Don't believe the mapping hype! Three steps back for an engaged cartography

Abstract

There is a mapping hype. Critical cartography, community-, participatory- or counter-mapping seem to be the new must-haves for any project in social sciences and the humanities, as well as in cultural and educational processes and public policies. Yet good intentions—let alone fancy labels—are no safeguard against failure, nor against causing unintended harm. As kollektiv orangotango, we apply collective mapping as a tool for awareness-raising and community activation ourselves—as a tool to reflect collectively one’s relationship to lived territories and to share knowledges and open spaces for collective action. Thus, the question of how institutional and project logic might affect counter-mapping’s emancipatory potential touches the heart of our practice. In this piece, we take three steps back to trace critical cartography’s path from the critique of modern western cartography to critical and participatory mapping, in order to point out where mapping might indeed have the potential of being a tool for progressive activism and popular appropriation. Building on bell hooks’ (2010: 19) ‘engaged pedagogy’, we argue that engaged cartographers need to cultivate caring relationships on which to grow an ‘engaged cartography’, that is, a cartographic practice committed to long-term, (self-)reflexive engagement with social movements and resistant practices.