Unit 6: Moving Forward/Future Directions

Over the last 30 years, the phenomenon of cultural mapping has gained international currency as an instrument of collective knowledge building, communal expression, empowerment, and community identity formation. Cultural mapping has found traction in many urban and nonurban contexts: It has the potential to reveal talent and diversity; contribute to a city’s story and identity; map cultural industries; recognize the value of everyday life; identify networks, nodes, and flows; unravel socio-spatial divisions and foster social cohesion; identify resources, gaps, and opportunities; imagine futures; and strengthen institutional support for developing sustainable culture-based development and producing more just and accessible communities.

Today, cultural mapping is emerging as a crucial tool in cultural policy and community organizing, not only documenting cultural resources and heritages and their proximity/spatial relations, but also offering representations of the meanings of place and the values of local communities. More broadly, forms of mapping have become increasingly employed by governments, most notably municipalities, and by academics worldwide, often under the premise that they promise an ability to engage and connect with populations and communities not normally inclined towards political/academic participation and distributed decision-making. Cultural mapping is aligned with other forms of mapping, such as participatory and socially engaged community mapping and deep mapping.

Furthermore, communities are increasingly challenged to develop cultural and social policies—and related cultural policy research methodologies—that are expected to work with (or for) policy areas such as economic development, cultural planning, social inclusion, and urban planning. Cultural mapping provides a ready approach and platform for this intersectoral work. The prospects for, and challenges of, including local voices and viewpoints in the public sphere are perhaps most keenly felt than in the use of cultural mapping techniques as key methods for generating community conversations and research data on social and cultural planning, public health, land rights, and sustainable development. As promising as cultural mapping methodologies have proven to be, however, there are limitations—particularly in terms of continuity and community impact. As those studying the field have noted (Evans, 2015; Duxbury et al., 2019), cultural mapping tends to be employed as a one-time initiative, a project rather than a long-term strategy, and thus typically remains not fully articulated or integrated within community planning and development practices. Community engagement, we suggest, must be based on partnerships that are more than merely transactional if cultural mapping is to become sustainable and transformative. We have referenced a number of case studies that can point the way to how we might integrate cultural mapping as a tool for community-engaged research, rooted in community, within policy and planning processes, linking such mapping to durable decision-making processes.

Social and territorial justice is recognized as a central axis of current and future urban transformations (Sitas, 2020; XXX). In the face of diversifying forms of social exclusion, new approaches to citizen empowerment, citizen participation, and social inclusion are developing around ideas, knowledge(s), experiences, resources and capacities that are “(dis)located across an array of arenas and distributed among different actors” (Duxbury et al., 2013, p. 10). Many initiatives reaffirm relationships between inhabitants and the meaning of and quality of their living spaces. Cultural mapping seems to be well situated as a potentially useful tool in this context:

To leverage culture and heritage for more just cities, pluralistic narratives that link fundamentally to places and people’s lives are critical. These stories exist and are
always in the making but need avenues through which to be surfaced …. These narratives help shift our social imagination—the capacity to imagine alternative future worlds …. Liberating culture, heritage and the imagination from rigid frames also opens up ways of thinking spatially and temporally… and this can foster the ability to speculate for more fantastical futures …” (Sitas, 2020, pp. 16-17)

Unit 6 Activities Check your understanding of Unit 6 by completing the quick, automatically assessed activities below. In your reflective journal practice, – future possible cultural mapping uses? (Time capsule) 🙂 You are invited to:

References

Duxbury, N., G. C. Moniz, S. Barca, M. Grigolo, G. Allegretti, and G. Sgueo. (2013). Introduction. In N. Duxbury, G. C. Moniz, and G. Sgueo (Eds.), Rethinking Urban Inclusion: Spaces, Mobilizations, Interventions. CEScontexto – Debates, no. 2 (pp. 10–14). Coimbra: Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. https://www.ces.uc.pt/publicacoes/cescontexto/index.php?id=8006

Evans, G. (2015). Cultural mapping and planning for sustainable communities. In N. Duxbury, W. F. Garrett-Petts, and D. MacLennan (Eds.), Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry (pp. 45-68). New York: Routledge.

Sitas, R. (2020). Cultural policy and just cities in Africa. City, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1782090