Mapping our futures: eco-imagination and collective visioning Michael Chew
Introduction This paper presents an analysis of the participatory mapping project OurMelbourne2050. It explores how differing conceptions of imagination operate in the project’s conceptual basis and its actual operation. These aspects of imagination – the ecological imagination, utopian futures, the cartographic imagination, and collective visioning - present different lenses through which to examine the project’s effectiveness and to understand the multiple imaginative processes embedded in the project’s operation. The analysis proceeds in four parts; the first two parts explore the context of the project’s central premise – the need for both imagination and utopian thinking in the environmental movement today. The third part examines the form of this visioning process itself – namely cartographic intervention. The last section explores the mechanism of the project’s participatory process – that of collective engagement - and how this reframes the participants’ subjectivity. Ultimately it is through framing the project as a collective, participatory performance that reveals its potential for transformational change.
The Project OurMelbourne2050 was run at the Sustainable Living Festival, in Birrarung Marr, Melbourne over three days in February 2009. It involved a large (2.4 x 1.6m) map of the city mounted horizontally, close to the ground. The map was an black and white enlargement of the Melways street directory section that covered the CBD area and immediately adjacent areas. The public was invited to participate by drawing or writing specific ideas for their vision of a sustainable Melbourne in 2050 onto a layer of trace paper directly resting over the map. This enabled participants to target their contributed ideas to specific
geographic areas. Over the duration of the festival these ideas accumulated together to form a colourful, multi-layered and interconnected composite vision of a future sustainable Melbourne.
The need for ecological imagination today ‘Do you want to have some fun here drawing while daddy goes to a workshop?’1 This statement, overhead at the project site, reflects a whole history of assumptions regarding the concept of imagination, its importance in society and role in social change. Imagination is fun, frivolous, and good when you are not doing the ‘real’ work of social change. OurMelbourne2050 posited an alternative view - in which imagination is central to social change by encouraging futures–thinking. Consider imagination itself, which has long been subordinated by reason in the Western tradition, which forms the project’s context. From Plato’s eminent ideal forms, from which the imagination distracted and distorted, to Descartes, whose elevation of the rational mind was enshrined through his maxim “Cogito, ergo sum”, imagination was perceived as a quality that was not only suspect, but which actually impeded reason’s ability to generate human progress.2 Industrialism and capitalism continued this trajectory, affirming themselves through reason’s child: technology. Despite the Romantic movement’s affirmation of the centrality of imagination to the human condition and their strong suspicion of technological progress3, Western civilisation has continued to privilege a notion of progress which upholds reason and largely excludes the imagination.4 1
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Personal communication, (unknown correspondent), Birrarung Marr 19 Feb 2009. This citation is representative of many conversations at the project site that reflected similar attitudes. 2 Descartes makes his position regarding imagination and reason clear - ‘…the misleading judgment that proceeds from the blundering constructions of the imagination’ . Descartes cited in Egan 1992:6. Egan provides an excellent summary of these historical views on the imagination in his ‘Brief history of the imagination’ Egan 1992. 3 Egan makes the following interesting observations: ‘While many of the Romantic poets were horrified at the industrialization of the world, this too could be recognized as a further product of the "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation".‘ Egan 1992:9. 4 Griffin 1996:26.
Despite - or perhaps because of - this longstanding subjugation, the need for imagination could not be more urgent today given the present multiple environmental crises that we face. It is useful look at Susan Griffin’s view of imagination – as not only including future visioning, but also encompassing new ways of seeing the present. In authentic social change ‘…new delineations are drawn over old maps, it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges’.5 By asking people to articulate the future on the map of the present, participants can step into another way of seeing the city that surrounds them and the possibilities for transformation in the now. This task poses a challenge not only to the urban horizon of possibilities for change – but also to the ‘sustainability movement’ as embodied in the Sustainable Living Festival.6 This festival has established itself a key event in Melbourne’s sustainability calendar, and approaches sustainability in a broad fashion – encompassing educational, political, consumerist, and creative approaches.7 Despite these wide scope, the vast majority of stalls and events are techno-scientific, analytical, or politically based – information workshops, talks, environmental industry and community stalls and so on. The fostering of the participants’ imagination through engagement with OurMelbourne2050 thus represents a participatory, imaginative mode of engagement with sustainability within this otherwise limited context.8 Susan Ebenreck sheds light on this situation in her article on imagination and environmental ethics. She views imagination as ‘…the power which allows us to… creatively envision a reality different to the one we are immersed in’9. Imagination here is not limited simply to concepts of ‘innovation’ - the generation of new ideas in order to limit our impact on nature, within that same cultural milieu that has originally caused the damage.
