Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping

Activating Imaginaries and Means of Knowing 

Edited By Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, Alys Longley

This book looks at artistic approaches to cultural mapping, focusing on imaginative cartography. It emphasizes the importance of creative process that engages with the “felt sense” of community experiences, an element often missing from conventional mapping practices. International artistic contributions in this book reveal the creative research practices and languages of artists, a prerequisite to understanding the multi-modal interface of cultural mapping. The book examines how contemporary artistic approaches can challenge conventional asset mapping by animating and honouring the local, giving voice and definition to the vernacular, or recognizing the notion of place as inhabited by story and history. It explores the processes of seeing and listening and the importance of the aesthetic as a key component of community self-expression and self-representation. 

We share here the concluding chapter: Artists in conversation. “Creative cartographies: A roundtable discussion on artistic approaches to cultural mapping”

From here, the book starts:

17 Creative cartographies

A roundtable discussion on artistic
approaches to cultural mapping

Marnie Badham, W. F. Garrett-Petts,
Shannon Jackson, Justin Langlois,
and Shriya Malhotra

GARRETT-PETTS: First, thank you for helping us explore and reflect upon artistic approaches to cultural mapping. Each of you brings a significant perspective on the role of art as an agent for identity formation and social change,and especially as a catalyst for community participation. So I’d like to begin by inviting you to situate your own practice with reference to community engagement, mapping, and social transformation. Justin, your work with the Broken City Lab seems a good place to start?

LANGLOIS: Broken City Lab came out of a conversation I had with my partner and BCL co-founder, Danielle Sabelli, ten years ago about the different kinds of roles that artists could play in their community. At the time we were living in Windsor, Ontario, the heart of the Rustbelt of Canada, and the financial crisis was hitting the entire region really hard. We had grown up in the area, we were going to school at the University of Windsor, and we could feel things changing around us. Statistically, the city had the highest unemployment rate in the country (and continued to for many years after), but we also saw the impacts of these changes as our friends and family left for other cities andother opportunities, and it brought up this question around what kind of a future existed for a city like Windsor.
GARRETT-PETTS: And your response?

LANGLOIS: We tried to answer it by imagining a response that could move outside of the narratives we saw around us. Rather than seeing a future that revolves around waiting out a change or moving on to a different set of circumstances, we imagined playing a larger role than we might otherwise have been invited to take. But it wasn’t about ambition or boosterism or some infallible hope for the city. It was really based out of a sense of frustration and anger. This was a key part of how we started to bring other people into the conversation (really amazing artists, thinkers, and activists like Joshua Babcock, Michelle Soulliere, Cristina Naccarato, Rosina Riccardo, and Hiba Abdallah). It was a position that we took together, thinking about the situation we found ourselves in as the raw material for explorations of civic engagement, citizenship, and artistic practice. The projects we started with were based on small interventions that tried to rework our relationship with the spaces around us, essentially working out our own imaginations in 300 Marnie Badham, et al public. Over time, our projects scaled up to invite broader participation, and, in particular, looked at forms of mapping (in spatial, psychic, and poetic dimensions) and community engagement to try to catalyze a conversation about social transformation in relation to a specific locality.

GARRETT-PETTS: Shriya, your work with the Partizaning Lab in Russia would seem to share some of the same motivations and approaches. Like Justin and the Broken City Lab, you are intent on involving citizens in the process of reimagining their spaces—and also advising local authorities and institutions on how to change the city in dialogue with local communities. In your collective’s manifesto, you say your “goal is to reflect and promote the idea of art-based DIY activism aimed at rethinking, restructuring and improving urban environments and communities.” Can you tell us more about the Partizaning Lab and the art-based DIY activism you practiced? What was the impact? And what was the role of cultural mapping?

MALHOTRA: I can definitely relate to the experiences—and also the motivations— of the Broken City Lab. Particularly this idea of rethinking the different kinds of roles that artists can play in their community.

