5 Concluding Propositions on Regenerative mapping

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.

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

(3) Naming harm, centering joy, and building on community-strengths by mapping both drivers of precarity and vitality through methods of asset-mapping, story mapping, promise mapping and kinship mapping. Through our literature review and praxis story of the Valverde Movement Project, we find evidence to support our proposition that these approaches can create and maintain reciprocal relationships, foster collective memory, and cultivate awareness that empowers practical, ethical action and structural changes required to decolonize our politics of land and expand community-rooted health, wealth, power, and ownership. Our literature review and early experiences suggest that sensing like a sovereign body can help cultivate the kinds of knowledge and power that contribute to tangible forms of sovereignty, such as community land trusts, cooperative economic development, and mutual aid networks that have supported geographies of radical resilience from Jackson, MS to Boston, MA (Medoff, 1994; Nangwaya & Akuno, 2017; Nembhard, 2014; Scharpie, 2017). We find that regenerative mapping contributes to knowledge production as “a form of wayfinding,” which, in Harjo’s words, “means re-associating our knowledge with what it has been dissociated from -our bodies, our senses, or feelings.”(2019, p. 100). Although VMP has yet to have a measurable impact on preventing gentrification, our diverse members are practicing embodying, embedding, and emplacing a decolonized politics of sovereignty in our everyday interactions, long-term vision, and strategic actions with diverse partners.

The ever-evolving online story maps of Valverde’s Past, Present, and Promise and ongoing efforts to name and sign Ulibarri Park may not look like “anti-gentrification” strategies of a radical politics at first glance –however, the stories we tell about the past are particularly critical in gentrifying neighborhoods. As Hern (2017, p. 35) notes, “ahistoricity is a prime capitalist strategy: constantly wiping the slates clean so that each successive person, family, and neighborhood can claim ignorance and/or nonresponsibility for what happened previously, even if it was very recent and right under our feet.” Newcomers to neighborhoods experiencing gentrification pressure rarely learn about the rich local histories of cultural vitality and community leadership in their new homes, or how processes and policies of disinvestment and displacement like redlining created the economic opportunity they enjoy today. They often arrive with a story of themselves as “urban pioneers” ready to inhabit “fixer-uppers” and “civilize the urban frontier”; usually unaware of their participation in cycles of displacement endemic to settler colonialism and structural racism (Schuerman, 2019).

Disrupting these narratives by centering – and broadly sharing – powerful stories of community vitality is an essential foundation for a politics of radical sovereign bodies. As Cyndi Suarez (2018) observes, the “stories one tells oneself and others transmit or transmute power.” She asserts that the liberatory practice of shifting from stories of victimhood to stories of self-sovereignty is critical to effective social change. As stories are shared, mirror neurons allow the receiver of the story to connect with the storyteller in ways that can foster compassion and motivation to act (Hess, 2012). As such, they are a powerful basis for organizing in social justice movements, especially in facilitated environments where individuals can share their “story of self” in ways that connect to a larger “story of us” and a “story of now” that directs the power of an expanded collective will to strategic actions that emerged in the process of sharing stories (Ganz, 2010). In this sense, stories are maps to the future through resistance to present actions by those