The Politics of Mapping. Bernard Debarbieux
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for marginalized social groups or social movements seeking to make their voices heard on the political scene (be it national, regional or international), their mobilization of “protest maps” (Wood et al. 2010) is aimed, above all, at influencing public policies on land use planning, land tenure or the management of natural resources, which are deemed to be unjust. This specific use of maps led Nancy Peluso (1995) to coin the neologism “counter-mapping”. As Irène Hirt explains in Chapter 7, Indigenous peoples were among the first social groups to make use of state language, techniques and modes of representation, as early as the 1950s and 1960s, with all the ambiguities that this implies for groups claiming to have a world view distinct from that of the state. Since then, other social and political actors have resorted to this strategy (see (Kollektiv Orangotango 2018) for a range of such practices). Indeed, the term has been so successful that it is now also used to describe protest mapping practices of a more symbolic or rhetorical nature, such as those described above.
Easy access to the production of cartographic representations by individuals or organized groups in civil society also has the virtue of encouraging public debates around societal issues. Charles Booth’s poverty maps of London in 1889 are a very early illustration of this (Topalov 2004). Olivier Clochard, in Chapter 10, illustrates the potential of maps to address contemporary migration issues. He describes how the Migreurop collective of researchers and activists produces its own maps in order to provide the public with alternatives to media and political representations of migration issues, to “oppose unjust migration policies”, and to challenge the scientific standards of maps through creative means of expression (e.g. drawing).
I.2.3. The issue of participation
As Peluso has pointed out, this does not mean that mapping has gone from being a “science of princes” to a “science of the masses” (Peluso 1995, p. 387). Despite easier access to the production of maps and geographic information, it is still generally the preserve of individuals or social groups with good technical, economic, social and spatial capital. The digital divide is also a significant factor of inequality. Finally, these limits to the “democratization” of maps are, to a large extent, located in the issues of participation, i.e. in the ways in which the “public” is involved in the design of maps (Hirt and Roche 2013); these modalities being at the center of the relationship between maps and mapping, on the one hand, and power or politics, on the other hand. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, these participatory mechanisms were instrumental in giving more people access to map production (see Chapter 4). However, several decades of experimentation and reflexive and critical analysis show that they are not self-evident.
From a critical and political perspective, Giacomo Rambaldi posed a fundamental question in this regard in 2005, one that is too often forgotten: “who owns the map legend?” (Rambaldi 2005). This is certainly the starting point for any participatory approach aimed at reclaiming the content of a map and what is represented, as Sylvie Lardon suggests in this book (Chapter 8). In this respect, recent experiments, such as the one conducted by Sarah Mekdjian and Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, are particularly interesting. In collaboration with artists and a group of people of immigrant backgrounds in Grenoble, France, the two geographers retraced their migratory routes, emphasizing their lived dimension. To do this, the workshop participants developed a common legend using stickers and colors (expressing emotions, key events in the migration journey, etc.) that could transcend the languages spoken by the participants (Mekdjian and Amilhat Szary 2015). This project illustrates that the appropriation of the legend, in addition to its content, is also promoted by the way it is represented.
Moreover, it is the nature and quality of involvement that has been particularly debated in the literature on participatory mapping or GIS processes, regardless of their name: participatory mapping, participatory GIS, community-based participatory mapping, etc., both in the scientific field (in French, see the special journal issues edited by Noucher (2013) and Lardon and Noucher (2016)) and in the area of land and regional planning (see manuals of “good practices”, such as (Corbett 2009) or (Gambier et al. 2016)). Participation in the field of mapping is usually measured by the degree of empowerment it fosters in terms of the transfer of skills from the expert cartographer to the “inhabitant”, the latter’s decision-making power in the production of the map, from the choices made upstream on what is mapped, to the way it is represented and communicated downstream. It also relates to the access and control of the information produced. These modalities are measured by tools that have extended Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) famous “ladder of citizen participation” for assessing degrees of public involvement in decision-making to participatory mapping or GIS projects (Amelot 2013). However, in the face of the complexity and diversity of the forms of social order, participation is certainly still more of a goal to strive for than an actual reality, and is even sometimes an ideal imposed, once again, by the North on the South, as Xavier Amelot points out when he emphasizes the “participatory illusion” of mapping projects carried out in Madagascar (2013).
In the English-speaking world in the mid-1990s, a critique entitled “GIS and society” (Craig et al. 2002) also emerged, focused on the social implications of how people, space and environment are represented in GIS. This led to work on the more specific impacts of GIS on participation, power relationships, processes of inclusion or exclusion, and existing inequalities in access to digital technologies and data, and on the determinant character of social and political forces. It is within these debates that gender issues were first explicitly posed in critical cartography (Kwan 2002a, 2002b; McLafferty 2002; Schuurman and Pratt 2002; Pavlovskaya and St. Martin 2007; Elwood 2008).
The relationship of mapping with the more general issues of contemporary, interactive, collaborative or integrative democracy, instead of representative democracy, are highlighted by several of the contributions in this book. Sylvie Lardon (Chapter 8) presents a participatory prospective diagnosis protocol that she calls the “territory game” and that she has been implementing for the past 20 years in various contexts, through the mobilization of “choremes”, the elementary structures of space invented by Roger Brunet in the 1980s. Federica Burini (Chapter 4) highlights the added value of information relating to the lived space of the “inhabitants” in order to know a territory through a semiological analysis of mapping. She includes in the notion of “participation” that which is, strictly speaking, not generally considered as such: i.e. the unconscious, or at least often involuntary, contributions of individuals through their smartphones and other connected objects, or by browsing the Internet. However, the possible effects of this geographic information are no less political, as it can be used by different actors for research, public policy making or even marketing purposes.
I.3. The structure of this book
Ultimately, 40 years after the publication of Cartes et Figures de la Terre (Centre Georges Pompidou 1980), and 30 years after the writings of Harley and other researchers, who furthered the critical approach to cartography, this book intends to contribute to the assessment of the work produced under this banner. It also aims to question the challenges posed by the technical, social and political changes in mapping, the forms and effects of which, although the subject of a growing number of analyses, have not yet given rise to large-scale syntheses. The preceding introductory elements were therefore intended as much as to sketch a genealogy of works questioning the relationship between mapping and “politique” (politics/polity/policies) as to underline the main issues that have run through them. Whether through the analysis of forms of representation or modes of production – authoritarian, participatory or contesting – they all enable us, to one degree or another, to see how mapping participates in “ordering the world” (Noucher et al. 2019), which concerns both the inhabited world and