A community farm maps back! Disputes over public urban farmland in Calgary, Alberta

Abstract

Geographers, cartographers, and related social scientists are increasingly locating the (geo)politics of the vernacular within volunteered geographic information, the geoweb, and other digital technologies that enable the production of new maps. We instead focus our attention on 'old' cartographic practices. We contend that map-based community activism and geopolitics continue to occur in ways that much research has left behind in its shifted attention toward digital geographies. We conceptualize vernacular counter-mapping, as practiced by Grow Calgary a community urban farm located on public land, by focusing on vernacular cartographic method and mode. We argue first that the vernacular exists not just in the production of new maps but also in the practice of altering and re-narrating existing maps, and, second, that the vernacular exists not just in the new modes of VGI and distributed/crowdsourced data production, but in the mode of leveraging official, static state maps to make legible situated knowledges.

From Making Automated Decision Making Visible to Mapping the Unknowable Human: Counter-Mapping Automated Decision Making in Social Services in Australia

“…Subsequent examples of counter-mapping, using participatory or grass roots approaches to mapping, include studies in Australia (Thomas and Ross, 2018), Canada (Barbosa & Burns, 2021), the United Kingdom (Firth, 2014), and the United States (Campos-Delgado, 2018). Many counter-mapping exercises use participatory methods, “mapping with” (Wilmott, 2019), rather than mapping on or over, whether this is reporting on grassroots mapping activism, or reporting on the researchers’ participation in this process.…”

Expanding Data Imaginaries in Urban Planning: Foregrounding lived experience and community voices in studies of cities with participatory and digital visual methods

“…An early example can be seen in Peluso (1995), who used mapping to reinforce the territorial claims of indigenous populations. Since then, counter-mapping has been used to contest hegemonic narratives in disputes over land (Barbosa and Burns 2021;Rose-Redwood et al 2020). In the setting of cities, initiatives such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (Maharawal and McElroy 2018) have used counter-mapping to reveal the injustices of the housing crisis in the Bay area, while others have addressed issues of police violence and street harassment Fileborn 2021).…”