Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping

Activating Imaginaries and Means of Knowing

Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, Alys Longley, Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, Alys Longley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367587475
• eBook ISBN: 9781351614832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Making space for imagination can shift research and community planning from a reflective stance to a "future forming" orientation and practice. Cultural mapping is an emerging discourse of collaborative, community-based inquiry and advocacy.

This book looks at artistic approaches to cultural mapping, focusing on imaginative cartography. It emphasizes the importance of creative process that engages with the "felt sense" of community experiences, an element often missing from conventional mapping practices. International artistic contributions in this book reveal the creative research practices and languages of artists, a prerequisite to understanding the multi-modal interface of cultural mapping. The book examines how contemporary artistic approaches can challenge conventional asset mapping by animating and honouring the local, giving voice and definition to the vernacular, or recognizing the notion of place as inhabited by story and history. It explores the processes of seeing and listening and the importance of the aesthetic as a key component of community self-expression and self-representation.

Innovative contributions in this book champion inclusion and experimentation, expose unacknowledged power relations, and catalyze identity formation, through multiple modes of artistic representation and performance. It will be a valuable resource for individuals involved with creative research methods, performance, and cultural mapping as well as social and urban planning.

1 An introduction to the art of cultural mapping

Activating imaginaries and means of knowing

Nancy Duxbury, W. F. Garrett-Petts, and Alys Longley

We are always enfolded with the maps that hold us; the maps that include us in, or exclude us from, their borders; the maps that pull us away from or toward others. In our daily movements, we are in a fluid exchange with cartographies of place—we create worlds, and worlds create us.

Practices of mapping reflect the exchange where places and inhabitants write each other. The places might be abstract or literal, conceptual or material, political or poetic. The inhabitants might be human or non-human. Each formal potential of map-creation implies possibilities for moving ideas into the world whether through representations of data or platforms for imagining.

The involvement of artists in cultural mapping gives contemporary urgency to Marshall McLuhan’s notion that it is “the artist’s job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new” (McLuhan, 1964). This dislocation or disruption, and the resultant alternative academic and public discourse, introduces issues of aesthetic presentation and legitimacy, social efficacy, and a rhetoric of visual and verbal display. It also involves issues of knowledge production, the need to accommodate alternative traditions of inquiry, and modes of invention that permit a balance of new media creation, and attention to a hands-on (“qualitative”) exploration of material culture.

This edited collection is dedicated to the contributions and insights of artists and artistic methods within the emerging interdisciplinary field of cultural mapping, offering a range of perspectives that are international in scope. The chapters gathered in this book collectively argue that a focus on the creative research practices and language of artists should be a prerequisite to understanding intrinsically the multi-modal interface of cultural mapping (an emerging epideictic discourse of collaborative, community-based inquiry, and advocacy). Further, the book’s contributors collectively articulate the contours of an interdisciplinary field of creative practice in relation to social and urban planning. The chapters discuss and reflect on work conducted in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, England, France, Portugal, Spain, Brazil, and Japan.

The initial impetus for this book emerged out of the international conference “Mapping Culture: Communities, Sites and Stories,” organized in 2014 by the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Since that time, we have observed the importance of artistic approaches to enriching the ways in which geographically based and place-engaged knowledges can be investigated and articulated within the field of cultural mapping. At the same time, the prevalence of artistic community-engaged work with distinct communities and place-specific artistic interventions has multiplied rapidly, encompassing a wide set of diverse techniques using artistic approaches to address socio-cultural and other issues and engage in various modes of creative placemaking, accompanied by critiques of these practices. While a complementarity between these spheres of activities has been evident, the two arenas were rarely interlinked, and we felt further conceptual attention was due to explore and link these practices as hybrid approaches that place the aesthetic and the instrumental in dialogue with one another.

A focus on artistic practices is thus a core concern: the contributors to this collection employ artistic strategies for cultural mapping in relation to diverse fields such as architecture, urban design, community development, geography, archeology, interdisciplinary theory/practice, tourism, cultural planning, social science, narrative research, and ethnography. Here artists and academics explore the intersection of creative practice, community organizing, and urban transformation as they reflect on techniques and processes they have developed for cultural mapping. Moving between creative practice and interdisciplinary contexts, the authors employ art-based public engagement strategies to develop a wider and deeper understanding of place-based communities and the interconnectedness of people, stories, landscapes, and social constructs. Collectively their work speaks to both research and practice.

The collection links the practices involved in artistic approaches to cultural mapping with practice-based/artistic research and connects these to community-engaged strategies and processes—aspects that are not so explicit in most “artists and mapping” books to date. While the chapters are not all of a piece in terms of their commitment to social development and planning, as Shannon Jackson (2011) notes, we remain mindful that artists who consciously engage “the social” in their work must negotiate with their collaborators a “language of critique” within an ethos of consensus and community building—and thus we must also explore “whether an artistic vision enables or neutralizes community voices” (p. 44).