The Partizaning website was set up in 2011 in Moscow by street artists and art historians interested in using the language of street art and the ethos of DIYism to motivate people to become more civically and socially engaged. When I joined to set up and be an editor for the English website, I was furtherinterested to use creative/artistic methods as forms for experimenting with practical, research-based urban and civic engagement. Thereafter Partizaning Lab was set up by us almost as a sort of faux “consultancy” to our larger project, to give it structure in terms of ideas. Some of our methods for civic engagement included the use of what we called “Collective Cartography,”including participatory, community, and psychogeographic mapping. The Lab was essentially a practical experiment in civic engagement through creativepractice. We shared the belief that DIYism and creative or artistic means were a way for people to reimagine—and transform—the spaces they lived in. We also found that giving people agency to do so, or catalyzing this belief in themselves, was quite powerful. So, a part of our project was simply to inspire people and encourage them to implement change and ideas within their communities. Of course, this is something that people had already been doing. In fact, many elderly people within the communities we worked in were known for undertaking such projects. But we also found that some of the practices which we valued—like mapping—were very useful for engagement, helping visualize the geographic contexts of issues, and highlighting often overlooked spaces, places, and voices.

GARRETT-PETTS: And, in general, your sense of the impact?

MALHOTRA: I’d say that creative means of engagement can be more inclusive andperhaps offer interesting insights to communities on the issues which they face. One of the processes or practices we like to use is mapmaking—and working with the possibility of mapmaking as a means of civic engagement— for contextualized geographic research that better informs community development. Maps and mapmaking can—on the one hand—be metaphoric, creative, and imaginative. But the ways in which we used it were a lot more functional. We used maps and

mapmaking as a cornerstone to attempt to start conversations with people on various issues, to demonstrate, using geography, the
limits and oversights of planning decisions/policies, and also to highlight the302 Marnie Badham, et al overlooked. We had children, the elderly, and many young people engage with these practical ideas of mapmaking in their community. That said, I think a lot of what we enjoy may be theoretical, because the fact remains that it’s difficult to mobilize people for such things, and even to get them focused and interested challenge. Such practical challenges and logistics of community mapping can’t be dismissed, despite my being optimistic and believing quite fully in its potential. I also think it’s important to consider, or at least be aware of, the potential for unintended vs intended consequences of community mapping initiatives. If these were civic surveys or government initiatives, the tone, engagement, and process would be different. I think by being artistic in nature and in intent, there is room for a more sensitive and emotional involvement with making visible issues relating to space—without excluding on the basis of, for instance, legal citizenship, or using spaces that may be inaccessible. Artistic mapping in its ethos can overcome many traditional limitations surrounding engagement, giving a voice for expression in a community.

Having said all this, I would like to add that the idea and some practices are very much theoretical. In practice, it’s not like a great number of people came together and/or were excitedly making maps. Involving people in these types of projects takes time, effort, and sometimes significant trust building. But I think mapping— geographic and cultural and artistic and whatever the definition—is an artistic output as well as informational, and is an intriguing idea for people, giving them a sense of authority and power over space which they may not have considered. In essence, whether the practicality of our maps and mapping projects worked (which to be honest is hard to remember clearly as these projects were years ago!), we considered it an artistic intervention and a means of civic engagement.

Cultural mapping does face its own limitations and challenges. It may be seen, on one hand, as a rather superficial way of doing research. However, using maps and locating sites for suggestions in physical space (i.e., using mailboxes) was a very effective way of gathering ideas from people, starting discussions, and simply contextualizing their ideas within space.

GARRETT-PETTS: When you talk about limitations and challenges, there are perhaps echoes here of the infamous Claire Bishop–Grant Kester debate over what Bishop identified as the shortcomings of socially collaborative art—over whether art’s primary role is to disrupt perceptions and assumptions, or whether it has also a more pragmatic, socially transformative role? Or whether this is a false dichotomy?1 Shannon, can I draw you in at this point and ask you to comment in terms of your own studies, where you’ve documented and considered extensively the interest in collaborative art performances and art as social practice. Can you talk about both the potential and the limitations of such creative engagement, of artists working with non-artists, and of cultural mapping in particular? What are the issues for cultural mapping that you see emerging when art exits the gallery and takes a more decidedly social turn?

