Regionalism: Land Use

Social Cartography: The Art of Using

Maps to Build Community Power
By Eli Moore and Catalina Garzón

I t was November 2008 and eight leaders from environmental justice community organizations were scrutinizing a map
of southeast San Francisco showing areas experiencing problems with diesel trucks. Hand drawn blue and red lines
indicated the locations of freeways and truck routes in the neighborhood. “Why do you think these problems exist
here?” asked the facilitator. The response was immediate: “Because the people who live here are poor! And the people
in charge don’t listen to us.”

In recent years, mapping has increasingly become a key
strategy for analyzing and communicating issues in public
health, urban planning, environmental justice, and human
rights. In mapping their own communities and reflecting
on the maps they create, people can develop and advocate
for solutions. Developments in GIS (Geographic Informa-
tion Systems) and internet-based mapping, and greater ac-
66 cessibility of digital data sets have made mapping feasible
for people with moderate resources and technical training.
Also, a growing appreciation for geographic thinking and
the value of looking at social and environmental problems
through a geographic lens have helped, even as concepts of
space and place become mainstream.
Not all mapping processes, however, are participatory
and it is still rare for non-professionals affected by the issues
being mapped to be involved in the decisions guiding map
creation, analysis, and distribution. In the U.S., there is such
an abundance of easily accessible data that asking residents
to generate their own seems redundant. Yet, we believe that
this type of mapping holds great potential for shifting the
relationships of power that are the root cause of social and
environmental injustices.
A mapping process—which includes selecting labels and
symbols, choosing the scale, and layering—guided by the
people most affected by the issues being mapped has the po-
tential to develop critical consciousness and generate collec-
tive action because:
n Participants develop their own language to describe
their reality, producing terms and definitions that re-
flect their values.
n Shared personal experiences enable groups to analyze
patterns and identify collective experiences.
n The role of institutions and the extent of their
power in shaping collective experiences becomes
more obvious.
A Tradition Older than Writing
People have been creating maps to understand their sur-
roundings since before the invention of writing. As Margaret
Wickens Pearce and Renee Pualani Louis write in Mapping
Indigenous Depth of Place, “Indigenous cartographies are
as diverse as indigenous cultures... Indigenous mapping may
be gestural, chanted, or inscribed in stone, wood, wall, tat-
too, leaf, or paper. Indigenous maps may be used to assess
taxes, guide a pilgrim, connect the realms of the sacred and
profane, or navigate beyond the horizon. Clearly, indigenous
cartographies are process oriented as opposed to product de-
pendent.”1
However, the maps that most people get acquainted with
in elementary school reflect the legacy of colonization, re-
source extraction, and state control. Maps were instrumental
in the process of making desired resources visible and people
invisible for imperial bureaucracies. But today, indigenous
people, such as the Nunavut of Canada, are at the forefront
of using mapping to reclaim their land and resources.2
With the widespread use of internet-based maps and
GPS units in cars and cell phones, mapping is more a part
of people’s everyday experience now than ever before. Map-
ping by social and environmental justice organizations has
also mushroomed. Some mapping involves elaborate GIS
analyses, such as the opportunity mapping developed by the
Kirwan Institute.3 And interactive mapping websites allow
users to choose from numerous datasets and create custom
maps.4 Other online maps use a Google platform, such as

Race, Poverty & the Environment | Fall 2010

 Resources and References
n Mapping for Change: Practice, Technologies and
Communication. International Institute for Environ-
ment and Development. 2006
n Mapping Our Land: A Guide to Making Maps of Our

Own Communities and Traditional Lands. Alix

Flavelle. 2002
n Maps for Advocacy: An Introduction to Geographi-

cal Mapping Techniques. Tactical Technology Col-

lective. 2010.
www.tacticaltech.org/mapsforadvocacy.
n Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Carto-

graphic Literacies in Indigenous Communities. Jay

Johnson, Renee Pualani Louis, and Albertus Hadi
Pramono. 2005.
www.acme-journal.org/vol4/JJRLAP.pdf.

the Pacific Institute’s Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the Cal-
ifornia Coast5 and the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s maps
of the genocide in Sudan.6 These developments have made
mapping more relevant and powerful, but also raise ques-
tions about when and how to use its many possible forms.
Building Maps for EJ
Like most EJ issues, freight movement involves complex
relationships between land use, transportation, air quality,
community health, race, and wealth. Maps often help make
these relationships clear. As one workshop participant
pointed out, “You can talk about all the different toxins in
the air, but if you’re not seeing a map of all these facilities as
they really exist, you’re missing out. Mapping is a great tool
for myself as an organizer, and for my active members to in-
form their neighbors and keep that conversation going.”
To relate to a map, we must be able to see something of
ourselves in the map. If we can recognize a street corner, a
park, a hospital, we can begin to place our experiences on
the map. Aerial photos help because they show the unique
colors and distinct shapes of buildings, streets, and other fea-
tures. Our base map in workshops is a poster-sized aerial
photo of the neighborhood with the streets labeled. It is ideal
because at larger scales, the details get lost.
For a map to respect a group’s knowledge and experience,
it must use the group’s language. What this means is that
the symbols and place names should come from the group’s
own discourse. Critical geographers like Jay Johnson have
pointed out that Cartesian maps limit our representation of
space because they demand fixed boundaries, whereas many
cultures value fluid boundaries.
To understand the root causes of a collective problem,
the maps must make visible the factors shaping the problem.
Being able to view different data sets layered on top of each
other—for example, demographics, land use, and asthma
rates—helps the exploration of their relationship to each
other. In one workshop focused on freight transport, the
groups mapped streets with heavy truck traffic and the busi-
nesses that attracted them on a transparency placed over an
aerial photo of the neighborhood. When the same trans-
parency was overlaid on a map of the same area with land
use designations, it became apparent that the problems were
wherever industrially-zoned parcels were mixed in with res-
idential parcels. The layering of community knowledge over
institutional and legal boundaries can help the community
move beyond the immediate problem to an exploration of
its political roots.
Mapping as Community Builder 67
Generating a “bigger picture” understanding of how an
issue impacts an entire community can help strengthen re-
lationships between residents affected by the issue. A key
challenge in mobilizing around an issue is convincing people
of the value of joining others to work together.
Map-making can be a useful tool in scaling up from the
individual lived experience to building a shared analysis
about collective challenges. Making maps together means
piecing together collective experiences, discovering patterns,
and arriving at a collective understanding of the root causes
of these shared experiences. n
Endnotes
1. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32:3 (2008) 107-126. http://www-
as.phy.ohiou.edu/Departments/Geography/bcvs/pubs/pearce_pub_01.pdf
2. http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/peopleandsociety/nunavut/1
3 http://4909e99d35cada63e7f757471b7243be73e53e14.gripelements.com/publica-
tions/king_county_wa_opportunity_mapping_apr_2010.pdf
4. www.healthycityca.org
5. http://www.pacinst.org/reports/sea_level_rise/gmap.html
6. http://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur/

Eli Moore and Catalina Garzón are the program co-directors of the Community Strategies for Sustainability and Justice
program at the Pacific Institute.

Race, Poverty & the Environment | Fall 2010

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