The Politics of Mapping. Bernard Debarbieux
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the debate between traditional policies that lead to the separation of social groups and attempts to promote a more socially mixed society is nourished by multiple maps, as was the case in the conflicts over public transport in Los Angeles and San Francisco (Bénit-Gbaffou 2005; Bénit-Gbaffou et al. 2007; Soja 2010). The cartographer cannot claim to short-circuit this process by providing knowledge that would render the debate useless, but, on the contrary, can contribute to the freedom of deliberation by proposing an explanation that makes it possible to keep misunderstandings and false leads at bay. By being present on the map and talking to each other through the map, ordinary citizens are therefore the most essential emerging actors.
“Participatory mapping” has yet to be invented as a component of interactive democracy, which complements rather than challenges representative democracy. Where representative democracy is still in its infancy, the project of replacing it by direct interaction with inhabitants alone is hardly tenable. Up until now, those who design, draw, or interpret maps have sometimes affirmed their willingness to promote the empowerment of inhabitants, but on the condition that they endorse their own ideas, which are sometimes marked by the project of preserving the “authenticity” of “cultures” or the integrity of “civilizations” in the face of powers that do not care about them. Why not? – if that is what the people concerned are asking for, and if they are also entitled to distance themselves from the founding myths of their own society and refuse allegiance to community powers. In other words, on all of these subjects, it is clearly not up to the cartographer to decide for the inhabitants what is good for them, but rather to respond, as honestly as possible, to their demands or expectations, which are, more often than not, marked by the dissensus inherent in any political life. The territorialization into “countries”, by continuous and bounded metrics of “indigenous” (pre-colonial) spaces that were mostly reticular in nature, in Australia, North and South America (Hirt 2012), or Arctic societies (Collignon 2002), participates in the projection of a classical state model (Elden 2013; Debarbieux 2015) onto societies (or the heritage of societies) without a state. Once the necessary (apologies, reparation, recognition, equalization of rights and status) has been done so that the past can “pass by”, it is the combination between two modes of inhabitation, the mental space of memory and the space practiced today, the heritage and the plan, that becomes the political issue for today. The map can then constitute a link (Desbiens et al. 2017), but this presupposes a posture of the cartographer, less carried by militant certainties and more attentive to the complexity of situations.
What do citizens expect from cartographic experts? What we are increasingly seeing is that citizens are asking for training that empowers them to play a role in urban planning or development issues, and, more generally, spatial identity and development. They do not want to receive a lesson or an ideological message, but want to be supported in a process of expanding their capabilities (Sen 2010; Lévy et al. 2018).
In Medellín (see Figure 1.10), members of a neighborhood committee are asking academics to teach them how to produce and read maps, so that they can discuss the issues as equals with the local government, urbanists and other actors in urban society. To be fully effective, mapmakers must unapologetically abandon their engineering role and construct another, which consists not only of making themselves available, but also in adjusting their technicality (and especially their language) to the specificities of the issues and political scenes. The pluralism intrinsic to all political life also requires the plurality of cartographic projects and not just the variation of locations on a standardized base map. The commensuration of all of these citizen cartographies is not the point of departure, but the point of arrival, to be invented, of the public debate.
Figure 1.10. Citizen Mapping in Medellín, 2016 (source: original photograph by Jacques Lévy)
Like all political mediators, cartographers must accept the fact that they are actors in a world of actors. They are only actors among others, many others make maps and corporatist defenses are no longer appropriate. Maps circulate in a horizontal universe where no one can afford to address others as if they are in a dominant position.
In the old system, as it existed in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, the pairing of cartographers with those of political or economic power dominated the scene. Innovations were emerging, such as the gradual emergence of a “thematic cartography”, which took the map out of the “headquarters”, but two significant limitations constrained the creativity of the field. First, a positivist epistemological paradigm gave the illusion that drawing a map was only about reproducing an already existing reality, and not about choosing a point of view and defining a method. This led to an impoverishment of languages and a belief that the Earth and the World only needed Euclidean geometry to be represented. Second, the concentration of cartographers in “countries”, those territories that are continuous inwardly and bounded outwardly, which constituted the privileged horizon of their “clients”, delayed the realization that networks constitute both the basic fabric of spaces and the fundamental spring of spatialities. This willful blindness has even diverted, until recently, the curiosity of specialists from the interest they should have shown in the remarkable achievements of Arab-Persian cartography from a thousand years ago. The impressive history of cartography launched by Harley and Woodward (1987–2015) has fortunately helped to show the extraordinary richness of the world’s cartographic culture. It was necessary to wait for the instructions for use, a geography inserted in a renewed science of the social capable of linking spatial productions, of which maps are obviously a part, and increasingly massively thanks to digital technology, to other human productions.
Ordinary citizens have been invited to the map table. Like everyone else, they need to acquire a minimum amount of technical skills to have access to the language of maps, but their arrival cannot be said to have “lowered the level” of communication in this field: quite the opposite, in fact. They also bring a breath of fresh air because they come with questions and are, moreover, quite capable of arguing if answers are proposed to them.
For all of these reasons, cartographic engineering is changing in nature and status. As can be observed in another field of spatial “technology”, urban action, cartographers and urban planners are no longer “experts” with all of the answers, but rather mediators with specific cognitive skills between inhabitants, habitability, for which politicians, including citizens, are responsible, and inhabitation, which society implements.
The relations between maps and politics are multiple. In this chapter, the themes of geopolitical propaganda, spatial ideologies, electoral geography, urban planning and citizen democracy show the multiplicity of the subject. In all cases, they raise the question of the specific role of the cartographer, whether they are a technician or a researcher. They must define their own place as a producer of knowledge without taking the place of citizens. This distinction in turn opens up a debate common to all on the ethics of knowledge and communication. The cartographer is not only someone through whom information passes, they are also the one who produces and disseminates it, which places on their shoulders, a responsibility commensurate with the questions and answers of which the act of drawing a map is an integral part. The cartographer’s contribution may sometimes seem modest, but it should never be underestimated because it is a part of the long chain of production, interpretation and action, of which the map is an increasingly present link.
While reinforcing the specificity and richness of its language, cartography has become established in the political scene and now plays a major role in the emergence and dynamics of its issues. A new, more open and more demanding age is therefore upon us.
1.7. References
Barker, R.G. (1968). Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior. Stanford