JACKSON:Well, I’m sure that Grant and Claire would be the first to say that the polarizing effects of that debate have not always been great for the field. But you’re absolutely right that this shorthand opposition—between perception disruption and social transformation—continues to shadow these discussions. It wouldn’t be surprising if it had a similar effect on how we understand artistic uses of cultural mapping. In my own work—whether in books like Social Works (Jackson, 2011) or Public Servants (Burton, Jackson, and Willsdon, 2016), in my teaching, or in engagements with social practice projects around me—I try to understand when social transformation is perceived to be “un-aesthetic.” Usually there is a concern about the instrumentalization of art, the use of art to advance a prescribed agenda—art that is “doing good.” Or there is a concern about emotional superficiality, the use of art to create temporary harmony—art that “feels good.” From the perspective of activism or community organizing, however, we know that both of those risks are always present in any project, whether or not “art” is involved in the social change effort. Some of the least successful community activist projects are those that start with self-satisfied prescribed agendas or that create provisional emotional connection without attending to structural change. That kind of poor social practice art isn’t just bad art; it’s poor social engagement. Complex and effective community activism also needs to “disrupt perceptions” of a given reality, to make unexpected connections amongst systems, stories, and people. In other words, I absolutely believe that this is a false dichotomy; genuine social transformation needs to activate alternate perceptions of what the social is before it can be transformed.

So that brings me back to artistic uses of map-making. I’m drawn to imaginative cartography precisely because of the way it can combine perceptual shift with social pragmatism. Yes, the tendency to hyper-functionality can be there—as Shriya notes—but I’m most interested when it’s not. Consider a project like The Trust Map in the Nottingham neighbourhood; its title sounds like a “feel good” project. In fact, its effects are far more radical; it tracks when and where neighbours trust those in their community—fellow residents, civic leaders, store owners, developers—and offers a counter-visualization of the neighbourhood that is otherwise not perceivable in city planning. We can also consider a project closer to my home—the Anti-Eviction Map of the San Francisco/Bay Area. Here again, an apparently overt agenda of doing good—anti-eviction—also offers an entirely different sense of relation amongst people and stories, decisions and effects, across the region. It ends up creating an entirely different way of defining borders amongst regional territories, while simultaneously showing systemic connection amongst people who weren’t aware of each other. Perceptual shift as social transformation: we need an aesthetic imagination to help us rethink what “functional” might mean in any landscape.

GARRETT-PETTS: I’m tempted to linger over the Bay area Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, for it seems a compelling example of how artistic practices are variously employed and integrated in the service of co-constructing a data-based, highly visual argument—a complex deep map of displacement and resistance. But, Marnie, would you lend your take on what you’ve heard so far? Cultural mapping as an extension or application of aesthetic imagination? As offering a counter-visualization that is otherwise not perceivable in or through conventional planning practices?

BADHAM: I’m interested in ways we can make and read maps to host new conversations between different stakeholders. In particular, I’m interested in the potential of creative cartographies to draw attention to counter-narratives on the politics of land, place, and history. We know that, historically, maps have served as tools of colonization as systems of ownership, management, and exclusion, so I’m interested in how we can shift the authority of “the cartographer” by re-centring local knowledge? There has been an explosion of cultural mapping as participatory planning processes over the last decade by civic planning and international development groups but, to be honest, I’m more interested in how artists and activists use creative cartography. Bringing a particular aesthetic sensibility and practicality to the work, artists offer very different skills than planners in spatial reading and also social analysis. Some of my favourite maps are made by activists as part of the creation of new sharing economies like Feral Fruit Map in Melbourne or the Anti-Eviction Map in the Bay Area. In these instances, technology can also help to democratize authority and disseminate information quickly and widely.

