City of Denver’s West Area Planning process currently underway. VNA leaders have been active on the West Area Plan Steering Committee, and they and other equity-focused neighborhood leaders are organizing around an anti-displacement agenda for reparative and regenerative neighborhood planning. Their recommendations include advocating for inclusion of participatory budgeting processes in the plan as a means by which the City of Denver can invest in both civic infrastructure and physical infrastructure, especially to redress harm caused by redlining in West Area neighborhoods. The VMP project team also submitted a report of findings from the planning grant that should be considered for adoption within the WAP. VMPs intersectional approach has expanded and deepened network connections across multiple sectors. Although the National Science Foundation did not award VMP a Stage 2 implementation grant, relationships and network/ecosystem awareness cultivated over the course of the project have resulted in pursuit of new funding opportunities to continue the work via alternative channels and on priorities in the order the community has identified rather than the NSF Stage 2 one-year timeline. Based on community insights, academic and community partners are continuing to research solutions and funding opportunities for Participatory Budgeting, affordable discount passes through apps, novel ideas for affordable car sharing and loan-to-own e-bike programs, and partnerships with a regional social enterprise focused on transportation logistics for food delivery and local economic development.
5 CONCLUDING PROPOSITIONS ON REGENERATIVE MAPPING At the outset of this chapter, we explored how Enlightenment Era conceptions of sovereignty, cartography, and rationality have propelled capitalist expansion and its geographies of displacement, while also shaping academic institutions and their systems of knowledge production. We distinguished that – from the cartographic gaze of “seeing like a State” – sovereignty means supreme control over bounded territory, and that cartography emerged as a tool through which land is made legible and subject to control by sovereign States. We briefly reviewed how social vulnerability mapping emerged as a tool intended to predict, prevent, or ameliorate displacement, yet in practice it has generally failed to (1) center community knowledge and strengths that enable resilience, (2) identify intersectional oppressions (let alone disrupt them), (3) advance community activism, and (4) decrease vulnerability to displacement. In other words, although it often accurately predicted displacement, it has generally failed to support the self-sovereignty of communities working to advance community resilience on the frontlines of displacement, and has tended to reify inequities in power and resource distribution. Recognizing these constraints and outcomes, we have proposed a conceptual framework for “regenerative mapping” to navigate from geographies of displacement to geographies of radical resilience. These intersectional, community-rooted, action research framework includes: (1) Decolonizing our conceptions of sovereignty, from a view of “supreme authority within a territory” and practice of extractive, exploitative, and exclusive politics of land, to the view (and practice) of cultivating responsible relationships with land and people rooted in reciprocity, liberty, and integrity; (2) Shifting our cartographic gaze from seeing like a State to sensing like a sovereign body, including an appreciative gaze, decolonial gaze, and compassionate gaze; and 16
