I
STATION
2
SITUATING MAPPING
AS CRAFT*ING
STATION
0
MAPPING
CHANGE
STATION
1
RYTHMS
OF RESISTANCE
STATION
3
COUNTER
TOPOGRAPHY
0.1 GREETINGS!
0.2 THE MAPPING
CHANGE PROJECT
1.1 COMMUN(ICAT)ING SOLIDARITY
1.2 RESONANCE OF IMAGINARIES
1.3 A PARTISAN JOURNEY
2.1 EXPEDITION OR EXPLORATION?
2.2 TACIT
KNOWLEDGE
2.3 DIALECTIC
LABORING
3.1 ANTICOLONIAL
MAPPING
3.2 (IN)VISIBILIZING
ZEROES
3.3 COUNTERIMAGINARIES
OF DISSENSUS
mapping
change
logbook
natasha aruri | katleen de flander | andreas brück
101 via Beirut
102 via Thawraaa!
103 via alKarama wa alAmal
104 via Hakitectura
105 via Haus
der Statistik
106 via Sakiya
107 via Ministarstvo
Prostora
108 via Belgrade 2041
109 via Shamsia
Hassani
110 via TEDIndia 111 via Urbanize!
316 via Mapping Gendered Ecologies
317 via Orangotango
318 via Chicago
319 via Prep Notes 3
320 via OpenVis
321 via Hurricane Colonialism
322 via Prep Notes 4
001 via Brazil
002 via Pseudo-
Concrete Realities
003 via Berlin
004 via Walking
Debates
217 via Rough Fish
218 via Fibers
and Shells 212 via Field Notes 2
213 via Field Notes 3
214 via Furtherfield
215 via Moritzplatz
216 via Field Notes 4
210 via handiCRAFT
2016
211 via Los Angeles
201 via Detroit
202 via Data Feminism
203 via Cartographie
Radicale
204 via States of Emergency 205 via Humboldt
206 via The Village Files
207 via Audra Simpson
208 via a June Encounter
209 via Field Notes 1
310 via Methods Lab
311 via Monopolized
Space
312 via Prep Notes 1
313 via Prep Notes 2
314 via Guardia Fuerza
327 via Airbnb vs. Berlin
328 via Haüser
Bewegen
329 via Encountering
Development
330 via
Jerusalem
331 via HKW
323 via SFB 1265
324 via Boxhagener Platz
325 via Leerstandsmelder
326 via Deutsche
Wohnen Enteignen
301 via Workshop 2
Highlights
302 via Decolonialization
in Action
303 via Defund
Humboldt 304 via TEDWomen
305 via Plenary
306 via a January
Encounter
307 via Kotti
308 via
Counterimaginary 1
309 via Counterimaginary 2
315 via Anti-Eviction
mapping
change
logbook
/entries
Natasha Aruri
Katleen De Flander
Andreas Brück
Acknowledgments
The web-based mapping change logbook is the result of the research
project “Mapping for Change?” which was financed through the research
grant “Originalitätsverdacht” of the Volkswagen Stiftung.
The research was conducted and managed by LABOR K //// K LAB,
Institute for Urban and Regional Planning (ISR), Faculty VI – Planning,
Building, Environment, TU Berlin.
We are thankful for the support of our colleagues, and for the time, inputs
and insights shared by our conversers, the participants in the two
workshops that we conducted within the framework of this project:
“Mapping for Change? Understanding Critical Cartographies that
influence Urban Transformation” (June 2019) and “Mapping for Change?
Cartographies of the Urban: Intersectionality and Climate Change
Adaptation” (January 2020). Some of their contributions feature in
detours of the logbook, and all names can be found on p. 74. We are
particularly grateful to Omnia Khalil, Robin Coenen and Mai AlBattat for
their partnership and patience in co-making this logbook, through the
hurdles of the Covid-19 Pandemic and “life happening” all around us.
Equally, we would like to thank the mobilizers and responders that have
been mapping ways to expose and challenge injustices in varying places
and geographies; the persons that shaped our learning journey, those
named in the logbook and the many others.
Entries Booklet
The web-based mapping change logbook presents the key findings of
our project and a selection of primary, secondary, and tertiary data that
enriched our journey with concepts and experiments that engage critical
mapping. Its design serves as a non-centered sitemap (table) of contents,
while providing direct links to sites of sources (see K LAB website: http://
mapping-change.labor-k.org/overview/).
In 4 STATIONS, we arranged 11 ENTRIES: short texts of +/- 1,800 words,
written by our team, that base on inputs from the 2 workshops and our
research. This booklet captures these entries. In addition, we plugged
60 DETOURS to the entries: short descriptions and links to relevant works
that we highlight under 9 filters: map/image, mobilizer, workshop,
scholarly, interview/podcast, field/prep note, music, video/film,
counterimaginary. The pages of these detours in the logbook are only a
windowsill that provides a synopsis (often a quote from descriptions by
the respective authors on the sourced site) and the link to the work on
the original server where it can be explored. Therefore, the detours can
only be viewed online, yet a list can be found as annex at the end of this
booklet.