I take inspiration from artists who explore both space and time in their “mapping” work. Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May exposed the extent of reported rapes in Los Angeles during a three-week performance back in 1977. Each day, Lacy went to the Police Department to obtain rape reports and stamped the locations on a map outside of City Hall. Each marked report was surrounded by up to nine fainter stamp markings to indicate unreported incidents of sexual assault. A second map was created by community organizations that visualized local sites of resistance and violence prevention (see Irish, 2010).

Other artists communicate crisis through alternative approaches in negotiating the relationship between spatial, temporal, and spiritual elements. Fly in and Fuck off is a painting by Garawa artist Jacky Green from Borroloola in Australia’s Northern Territory. It pictures an open cut iron ore mine located in the remote top end, which diverted the McArthur River—a river of great cultural and environmental significance—more than five kilometres. As a ranger, artist, and activist, Green’s painting shows how the river was cut and diverted to make way for the open cut mine—they cut the backbone of the Rainbow Serpent. Painted as an aerial narrative, Green has explained he is not painting “dreamings,” he is painting history and capturing time—past and present—to communicate the violence on his people and land.

GARRETT-PETTS: So what about the relationship between artists and, say, planners? Do they or can they speak the same language? Share the same worldview when engaged in mapping? Also, I suspect that the Russian context for cultural mapping is very different than, say, that in the Bay area or Melbourne or Windsor—but I don’t see anyone in the literature on cultural mapping talking in specific terms about the social and political relationships at play?

BADHAM: As an artist-researcher I’m often invited to develop collaborative arts projects in the gap between communities and decision-makers. Mapping can be a development process before we move into a larger socially engaged arts project. This might look like walking together in silence to listen, smell, and pay attention to how our bodies respond to our surroundings or storytelling about significant places and debates about spatial justice. All of these lived experiences can then be visualized as a broader narrative. We will use a range of planners’ maps (pre-colonial topographical imaging to those with street and water body names) blown up like wallpaper size for people to draw and paste notes on, to identify or rename places, or to even tear up. The outcomes can be read literally as maps, or as more poetic expressions. I’m currently working on a few projects with outer Melbourne communities to explore expressions of local resilience in the changing times of climate change and massive urban growth. These durational cartographies will focus on locals tracking their own engagement with their own neighbourhoods; and like Lacy and Green’s approaches, I expect the unique aesthetic and intention of these maps will surface only once embedded in place with people and process.

MALHOTRA: I guess from working in Moscow, I would say that an important part of creating our own maps was situated both artistically and socially—from traditions of DIYism and clever resource allocation as a way of living and an ethic in Russia (not unlike other countries/regions). To start making maps on our own or with people at the time was a response to a surge in construction and planning changes in and around the city. I don’t think otherwise the context is all that different from any other major city which experiences complex planning decisions that are often controversial to the people facing its practicalities, in terms of where they live. You see mostly similar complaints and situations to be dealt with by planners and civic groups. Yes, it could be argued that planning resistance is a political mode of working for artists. I would say that, in actuality, from these experiences, you realize it’s mostly very creative, civic, and socially oriented. Planners with jobs in government would look to using this as a form of goodwill and community PR, while private agencies competing for contracts might see it as an opportunity to work in a different way. Such cultural mapping is a form of creative civic engagement to undertake, but ultimately remains simply that—unless it starts a media discussion to prompt a broader discussion on the ideas that are generated. This raises for us, constantly, the line between being an artist and a civic activist to almost being a civic worker or self-styled planner. Ultimately, however, what we choose to map is what challenges the authority of mapmakers everywhere; and given the political situations in many countries these days, mapmaking is in itself a contentious issue. But I wanted to speak more of the motivations as being a creative impetus and engaging with communities or minorities that were generally omitted from planning or other considerations.

LANGLOIS: Building off of Shriya’s comments, I wonder about what kinds of relationships between artists and planners not only can but should be fostered? In Vancouver we’re seeing opportunities for artists to take on residency positions within City departments. I participated in the first one with the Sustainability Group, and this practice is quickly expanding, though has yet to reach the Planning Department specifically. It follows a logic similar to Artist Placement Group’s work, but the governmental context is obviously very different now.

