0104 Mapping

Links:
T11 Mapping spatial practices
T12 Mapping social relations

Perhaps a key feature of all maps is their ability to visually depict different
realities by distilling and privileging some information over others. In this sense,
maps are always political and should be read as such, including paying close
Methods

attention to the conditions of their production. They are also always partial and
perspectival, regardless of their claims to authority. What we choose to show
in a map is therefore fundamental because it is a way of framing and codifying
a particular view of a place. That this quality of maps is often hidden or left
unacknowledged might be one important issue for a critical urban practice.

Embedded within the question of what to map is the question of how to map.
The maps we use in everyday life, such as those available on Google, or the paper
maps we relied on to navigate in the past, leave out much: scale, colour coding,
longitude and latitude, do not account for temporality, touch, memory, relations,
stories and narratives – in fact it is experience that is altogether removed. Rather
than only mapping the physical qualities of space, we can also map the social
relations embedded within a place, the way people use a space, or the overlapping
claims made on a particular area by different groups of people.

Such mapping requires different techniques to those of conventional cartography.

We may need to find ways of representing blurry boundaries, fuzzy edges and
novel points of view. We might also think about what the purpose of the map is
 and who its audience is. A map that attempts to show the workings of a complex

04
organisation to the general public would look very different from a map that
shows a group of people their daily routes through the city.

References

Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (eds.), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of
Networks and Territories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute,
2006).

Denis Cosgrove, “Cultural cartography : maps and mapping in cultural geography,”

Annales de Géographie no. 660-661/2 (2008): 159–178. http://doi.org/10.3917/
ag.660.0159

Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Los Angeles:
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008).

Doina Petrescu, “Relationscapes: Mapping agencies of relational practice in

architecture”, City, Culture and Society vol. 3 no. 2 (2012): 135–140. http://doi.
org/10.1016/j.ccs.2012.06.011

Denis Wood and Ira Glass, Everything sings: Maps for a narrative atlas (Los
Angeles, CA: Siglio, 2010)

SSoA On the front page:

MA in Urban Design
Methods & Tools for the Engaged Nishat Awan, ‘Mapping
Practitioner Kurdistan’ 2007
 T11 Mapping spatial practices

Methods: The everyday practices and social activities of residents play an important role
Mapping in the production of urban space. This form of mapping adopts ethnographic
Critiquing methodologies to observe the relation between physical space and those who
inhabit it. The aim is to examine the ways in which spaces are used, appropriated,
Examples: and re-imagined through action. Information is gathered through surveying, and
E1. Street Vendors can be visualised through sketches, illustrations, maps, and videos. This allows to
Initiative, Cairo, 2011-...
address the potential of everyday practices as a critique (to the current state of
things) and as a proposition (suggesting new ways of using and inhabiting the city).

As you start mapping, one of the issues to consider is whether you are going to
immerse yourself ‘in the field’ first, and then generate categories to order your
observations, or whether you are going to ‘walk in’ with a a set of research questions
and categories that will guide your work. Which is the best technique depends on
the nature and purpose of your mapping.

References:

Mara Ferreri, “Self-Organised Spatial Practices and Desires in Conflictive Urban

Developments,” in Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield (eds.) Critical Cities: ideas,
knowledge and agitation from emerging urbanists (London: Myrdle Court Press,
2009): 40-52.

Katherine Shonfield, Rosa Ainley, Adrian Dannatt, This is What We Do: A Muf Manual
(London: Ellipsis, 2001).

SSoA
MA in Urban Design
Methods & Tools for the Engaged
Practitioner
 Street Vendors Initiative
T11 E1
CLUSTER Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research
Cairo, 2011-...

Grounded in post-revolutionary Cairo, “this project aims at capturing the

fleeting moment of urban fluidity, whereby individuals and communities are
taking advantage of the political vacuum and increasingly vulnerability of the
state … to maximize gains over public spaces and city infrastructures” [Learning
from Cairo, p.75]. “Since October 2011, CLUSTER have been documenting
the condition and process of street vendors’ use of streets and sidewalks
in downtown Cairo, including their typology, uses, range of merchandise,
boundaries and tools of demarcation. In addition we have been documenting
the relationship between the vendors and shop fronts, on the one hand, and
street and parking lanes, on the other. In this context, we have also been
monitoring the multiple attempts by the local municipality to remove and
relocate street vendors, documenting recurring confrontations, followed by a
return to business as usual” [clustercairo.org, Street Vendors Initiative].
About:
Omar Nagati & Beth Stryker, Archiving the City in Flux. Cairo’s Shifting Urban
Landscape since the January 25th Revolution (Cairo: CLUSTER, 2013).