In this context we are highly cognizant of the need to engage critically with two important, cross-cutting issues: first, that arts practices are often socially and economically exclusionary, that is, there are substantial barriers to participation (class, gender, race, etc.) and in many contexts they are not fully democratic. Consequently, cultural mapping techniques sitting within such a context will have limitations and pitfalls in terms of who becomes included/excluded. Second, how cultural mapping is used and mobilized in support of certain policies, plans, and agendas. For example, under the banner of cultural and creative industries development, cultural mapping has emerged as a broad-brush analytical tool used in a variety of positive ways (e.g., a method for fostering community engagement in research, a technique to delineate spaces of the city for cultural practices/activities, and so forth) but also negative ways (e.g., for mounting arguments about the capacity for culture and art in “place” revitalization and as a remedy for industrial decline, masking the roll-out of neoliberal “creative city” planning scripts and exposing “hip” places prone to future gentrification, justifying privatization of cultural/arts space, etc.).

Cultural mapping

Cultural mapping has been only recently identified as an emerging field of interdisciplinary research and a valued methodological tool in participatory planning and community development. Such mapping aims to make visible the ways that local cultural assets, stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals constitute places as meaningful locations (e.g., Crawhall, 2007; Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and MacLennan, 2015; Roberts, 2012; Pillai, 2013; Stewart, 2007), and thus can serve as a point of entry into theoretical debates about the nature of spatial knowledge and spatial representations. But cultural maps are also artifacts (i.e., objects of study in their own right), forms of social action, foundations for advocacy, and, sometimes, works of art.

Used by Indigenous communities in the 1960s as a way to represent local knowledge and culture, and later endorsed by UNESCO as a tool for preserving cultural assets, cultural mapping techniques have become readily accessible through a growing number of academic articles and cultural toolkits (community guidebooks). Cultural mapping is now widely used by municipalities, neighbourhoods, and community organizations to bring a diverse range of stakeholders into conversation about the cultural dimensions and potentials of place. It has proven very good at detailing tangible assets (i.e., things we can count, for example, physical spaces, cultural organizations, public art, and other material resources). It has proven less successful in mapping intangible cultural assets (e.g., values and norms, beliefs, language, community narratives, identities, and shared sense of place). In their attempt to map these intangible elements of place, communities have been turning to artists, identifying them as especially well positioned to help make cultural assets visible—a contention supported by the growing interest in the role of artists and the arts in community development more broadly (see, e.g., Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and MacLennan, 2015).

Those involved in cultural mapping express a growing conviction that the inclusion of artists and artistic approaches to mapping will foster grassroots and experimental initiatives within a participative and creative community planning process. This is especially true of roles played by artists in producing or co-producing vernacular forms of mapping—and how, emerging from a growing body of theory and practice in socially engaged art, “arts-led dialogues” are becoming positioned and variously championed as vehicles for citizen participation in community decision-making, identity formation, and embedded in forms of participatory mapping. As Ruth Watson argues in her article “Mapping and contemporary art” (2009),

artists also have a role to play in the new constructions of mapping. It has been a long time since an artist was considered to be able to contribute in more than just an ad hoc manner to a field long considered as a science.

(p. 300)

This shift to the end-user, combined with contemporary art’s current focus on participation and interactivity, continues to erode notions of the individual artist as a sole creator–genius, acting from either inspiration or the need to express themselves: the new artist, Watson says, “is a conduit, at times a facilitator of events or environments that seek to engage with new audiences, employing terms familiar to most users” (p. 300).

However, until recently—and despite an ongoing interest in the process of cultural mapping—cultural maps themselves, the contributions of artists, and the international array of cultural mapping initiatives have not been identified as subjects of sustained critical study. This book emerged from the conviction that further research needs to be done in terms of examining and documenting the impact of cultural mapping and maps on the ways communities represent themselves and communicate with one another—especially with respect to the alternative communication patterns, methods, social relations, and processes that result from any integration and leadership of the artists as animateurs, co-researchers, and community collaborators—with an eye toward identifying good practices and emerging issues resulting from such community-based collaboration.

