Alternative urban imaginaries: Counter mapping and creative cartography

Presenting author: Holly Farley (The University of Notre Dame, Australia)

Other authors: Cassie Lynch (Curtin University), Tod Jones (Curtin University)

Cultural mapping is a broad range of spatial representational practices which pre-date settler colonial societies by millennia. In a contemporary context it is a method for Indigenous communities marginalised by colonisation and globalisation to convey living knowledges connected to place, assert sovereignty, and record cultural information for other community members. Many learning institutions and spatial practitioners acknowledge that Indigenous spatial knowledges are marginalised. Non-Indigenous researchers are often keen to collaborate with Indigenous researchers and community members to explore shared visions of decolonisation and truth-telling.

However, when bringing together Western cartography and Indigenous concepts about place, researchers must be transparent about the limits of Western science to articulate and incorporate Indigenous world views and ontologies into meaningful outcomes. While some promising projects have been realised (The Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route Project), others perpetuate assimilation of Indigenous cultural material (México Indígena Project).

In this paper, we review cultural mapping by and in collaboration with Indigenous people in settler societies to establish the characteristics of approaches that are genuinely decolonial. We provide an overview of the different approaches and emerging practices internationally but with a focus on Australia and identify and respond to current issues in First Nations - settler cultural mapping.

Presenting author: Ana Lara Heyns (Monash University)

As stated widely, maps have been used as a tool for navigation, exploration, classification and management of territorial control (Duxbury, Garret Petts and MacLennan, 2015; Cosgrove, 2008). While traditional cartography was conceived as a colonial tool, contemporary critiques of cartography are sharing new light in the use and creation of maps. Following the understanding that design is ancestral and alive in Country, through the Respectful Design framework developed by Norm Sheehan (2011), maps can work as productive interactions between humans and the world, adding to our experiences in our positions of relationality and the shared cognizance of all 'things'.

With a cross disciplinary effort to decolonise mapping to destabilise dominant urban narratives of the city, this paper explores immersive tracing to map Country by including relationships, knowledge and memories. This research presents the explorations in a case study where the colonial project is substantial: Rippon Lea; and questions the interactions of a multidisciplinary research and Indigenous ways of knowing. On a one-on-one scale experience of Country, water is the element traced through memory and space to understand the different knowledges of the contemporary city.

Presenting author: Rowena Butland (Western Sydney University)

Conserving the collective memories of heritage places has been preoccupied with telling stories through the temporal layering of buildings, people, and environment: being able to stand, see and touch where something happened as a way of knowing. Critiques of cultural heritage management practices often focus on the visual elements of landscapes, seeming to control the things visitors see. But the richness of place is multi-sensory: not only do we 'see' heritage, but we also hear, smell and feel it. This paper counters the visual narrative by presenting alternative sensory mappings of the Angkor World Heritage Area.

Utilising exploratory aural mapping, this paper investigates how multidimensional soundscapes are influenced by and influence visitor experiences and management practices. Whether it is stony silence or a cacophonic tapestry, sound washes over and through us, pulling us in and out of memories and moments, helping and hindering our relationship with heritage places. As a site of significant international heritage tourism, the sounds of Angkor are complex and contested. Aural interactions between people and place are entangled in emotional responses to Angkor: appreciated and despised; maintained and destroyed.

Presenting author: Rachel Iampolski (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Other authors: Marnie Badham (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Emerging in response to traditional, colonially-rooted cultural asset mapping techniques, cultural counter-mapping approaches offer an opportunity for community developers, activist organisers and social practice artists to be deliberately attentive to alternate histories and help to make visible the way local stories, practices, relationships, physical memories, and rituals constitute place as meaningful. Creative forms of mapping employing participatory language aim to subvert the expert nature and authority of the cartographer by appropriating the methods and aesthetics of mapmaking to engage communities. The appropriation of these tools of power and ownership provide visual signifiers that can be easily created and read by its many stakeholders.

Through the examination of a case study on creative methods in participatory mapping focused on citizens' attachments to public space, we highlight the ways creative mapping projects can work to subvert dominant narratives of place and heritage. EmpowerHER: a women's map to the city aimed to re-centre place-based knowledge including experiences of beauty, fear and important public services. We conclude by proposing that within an intangible cultural heritage framework, cultural counter-mapping - both as a process and an outcome - can act as a bridge between an alternative, affective understanding of place and its valuation and preservation

Presenting author: Wendy Steele (Centre for Urban Research, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

The rise and fall of public markets are inextricably linked with the politics and processes of urban growth and development and shifting visions of the city and its urban hinterlands. The importance of public markets goes far beyond equitable access to food, to include a focus on the provision of community-oriented space and public place.