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Griffin 1996:27. The term ‘sustainability’ is a highly contested concept – for a general summary of some of the ongoing debate see McManus 1996. 7 For more details of the core principles of the Sustainable Living Festival, see Gisele Wilkinson’s submission in Petheram & Johnson 2006. 8 I use the term participatory here to distinguish the project from the other artwork which was on display at the festival. 9 Ebenreck 1996:12. This is the first part of a her six part definition, selected as it accords most closely with the concepts of imagination being explored in this paper. 6
Rather the concept of ‘imagination’ should extends to include ‘…new possibilities for human societies in their forms of interaction with the natural world… fresh ways of seeing’10. With this perspective the project provides a space for contributions that may not fit within the dominant technical or political frameworks of the festival, and can provide avenues for expression of these fresh ways of seeing that are congruent with the ideas of ecological imagination discussed above.
Utopias and the eco-imagination We shift from examining the general concept of imagination to the more specific manifestation in OurMelbourne2050’s operation – its focus on sustainable futures. Just like the more general concept of imagination, utopian thought is often rejected as either a useless form of daydreaming or a dangerous flirtation with totalitarian social planning.11 Utopian environmental imaginary has similarly had a dialectical relationship with reason in Western thought, in which the dominant narrative constructs a utopia of solely human progress, taming and subduing nature for human ends.12 By briefing examining alternative perspectives on utopianism we can situate the project’s scope and operation in a broader framework of imagination. Three alternative approaches to utopianism are considered here. Firstly Romanticism’s reaction against the excesses of industrialism and its impact on nature led to a variety of ‘pastoral’ utopian visions, with a common vision of a redemptive wilderness, separate to humans but which they able to learnt from.13 After the rise the green movement in 1960s a different type of utopia began to emerge – the ‘ecotopia’, which represented a vision more informed by social politics, where revolutionary eco-societies recast both 10
Ebenreck 1996:16. This suspicion consciously avoids the reality that both utopian and dystopian currents often underlie the narratives of the rational-scientific policy frameworks which guide governmental decisions regarding the environment. See for instance Hjerpe & Linne 2009. 12 Utopias were places where technology had finally won the gruelling battle with nature and humans could finally rest in their comfortable world, free from nature’s vicissitudes. See Garforth 2005 for further elaboration. 13 For instance Thoreau’s Walden, was homage to the noble savage living amidst the wild, whereas Morris’ News from Nowhere centred life in small scales crafts-based human settlements. For further reading, see de Geus 1999, who critically analyses and reviews nine different ecotopian positions. 11
human relations and human-nature relations. 14 A third strand of green utopias has emerged under the influence of constructionist and postmodernist critiques of the earlier ‘pastoral’ and ‘ecotopian’ utopias, arguing that their uncritical concept of ‘wilderness’ was a construction maintaining the polarity between ‘human’ and ‘nature’ which is central to modernity’s domination of nature. These ‘postmodern’ visions are characterised by the breaking down of this polarity, and the construction of multiple hybridisations.15 All these strands provide essential and ongoing contributions to the environmental movement.16 During OurMelbourne2050’s operation, participants contributed content that reflected images of all three utopias – from eco-villages and communes, to wilderness areas and natural reclamations of urban space, and various examples of human-nature hybridisations. This variance of the representation of utopias between participants suggests that no single concept has achieved dominance. However if we examine the form of the project – which enabled participants to participate collectively in adding their contributions to the single map, then we can then situate the operation of the project as bricolage – the concept of spontaneous, recombinant assemblages of ideas and material representations. This postmodern process encapsulates all three types of utopic representation, each with their different concept of human-nature interactions.17 A plurality of utopian fragments combine on the single map to form a hybrid multiplicitous vision. It could be argued that this vision lacks the depth and carefully structured thought contained in the cohesive development of a single vision, however this critique undervalues the
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A famous example is Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, which centred around ideas of eco-centrism, selfsufficiency, and embeddness with nature. For further reading, see Garforth 2006:9. 15 These hybridities may include: nature/human, technology/nature, mind/body. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is a well known articulation of this position. See Garforth 2006:14-16 for a summary and review of these positions. 16 For a discussion regarding the present need for utopian thinking in social movements generally, see Levitas 2008. 17 Lévi-Strauss originates this concept in Savage Mind (Lévi-Strauss 1968), since then numerous theorists have developed the idea. Frediric Jamesen is famously critical of this concept – ‘The writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds - they've already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the unique ones have been thought of already’. Jameson 1998:7. However without diverging too far from the topic of imagination, it can be argued that the particular assemblage that OurMelbourne2050 constructs emerges from a participant’s individual acts of creation, rather than a pastiche from already circulating images.
process oriented and transformative nature of the interactions that the project facilitates, which we will examine later.
