As explained in the introduction, CMMM was a practice-oriented project funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung between 2019 and 2023 that sought to support municipalist mobilizers in Belgrade, Berlin, and Barcelona in their endeavors to combat housing injustices through collaborative research, mapping, and the development of nuanced maps. It is based on our study of ample research conducted by peers in the field, which we had conducted within the “Mapping Change” research project implemented by K LAB between fall 2018 and early 2022, and was funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung through its program: “Original – isn’t it? New Options for the Humanities and Cultural Studies” (now OpenUp). In addition to the literature review, the Mapping Change project was built around findings collected from the expert workshop “Mapping for Change? Understanding Critical Cartographies that Influence Urban Transformation” (2019) and the international symposium “Cartographies of the Urban: Intersectionality and Climate Change Adaptation” (2020).
The resulting web-based publication, the mapping change logbook,[1] connects insightful contemporary mapping projects and scholarly debates with each other to re-explore concepts that are central to uses of critical mapping for tackling the current precarious age of compounded global risks and crises. It is organized into three “stations,” each composed of three subsections of ±1,800 words. Station one outlines the approach and theoretical framework, station two discusses how to re-situate mapping in craft*ing, and station three explores how Cindi Katz’s notion of countertopography[2] can be applied to critical mapping practices. Each station connects to several clickable “detours,” which are links to maps, videos, texts, and other types of materials that visitors can explore as their authors intended for them to be exhibited, inspiring each of them differently.
Since the turn of the millennium, there have been many movements for justice that mainly manifested in cities and on their public streets and squares and where imagery and audiovisual communication have played a significant role in redirecting attention to grave injustices that have been cast aside. In varying contextual trajectories, visual modes of expression have succeeded in forging and communicating solidarity across geographic and linguistic boundaries, in engaging people, and sometimes in forcing parts of the world to pause even if only for a few days or weeks at a time. Disruption of the status-quo machine is the goal, enchanting a critical mass of society through iconic vocabulary and visual languages is a key tool.
Another important instrument is nuanced mapping, which involves bringing (non-/inter-)connected occurrences into conversation with each other and detaching from hegemonic perspectives and ways of seeing our lifeworlds to create what Ashanté M. Reese refers to as “geographies of self-reliance” and to “reveal different yet related experiences, namely, how the everyday lives of residents disrupt the dichotomy between death and survival to reveal how hope and visions for an uncertain future animate decisions.”[3] At the same time, site-based claims and visions of frontline mobilizers against the translocal and global shape transformation processes and constitute acts of Ishtibak (Arabic: engagement): short episodes of confrontation that employ temporality and simultaneity in physical and virtual realms, resulting in creative disruption. Re-defining roots of dispossession through narratives, agency, and defiant debate are essential in this context.
Accordingly, and as reflected in the various parts of the mapping change logbook, we understand critical mapping in a broader sense as processes of visual conversations (collective reflexive un-/re-making) and communication (solidarity through re-/co-learning, socializing knowledge). We consider it a sensory performance and an act of craftpersonship that unfolds through tacit knowledge acquired through slow (disposable) time and through dialectic labor embedded in social and intersectional knowledge. It is a practice that collectivizes by knitting together individual vested interests. It is a practice that involves aimless observation and a knowledge culture, where creating a plan or a map is not the target although it could potentially be an outcome. It involves caring and seeing the city less through the lens of utility and efficiency and more through the subjectivities and the “perceived, conceived, and lived” welfare of individuals. It involves reading gendered spatial violence, the systemic, social, and environmental violence reproduced in and through banal everyday spaces and aesthetics of exclusion that are regularly promoted by modern patterns of planning and seldom officially recognized as such. It is about continuities, where ends meet new beginnings. It is about giving rise to counterimaginaries of dissensus and resonance to imaginaries of hope and inspiring further resistance against dispossession and all forms of injustice.
[1] Aruri, Natasha, and Katleen De Flander and Andreas Brück. 2022. mapping change logbook. Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-15560. Ebook: mapping-change.labor-k.org/overview/
[2] Katz, Cindi. 2001. “On the Grounds of Globablization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement.” Signs Journal of Women Culture and Society 26 (4):1213-1234.
[3] Quick Hall, K. Melchor. “Darkness All Around Me: Black Waters, Land, Animals, and Sky.” In Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism, edited by K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk, 17–32 (p.22). Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021.