SSoA
Omar Nagati, Beth Stryker & Magda Mostafa, “Mapping informality,” in Learning
MA in Urban Design from Cairo: Global perspectives and Future Visions (Cairo: CLUSTER, 2013): 74-
Methods & Tools for the Engaged 87.
Practitioner
 T12 Mapping social relations

Methods: Mapping social relations’ is a means to clarify the invisible social, political, and
Mapping economic relationships underpinning a place or project. The emphasis is on the
Critiquing individuals and groups involved in the production of space, and in the ways in which
they relate to each other.
Examples:
E1. ECObox, Paris, When mapping social relations, you should ask: Who is involved? How? And why?
2004-ongoing This can be a way of revealing relations that already exist in a place you are observing,
E2. An Atlas of Agendas or of planning how your project will shape the relationships between people and
institutions. Furthermore, this form of mapping may be used to reveal how these
relationships change over time, and the influence of spatial interventions in this
process of change. Visual representations may encompass illustrations of places
and the social relations underpinning them (Example 1), as well as network diagrams
(Example 2).

References:

Doina Petrescu, “Relationscapes: Mapping agencies of relational practice in

architecture”, City, Culture and Society vol. 3 no. 2 (2012): 135–140.

Nishat Awan, Teresa Hoskyns, & students of MA/ad x2 studio, “Mapping Occupy,”
Architecture and Culture vol. 2, no. 1 (2014): 130-140. doi: 10.2752/175145214X137960
96691689.

SSoA
MA in Urban Design
Methods & Tools for the Engaged
Practitioner
 ECObox
T12 E1
aaa (atelier d’architecture autogeree)
Paris, 2004-ongoing

“With the aim of preserving urban biodiversity, aaa adopt ‘urban tactics’ to
encourage inhabitants to reappropriate vacant land into self-managed space.
In mapping the ECObox garden project (Paris, 2004), rather than drawing lines
of objects and forms, instead the architect portrays the dynamic relationships
of a live performance. The mapping of this ‘space of subjects’ took place during
the making of the garden, as the project unfolded in time. Different lines and
colours were used. Rather than represent the project, ‘the map’ enhances
relationships in the making of the project. Instead of mapping buildings and
places, the ‘relational architect’ is seen to ‘scape’ relationships between
people and spaces: relationscapes” (Doina Petrescu, “Relationscapes: Mapping
agencies of relational practice in architecture”).

About:

aaa, Eco-urban network/ ECObox (http://www.urbantactics.org/projects/

ecobox/ecobox.html)

aaa, (text by Ruth Morrow), “ECObox. Mobile devices and urban tactics”. In
SSoA
MA in Urban Design Domus 908, November 2007 (http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/
Methods & Tools for the Engaged ecobox-mobile-devices-and-urban-tactics/)
Practitioner
 An Atlas of Agendas
T12 E2
Bureau d’Etudes

“AN ATLAS OF AGENDAS is a political, social and economic atlas: informing the
public about socio-political power structures and activating opportunities
for the self and the commons. The French research and design group Bureau
d´Études has been producing maps of contemporary political, social and
economic systems that allow people to inform, reposition and empower
themselves. Revealing what normally remains invisible, often in the shape of
large-sized banners, and contextualizing apparently separate elements within
new frameworks, these visualizations of interests and relations re-articulate
the dominant symbolic order and actualize existing structures that otherwise
remain concealed and unknown. This book is the atlas for an emancipatory
new citizenship that utilizes the opportunities of infographics from the local to
the global and back again” (Bureau d’Etudes, www.bureaudetudes.org).

About:

Bureau d’Etudes (http://bureaudetudes.org)

Holmes, B. (2006) “Counter cartographies”. In: Abrams J. and Hall P. (eds.) Else/
SSoA
MA in Urban Design where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Minneapolis:
Methods & Tools for the Engaged University of Minnesota Design Institute.
Practitioner