Writers like Markus Miessen warn of the nightmares of participation and the loss of civic capacity—lost by awaiting the invitation to participate. Bishop has discussed the challenges of socially engaged art practices risking becoming a new kind of outsourcing of government responsibility. Radical geographer William Bunge’s 1968 Where Detroiters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track map; Park Fiction’s decade-long effort to map, design, and build a public space built around non-expert planning; and processes of engagement that we can see in work by DodoLab or the Department of Unusual Certainties are all example propositions of reappropriating the methods and aesthetics of cultural mapping towards much more difficult, much stranger, and much less useful lists and maps of assets, values, and practices. To that end, the activation of mapping and planning techniques outside of predetermined outcomes is promising in its ability to speak back to power and to render difference in legible if limited forms.

In Windsor, Broken City Lab created a project, “Sites of Apology/Sites of Hope,” which looked at not only mapping spaces that matched those

descriptions through community workshops but also demarcating them with large ribbons and ceremonies. We also used algorithmic/psychogeographic processes to map differently both spaces and localities that had become all too familiar. We knowingly worked through models that undoubtedly mirrored cultural mapping practices taken up in planning departments and by municipal cultural planning consultants, but with other ends in mind. We didn’t work exclusively “against” existing planning practices but, rather, aimed to work beyond the limits of how cultural mapping would be deemed useful to municipal government or even the practice of planning.

I would argue that these same projects, which could be created within a partnership with a planner or an official process, actually shift largely because they are not hosted in an official capacity. The value of this work is not necessarily in the creation of the maps (certainly a question asked of any art project or planning open house is “Will this ever actually be put to use?”), but instead in the activation of the idea to map at all, the idea to work without invitation. Cultural mapping that operates as a way of working to see and enact difference from the existing maps we find ourselves implicated in already is an incredibly valuable practice, but also one that has its value more accurately measured as a degree of autonomy from instrumental legibility, at least in the first instance. In this way, the value of being able to apply pressure onto existing maps and existing planning practices might be a more resilient model of artists and publics participating in a larger practice of cultural mapping towards cultivating new expectations of the relationships of planners and public.

BADHAM: I reckon we can all agree with a degree of certainty that city planners, artists, and different individuals across the community speak different languages. But that’s sort of the point. Artistic approaches to cultural mapping can be the start of a visual conversation between very different ontological positions to understand difference. We know maps hold a lot of power, but we also know they are not objective. They represent the purposeful aims of the cartographer—who makes choices about what is on the map, but also what is left out. I’m particularly interested in Justin’s examples for “reappropriating the methods and aesthetics of cultural mapping” and how they can be used “to speak back to power and to render difference.” I feel strongly that this exchange of value positions needs to happen before relationships can move into any kind of meaningful work. As a socially engaged artist who works between communities and decision-makers, I see cultural mapping as a useful tool for this fleshing out and communication of differences.

Here in Australia, cultural mapping might be understood as* part of the long history of community cultural development (CCD) practice. Back in the 1990s, the Australia Council for the Arts invested in a three-year programme for local governments to employ artists as CCD workers to deliver programming “for,” “with,” and “by” communities such as multicultural festivals, disability arts programmes, and youth engagement. Focused on relationship building across sectors and communities, the CCD worker also impacted significantly on the culture of how city and town councils do business. I believe 70 of the 79 Councils in Victoria still have these roles, which promote cross-departmental planning. I recently delivered a cultural mapping workshop for Darebin City Council and was not surprised to see urban planners (water specialists), educators, artists, and social workers all in attendance.

GARRETT-PETTS: Paul Carter’s work in Australia, and as referenced in this book, provides another strong example of an artist-led collaboration with municipal planners and, especially, Indigenous community partners. He asks us to see the “urban designer” as primarily a dramaturge and argues that “places are poetic constructions,” all the while advocating a form of bicultural mapping, taking into consideration Aboriginal perspectives and stories. Let me quote briefly from his writing:

“In Australia the experience of bicultural mapping is different. Instead of contemplating enigmatic patterns in the absence of their authors, place makers (planning authorities, designers, artists, heritage consultants) learn that any initiative to recapture senses of place begins in the negotiation of a human contract.” (Carter, this volume, p. 53)

The implication here—one that I hear you echoing as well—is that much can be learned and achieved by engaging artists, first peoples, and planners in dialogue.