The Cartographic Imagination We turn our attention to the cartographic imagination as articulated in OurMelbourne2050, examining its cartographic heritage and the conceptual basis for its ‘counter-mapping’ processes. Cartography has always described the human relationship to nature. Early maps showed the whereabouts of food and game, and the rise of empires led to the mapping of the favoured sea trade routes and the boundaries of land ownership. With the growth of nation states and widespread taxation the precision of boundaries on maps became of paramount importance – land that could be mapped could be taxed precisely. Later capitalism and the rise of private property rights upheld this crucial reliance on the exactness of mapped boundaries for ownership. The contemporary proliferation of computerised mapping techniques - GIS, GPS, web-based to name a few – can map more land, faster, and to a greater precision, but the underlying logic of maps has remained the same. They still define control of land.18 In all of these instances the primary operation of the map is to represent the world, whether it is territories to be governed, or private property to be valued.19 However maps simultaneously do more than represent – they also act to constitute these areas through controlling how we see them. This in turn influences how we construct them in the powerknowledge discourses of law, commerce, and the social and natural sciences. The map is a powerful artefact precisely because it appears to faithfully represent reality, and - like the photograph - is thus assumed to be ‘the real thing’. The map’s creator, his or her intent, and the social context 18
For an extensive examination of the history and wide ranging influence of cartographic reason in Western thought, see Olsson 2007. 19 While this brief description refers to Western society’s relationship with mapping, there are longstanding traditions of indigenous mapping around the world through which co-extensive relationships between nature and human are represented. See Lydon 2003 for further reading.
surrounding its construction, thus often remains hidden. As Monimoner points out, ‘A single map is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation’.20 Thus the map is always political, directly or indirectly. A cartographer cannot include everything, and what is not represented on the map can subsequently influence our ways of seeing it in reality.21 The project’s use of a Melways street directory engages participants directly with this existing political dimension, while simultaneously offering them a mechanism for critical engagement. As a well-known map, the project’s Melways enlargement firstly functions as a conduit for orientation. Participants need to get their ‘bearings’ and locate sites of interest before they make contributions. In this process they must collude with the silencing logic of the map. The Melways represents Melbourne as essentially connections of streets, with minimal information beyond. Aside from roads, built infrastructure is listed, and natural features are largely reduced to generic ‘parks’ and ‘reserves’, and therefore effectively sidelined.22 The paradox of participatory engagement in this context is that the street directory is the most effective way of locating ourselves within urban space, precisely as we have been socialised into this way of seeing and engaging with - our urban landscape.23 Once located, a participant’s active contribution to the map invariably alters the map at that site, which re-constitutes it in a ‘counter-mapping’ process. In turn, this addition becomes part of the collective field of cultural and geographic indicators that subsequent contributors use for orientation. Thus this layer of contributions continually evolves through an ongoing dialogue with both the static street map and the participants’ contributions. It is this layer which forms the true map - one that is not a spatial unity, 20
Monmonier 1996:2. There are numerous examples of fictive maps which explore this paradox, often in the attempt of a 1:1 scale mapping. For examples see Wikipedia contributors 2010. 22 Harley describes an analogous situation in his reading of early modern maps and the silences they produce, describing the process that entails, ‘Space becomes more important than place: if places look alike they can be treated alike. Thus, with the progress of scientific mapping, space became all too easily a socially-empty commodity, a geometrical landscape of cold, non-human facts’. Harley 1988:66. 23 Baudrillard describes situation run to its extreme: ‘The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.’ Baudrillard 1988:167. 21
rather a network that is in a constant state of becoming. Deleuze describes this difference as between a tracing and a map: ‘The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.’24 The traditional logics of cartography - tracing and reproductions - are replaced with logics which instead proliferate relationships and open up spaces, a cartography that performs rather than represents a world. A last cartographic caveat here. Although this counter-mapping strategy was central to OurMelbourne2050, not all the contributions were submitted in close relationship with their physical location or other contributions. A noticeable minority featured generalized comments or opinions, such as ‘more trees’, ‘no cars’, or ‘save our parklands’.25 Their authors have treated the map’s substratum as a literal tabula rasa for their views, without connecting them either spatially or in their content to the rest of the map. However while these entries may not have contributed to a collective vision in the way the project intended, they nonetheless enter into creative dialogue with subsequent contributions. To be overly prescriptive with contributions risks re-creating exclusionary mapping processes – ‘A map without multiple entrances - a map that denies multiple interpretations is a map that discourages change, that presents the world as a ‘fait accompli’26 . Instead OurMelbourne2050 attempted to open up the interpretations of its skeleton of roads, inviting constant reworking – to become a map without end.27