As a reflection of urban citizenship, public markets have adapted and survived in a world changed by new technology, patterns of consumption and differing views on the role of government. They provide common ground for both city-regions and offer sites for reworking old citizenship practices to reflect new experiences. But they are constantly under threat from forces such as de-regulation, suburbanization, gentrification and privatization. The key question is not if public municipal markets can survive - but instead where, for whom and in what form they survive. This paper draws attention to the need for alternative methodologies for creatively engaging with public markets framed around the three keywords of critical, counter and cartography; and simultaneously reflects on the tensions of this inherent in Audre Lorde's famous dictum that 'the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house'.

Presenting author: Alexandre da Silva Faustino (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Waterscape can be an analytical framework that focuses on how water and society intertwine through power relations to create hydrosocial geographies (Karpouzoglou & Vij, 2017; Swyngedouw, 1999). Often, these geographies are uneven and unjust, noticeable by urban and water crises multiplying globally. Dwellers of informal settlements historically disempowered - women, indigenous, black, and poor people - have experienced the deepest exclusionary practices of such crises, and many times organise themselves through grassroot activism to seek alternatives to their realities.

Taken as guiding reflexive lenses, waterscapes entail the archaeology of the socio-natural metabolism that engenders uneven hydrosocial relations. But what tensions in such relations might emerge when social actors and activists experiencing urban water injustices engage with counter-mapping practices of the waterscapes they live in? What is the possible role of this representation exercise as a practice of emancipation from dominant water and urban discourses?

In this paper I: 1) introduce ways in which waterscape concept could be mobilised to create visual representations of hydrosocial relations and cartographies of the geographies they make; and 2) discuss opportunities to social change by producing such knowledge through participatory methods. The conclusions highlight some of the challenges to facilitate such processes remotely with socioeconomically disadvantaged communities during COVID times.

Presenting author: Jan Filmer (University of Sydney)

This paper takes discourses that frame the Sydney 'lockout laws' as ushering in the demise of queer party cultures and the inner-city gaybourhood of Oxford Street as its starting point. Such discourses, I argue, are characterised by a tendency to equate the lives of LGBT people and communities with specialised areas of the city in which transgressive queer identities may be realised. However, debates about whether gaybourhoods like Oxford Street will persist or perish fall short of attending to how gaybourhoods become more dispersed and, indeed, plural (see e.g. Ghaziani 2019).

Here, I draw on the findings of 'queer cartography', a visual method I devised to capture the geography and cultural practices that constitute the everyday lives of queer people in contemporary Sydney. Hand-drawn maps of research participants (alongside verbal interviews) offer alternative spatial imaginings of queer Sydney beyond the gaybourhood's commercial scenes. By representing the ordinariness of day-to-day queer existence, this visual method challenges queer theory's dominant assumptions about how and where 'properly' queer lives are lived.

Presenting author: Augusto Cesar Oyama (Kyoto University)

Other author: Marcel Fantin (Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de São Carlos (IAU/USP)), Alexandre da Silva Faustino, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Grassroot processes of social mobilization reveal how the political organisation from the peripheries has centrality in fights for fundamental rights, such as land, housing and sanitation. The collective and supportive nature of these groups shows inevitably in processes and results of encounters and activism with the periphery, such as community plans and counter-cartographic practices. These instruments produce collective representations of territories, cultures, histories, and desires traditionally silenced, and challenge power relations supported by vertically hierarchical approaches to cartography.

This work discusses some experiences on counter-cartographic processes that have appropriated tools such as geotechnologies and Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA). These activities were facilitated by 'university extension' projects working in advocacy for the construction of counter-hegemonic practices of political and environmental fight. During the elaboration of the Banhado Community Plan and complex cartographies, a set of exchanges and discussions in workshops supported the validation of proposals for housing, sanitation, environmental conflicts, community spaces, public services and infrastructures.

This experience highlights 'university extension' - one of the pillars of Brazilian education - as an essential instrument for transforming the process of cartographic knowledge production and for connecting academia and civil society. The tools and methodologies applied showed remarkable applicability and replicability potential for revealing territories and social demands made invisible by official state cartography, thus becoming important technopolitical support for alternative projects from below.