Beyond Cooptation or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives

Abstract

The roles, relationships, and strategies of state and civil society institutions in urban planning, problem solving, and service delivery are in flux. In trying to understand how these changes affect community organizations, grassroots groups, and local-level institutions of civil society, existing research has tended to conceptualize these roles through a series of oppositional dialectics, such as cooptation or resistance. This article shows instead that community organizations shift their technological, institutional, and spatial approaches to urban planning and problem solving in creative and multifaceted ways. They produce a variety of spatial narratives to advance their agendas by strategically enacting multiple roles vis-à-vis a diverse set of actors and institutions. Information technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) can play a central role in this approach. Community organizations apply their own interpretive frameworks to GIS-based maps and images to produce spatial narratives of local needs, conditions, and assets that may be adapted to the diverse roles and relationships they negotiate in urban spatial politics. These arguments are developed from ethnographic research carried out with two inner-city Chicago community organizations pursuing a range of neighborhood improvement activities.

Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian Adventures on Google Earth

“…As Klinkenberg argues, critical social theorists need to engage rather than simply repudiate GSTs. He then points to several recent developments along those lines, including a more socially responsible and involved approach on the part of advocates of GIS that opens up a previously perceived ''single official reading" ( , p. 351, quoting Hoeschele, 2000, as well as to the increasing democratization of GSTs in the form of participatory approaches that place technology in the hands of the many instead of the few (Elwood, 2006;Goodchild, 2007).…”

Digital turn, digital geographies?

“…However, interventions from critical GIS demonstrated precisely the opposite: digital media could be appropriated and repurposed to produce spatial knowledges that are situated, reflexive, non-masculinist, emotional/affected, inclusive and polyvocal, and flexible rather than foundational (Elwood, 2006;Kwan, 2002;Pavlovskaya, 2006;Schuurman, 2002). Feminist GIS interventions in particular repurposed quantitative methodologies and geovisualization techniques within mixed-methods approaches that sought to effect and make subaltern and counter-hegemonic geographies visible (e.g., Kwan, 2002;Pavlovskaya, 2002).…”

Visualisation and Immersion Dome Experience for Inspired Participation

“…The integration of the Visualisation Dome into the EnerPol framework is novel, as the state of the art GIS mapping in the prior EnerPol framework mainly takes into account technological, weather and geographic information, whereas the Dome brings in social and psychological aspects, apart from outcomes from participatory GIS initiatives [25].…”