We want to assert that community planning and cultural mapping involve a class of public problems and issues not easily addressed or resolved through conventional discussion, debate, and policy formation. Janinski (2001) calls this class of problems “communal exigences,” occasions where we are called to come to terms with our shared values, our sense of place, our sense of shared or competing identities, and our sense of our position in community hierarchies (including a recognition of our relationship to those individuals, groups, and organizations in positions of cultural authority). Such occasions call for what classical rhetoric termed “the epideictic,” a kind of performative (action-oriented) discourse best suited to engaging the process of communal definition. From the Greek epideiktikos (to “shine or show forth”) epideictic discourse exhibits or makes apparent “what might otherwise remain unnoticed or invisible” (Beale, 1978, p. 135). More importantly, while referencing and describing social action and relationships, the epideictic also enacts (and thus embodies) social action itself. For example, maps both describe and argue. Maps are propositions (Crampton, 2009). A focus on the work of artists and artistic approaches allows us a unique opportunity to explore the phenomenon of cultural mapping as an emerging example of “performative discourse”: a showing forth of the otherwise invisible; a key, if largely under-theorized, community-based form of multi-modal rhetoric and a potentially new means of building and enacting situated knowledge.

Mapping has of course long informed the work of artists. Examples of artistic approaches to mapping in Western history span from the celebration of place found in Renaissance maps to the “map art” and diagram art of the Surrealists and the Situationists. The engagement of artists in cultural mapping, however, is a more recent development, and, although their participation is highly encouraged, artists involved in cultural mapping work have been cast to date mainly as illustrators, provocateurs, and facilitators—or consulted and surveyed as part of a special contingent of amateur and expert stakeholders, usually characterized as the “ethnic, arts, and heritage community” (Jeannotte and Duxbury, 2012). Only gradually are artists working in community settings being recognized as more than “fixers” (cheap labour to improve distressed communities). Malcolm Miles (1997), for example, notes provocatively that two key fields—“urban planning and design, and art—are beginning to construct a dynamic in which each contextualizes and interrogates the other” (p. 188). Such insights are rare. More generally, artistic contributions tend to be characterized as “interventions,” with artists seldom involved extensively in the participatory planning processes or understood as rhetorical agents with their own disciplinary orientations, methods, and histories. As a result, remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the potential impact of local artists and university-based artist-researchers on new collaborative and sustainable practices in community settings—practices such as cultural mapping. This despite the widespread observation that, during the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have been drawn to collaborative and community-engaged modes of research and production (see Badham, 2013; Bourriaud, 2002; Bishop, 2012; Finkelpearl, 2013; Kester, 2011).

It is our contention that a focus on artistic approaches to cultural mapping enhances our understanding of collective action and civic engagement, particularly as it relates to collaboration, place-based research, citizen engagement, communal authorship, local sustainability planning, performativity, and social activism—the hallmarks of cultural mapping.

Cultural mapping and the involvement of local and university-based artists in this process are seen as especially important to planning and cultural development in neighbourhoods and smaller communities. The stakes here are high, for the “creative city” approaches and planning tied to notions of the “creative class” (Florida, 2002) have proven unsuccessful as recipes for urban renewal and cultural re-invention (Badham, 2009; Duxbury, Cullen, and Pascual, 2012; Lewis and Donald, 2009; O’Connor and Kong, 2009; Richards and Wilson, 2006). As Nancy Duxbury (2014) has written, these approaches, which are tailored to large metropolitan centres, “have . . . tended to neglect issues of social equity and inclusion, spawned dislocation of existing artist/creative communities, and favoured ‘big and flashy’ globally circulating art products (exhibits, performances, artists) over nurturing approaches to ‘authentic’ local cultures and heritage” (no page). In smaller places, the emphasis tends to be on nurturing local creativity and culture, rather than on attracting it from elsewhere (Bell and Jayne, 2009; Garrett-Petts, 2005; van Heur, 2010; Waitt and Gibson, 2009).

Notably in Canada, encouraged by the federal government’s requirement to develop Integrated Community Sustainability Plans to access gas tax revenues, many Canadian cities have employed a “four pillar” sustainability model (Hawkes, 2001) that highlights environmental responsibility, economic health, social equity, and cultural vitality (Government of Canada, 2005). Here the challenge of defining and measuring culture as part of sustainability planning has prompted increased attention to community dialogues and participatory processes; and, in the process, communities have turned to cultural mapping. Where larger cities focus their community sustainability planning more on environmental challenges than on cultural considerations, neighbourhoods, small cities, and rural areas tend to treat cultural vitality as an important element of holistic local sustainability and a key concern linked to tourism development, downtown revitalization, preservation of heritage, community identity, community engagement, quality of life, and social cohesion (Dubinsky and Garrett-Petts, 2002; Duxbury, 2011; Garrett-Petts, Hoffman, and Ratsoy, 2014). The...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping
• Routledge Research in Culture, Space and Identity
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An introduction to the Art of Cultural Mapping: Activating Imaginaries and Means of Knowing
• Part I Contextual Terrain
• Part II Self and Place
• Part III Community and Place
• Part IV Cultures of Place
• Part V In Closing: Artists in Conversation
• Index