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Deleuze & Guattari 1987:12. These examples are representative of a range of similar comments. 26 Zournazi 2002:22. 27 The project forms part of a growing movement of counter-mapping projects which aim to open up the power relations that have been closed down by traditional cartography. For a general review see Cobarrubias & Pickles 2006. It is important to note the culturally specific and privelaged context for the project - participants run no risk in engaging with the project unlike in participatory mapping projects elsewhere in the world, where contributors can be at more risk. See Di Gessa 2008 for further reading. 25
Performativity and the collective imagination This final section considers briefly the participatory relationship that the project generates and how imagination is re-enacted in this context. Camden Pratt describes in Relationality and the Art of Becoming how collective art-making builds connections and relationality between participants. Drawing on Groz’s view of art being ‘that which impacts on the body most directly28’, she describes a classroom context where this shared embodiment - in the context of the communal art practice - creates the conditions for the ‘emergence’ of some children. This emergence involves differentiating themselves, becoming – ‘…something other to the already known, the established’29, and accessing a generative, learning space outside of the traditional proscriptive rules for what constitutes educational ‘success’. Using these ideas we can examine how the collective nature of the participants’ contributions helped to create a space where this emergence and differentiation was supported. Numerous chairs with cushions were set-up around the map close together to encourage people who were contributing ideas to stay as long as they wanted and to make it easy for them to enter into dialogue with others. Many such dialogues occurred, often with the participants also collaborating over their ideas, and generating contributions that would have been unforeseeable otherwise. The participants’ shared embodiment provided a grounded, universal level of connection, beyond the often hyper-rational or expert-centric issue-based environmental discourses that commonly inhabit at the festival.30 The process of collective participation usually included people reading and viewing a selection of the contributions before adding their own, with others watching the process from afar as a precursor to their own involvement. As Griffon writes ‘…vision is a collective activity… What one is willing to see is 28
Grosz, cited in Camden Pratt 2009:55. Camden Pratt 2009:54. 30 An additional reason why the shared embodiement encouraged communication was that the normal participant bodily orientation at the festival was a standing position to engage with stalls, browse other events, talk with friends and so forth. The act of sitting down encouraged a participant’s commitment to the project and their sitting co-participants. See Goffman 1959 for a discussion of the relationship between bodily comportment and group dynamics. 29
dependant on what others see, …[and] the social atmosphere.’31 Thus the project’s site becomes a generative space where subjectivities and intersubjectivities can ebb and flow back into each other, and while embodied connections are made through words and pen strokes.
Conclusions The OurMelbourne2050 project unfolded in a state of ‘in-between-ness’32, an imaginative state of becoming. Geographically the participants’ contributions were linked to the static cartographic substratum – however as more contributions were made, the more dialogue occurred in reference to new, unknown ideas, opening up a space for new becomings. This in-betweenness operated on multiple levels: in-between our varied imaginings of humannature relations; in-between our present experience and future dreams; inbetween our unbridled creativity and cartographic reason; and in-between our bodies and their drawing hands, speaking mouths, and seeing eyes. The space is also in-between through the very act of participation – engaging with a single map in an uncoordinated process, the contributions neither sit in isolation, nor melt into an undifferentiated whole. Spaces are opened up to engage with ideas or each other, which generate conversations and concepts that may or may not make it onto the map, and which generate ripples that may or may not escape the project and drift away home with the participant. Marcel Proust is attributed with the saying ʻThe real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.ʼ33 Seeing oneʼs own environment with different eyes can be the enduring gift that dabbling in the future may bring. 2648 words.
31
Griffin 1996:26. Camden Pratt 2009:54. 33 Proust, cited in Lydon 2003:13. 32
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