MALHOTRA: I do think that’s true. People have a lot to contribute regarding their different knowledges and often overlooked experiences of and in space. The same city and its places/spaces and geographies are experienced entirely differently by various groups, based on all kinds of factors like income, race, ethnicity, age, occupation—even simple individual characteristics—so cultural mapping is perhaps not just an opportunity to go into practice and research with this awareness but to engage creative thinking and potential in people, as a form of data and expression. There is a lot to unravel in this idea of ownership of expression and participation of and in place. Who shapes the environment, with what processes, and how can people creatively engage within their geographies to actively, directly, and maybe positively contribute to these? The fact is that a map or the act of mapping is less formal, less difficult, and less rigid a conception for engagement across ages and backgrounds.

I would also like to add, though, an observation of how we currently live in a world of unparalleled displacement, forced migration, and even immigration—people have their complex relationships with space and concepts of “home.” But they are also vessels of knowledge, experience, and cultural exchange through their mobilities which—it seems at least—map making is best positioned to connect with. And I think perhaps this is the essence of research and engagement: focusing on and understanding people.

LANGLOIS: I would extend Shriya’s questions and respond to Shannon’s ideas of the intersection of many practices at the site of cultural mapping to look at the role of authorship or facilitation. When the terms of a mapping process are initiated by a planner or municipal government, the introduction of other actors and epistemologies may arguably have a muted effect—rather than articulating something unmappable (and therein something incredibly important to try to draw out), they are already accounted for and rendered already legible. Will’s reference to Paul Carter’s essay may also help us to ask other questions that examine not only what is possible to achieve with cultural mapping but also what is potentially foreclosed or inaccessible. Is there a way for Indigenous epistemologies to be negotiated within a project of cultural mapping? Or might we need to peel back a process even further to understand not just what input can look like but how our expectations of the creation and output of cultural mapping may shift dramatically if we extend invitations to other hosts and other forms of hosting premised on other ways of knowing and being in relation to the community around us? More concretely, in my experience, the work of participating in a cultural mapping exercise, no matter how creatively designed, is distinct from, for example, an artist redeploying the form and practice of cultural mapping to other ends. Both may involve multidisciplinary expertise and community input and even aim to create deliberate opportunities for participation from marginalized experiences, but the role of the host, in this way, can dramatically alter what we expect cultural mapping to do, for whom, and to what end.

GARRETT-PETTS: Shannon, I know you’ve explored elsewhere (with Karen Chapple, 2010) how competing epistemologies may affect collaborations among artists, planners, and community organizers. In light of that work, I’m wondering whether you, like Justin and Shriya, see possibilities for a more resilient model of cultural mapping, one that is artist-led and capable of cultivating new expectations? Are artists and planners and communities ready for such a transformative dialogue and possible new practice?

JACKSON: I think that part of why we are having this conversation—and why it feels so important to me—is because we really can’t say that artists and planners are ready for that kind of “transformative dialogue” or, at least, that most are not, or are only under very specific conditions. I think that we have all experienced the potential of this synergy, and we have likely all experienced its difficulty. A planner might become confused by the key or code created by an artist—or by the artistic impulse to map relationships that do not seem useful or verifiable. Meanwhile, an artist can become frustrated with the fixations and protocols of planning, as well as its perceived certainty. In those situations, I find myself wishing for a few things. For one, I wish for more time. I wish for longer, durational project cycles that allow different constituents to learn from each other and test responses, before being required to produce an outcome together. Artists, planners, and community members are often coming to terms with very different methodologies in the same moment that they are trying to execute a project. I am inspired by the efforts of A Blade of Grass, an organization committed to funding socially engaged art that promises the advice and technical support of a sector expert in every project. This allows the community-oriented artist to anticipate the policy, planning, and fiscal contingencies of the site with which they are engaging. They can enter with more tools and methods, rather than learn on the fly.

The wish to learn from each other’s methodologies means that I also wish for different educational programmes. I want skills in mapping, data visualization, demography, and policy to be available to students in arts programmes (including the performing arts, literature, film, and media art). I also want aesthetic histories and conceptual art models to be more available to planning students, including exposure to critical theory in the humanities. We are certainly working toward building such courses and programmes at Berkeley under the rubric of the Global Urban Humanities. I’ve had the privilege of co-teaching with colleagues in City and Regional Planning now a few times, and we have produced showcases, publications, and alternative mapping exhibits together. There is nothing like teaching or attending a co-taught course that allows you the space to question your basic reality principles; it gives a group the time to work through differences and a space of safety to risk new models before bringing them out in the world.

I do want to note, however, that such spaces of deep and humbling collaboration will inevitably force us to question what it means to be “artist-led.” We might even learn that artist-led projects can have just as many problems or myopias as planner-led projects. While we want to think that artists are by nature open to new worldviews, artists can have fixed preconceptions too. They can resist new ways of working too. And the professional protocols of assuring the signature of the artist, or securing the grant or commission, can sometimes get in the way of the openness we think we seek from these transformative dialogues.

GARRETT-PETTS: Whatever the blind spots and myopias we encounter along the way, artist-led dialogues like this one are surely vital to the ongoing conversation on the art of cultural mapping. Thank you for all of this. I sense that this might be a good place to draw our portion of the conversation to a close, noting along the way that we’ve already begun to identify a number of threshold concepts central to understanding how artistic and non-artistic approaches to cultural mapping variously converge, collude, and collide. I’m thinking of Justin’s observation that an artistic stance both allows and provokes autonomy from the instrumental. Also, what seems our shared sense that aesthetic imagination is vital for understanding and representing local knowledge, and that it functions as a key agency for perceptual and social change. That said, we are only beginning to appreciate the potential for creative cartography to transform (and be transformed by) prevailing cultural mapping practices.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge the outstanding editorial help offered by Emily Dundas Oke and Laurel Sleigh, the student research assistants working with us on this project.

Note

1 The Claire Bishop–Grant Kester debate is documented through Bishop (2006a), Kester (2006), and Bishop (2006b).

References

A Blade of Grass [website] (2018). Available at: www.abladeofgrass.org.

Anti-eviction mapping project [website] (2018). Available at: www.antievictionmap.com.

Bishop, C. (2006a). The social turn: collaboration and its discontents. Artforum, 44(6), 178–183.

Bishop, C. (2006b). Claire Bishop responds. Artforum, 44(9), 23.

Bunge, W. (1968). Where Detroiters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track [map].

Burton, J., Jackson, S. and Willsdon, D. (2016). Public servants: art and the crisis of the common good. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Chappel, K. and Jackson, S. (2010). Commentary: arts, neighborhoods, and social practices: towards an integrated epistemology of community arts. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29(4), 478–490.

Department of Unusual Certainties [website] (2018). Available at: www.douc.ca.

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Green, J. (2013). Fly in and fuck off [artwork].

Irish, S. (2010). Suzanne Lacy: spaces between. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Jackson, S. (2011). Social works: performing art, supporting publics. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kester, G. H. (2006). Another turn: a response to Claire Bishop. Artforum, 44(9), 22–23.

Lacy, S. (1977). Three weeks in May [artwork]. Retrieved from: www.suzannelacy.com/three-weeks-in-may.

Park fiction [website] (2018). Available at: http://park-fiction.net.

Partizaning: participatory urban planning [website] (2018). Available at: http://eng.partizaning.org.

Sites of apology/sites of hope: the map [website] (2010). Developed by Broken City Lab. Available at: www.brokencitylab.org/blog/sites-of-apology-sites-of-hope-the-map.

The trust map (2018). Gateway to Research, Research Councils UK. Available at: http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=ES%2FM003566%2F2.