To view the mapping change logbook on your device,
please scan this code:
www.mapping-change.labor-k.org/overview/
Contents
V Acknowledgments
VII Entries Booklet
2 station*zero_mapping change
4 0.1 Greetings!
7 0.2 The “Mapping Change” Project
10 station*one_rhythms of resistance
12 1.1 Commun(icat)ing Solidarity
17 1.2 Resonance of Imaginaries
21 1.3 A Partisan Journey
26 station*two_situating mapping in craft*ing
28 2.1 Expedition or Exploration?
33 2.2 Tacit Knowledge
38 2.3 Dialectic Laboring
46 station*three_countertopography
48 3.1 Anticolonial Mapping
54 3.2 (In)Visibilizing Zeroes
62 3.3 Counterimaginaries of Dissensus
70 Detours
74 Contributors
75 Notes
78 Imprint
2
station*zero
33
mapping
change
4
0.1 Greetings!
This is a logbook of our journey through concepts and projects that
engage “critical mapping.” We are an international team of hybrid
professionals who question how to communicate reflexive
multidisciplinary knowledge about the urban to serve the global challenge
of emancipating socio-environmental understandings, language, and
positionalities. We do this by means of research, teaching, civic and
political engagement, and co-learning within and beyond academia. We
choose to focus on urban geographies because they are nodes of intense
assemblages and flows of resources, bodies, and infra/structures, and
because that is where we are situated between Berlin, Jerusalem, Cairo,
New York, and our networks in many other places.
This work centers on the fact that cities and agglomerates are rich
topographies of translocal, gendered, and exiled identities.1 Rubbing
shoulders in dense spaces disturbs norms, alters and gradually resets
relational perceptions, and nudges politics while feeding off a network of
(non-)textbook narratives of other (non-)urban geographies. While formal
global agreements (e.g., SDGs, COP, etc.) and governmental programs
are based on institutionalized paradigms and “law and order,”
dysfunctional states are in fact a common phenomenon and oppression,
poverty, and informality are on the rise everywhere, including in the
fortress of Europe. The ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic has unsurprisingly
served to advance disaster capitalism, encourage corruption, and silence
dissent from Hong Kong to Beirut to Rio de Janeiro and beyond.
In pre-pandemic Rio de Janeiro, on 14 March 2018, Marielle Franco—a
black Brazilian politician, sociologist, feminist, socialist, and human
rights activist—was assassinated twice as narrated by Pablo DeSoto in
1 We refer to forcefully
displaced persons whether by
war or climate or economic
crises (e.g. migrants and
diasporas) or due to
socio-political prosecution
(e.g. due to sextual
orientation or religion). While
the world regards movements
of population as burden on
the ‘North’, in effect,
addressing the issue of exiled
livelihoods is relevant
because it is about brain- and
labor-drain, and about
creating continuities. This
approach is elaborated in
station*two_situating
mapping in carft*ing and in
station*three_counter
topography.
55
his work “Cartography of a Techno-political Assassination” (see detour
001). While exploring this work, it is important to take a moment to think
about derivative cases that each of us knows and ask how we can
contribute to developing the skills needed to keep from becoming (in)
directly implicated in similar scenarios. This was not one of our initial
questions, but it became relevant as this project progressed due to a
tangible rise in neo-nationalist and neoliberal regimes. It implored us to
look for answers to how to re-skill ourselves and future generations
across disciplines in visualizing (voicing), encouraging, and protecting
“pseudo-concrete” spaces embedded in “fantasies”2 of dissent and
their creators.
As a team, we are invested in tactically designing “life between buildings,”3
drawing our inspiration from principles of makeshift placemaking
initiatives, including Flussbad Berlin (see detour 003). We are also
inspired by important contemporary works such as that of Jan Gehl.
However, over the course of our work, we have addressed a range of
concepts related to socio-spatial violence and segregation that are far
more brutal than commonly acknowledged. The dislocations resulting
from the current economic, political, and social structures and gendered
systems cannot, as Saskia Sassen argues,4 be understood in the
conventional terms of poverty and injustice. They are more accurately
understood as expulsions: from professional livelihood, from living space,
from the very biosphere that makes life possible.5
Expulsions are systemic because “poverty is a very lucrative business,”
as Onalenna Selolwane explained in 2017 at a high-level SDG6-related
event at the United Nations pointing to the key issues of corruption and
the lack of accountability.7 One could consider it a prophecy of the kinds
of shortcomings illustrated in the recent COP 268 in Glasgow, which took
place as we were finalizing this logbook. Yet, we are pessoptimists and
believe that changing mindsets is not only necessary in theory but also
2 See detour 002: Žižek,
Slavoj. 2008. The Plague of
Fantasies. London: Verso.
3 See: Gehl, Jan. 2011. Life
Between Buildings: Using
Public Space. London: Island
Press.
4 Sassen, Saskia. 2014.
Expulsions: Brutality and
Complexity in the Global
Economy. Harvard: Harvard
University Press.
5 If you are interested in
short articles from our archive
on issues regarding food
sovereignty and ecological
degradation in Nairobi and
Berlin (conducted within the
framework of the Global Soil
Forum), see detour 004_via
Walking Debates, by Katleen
De Flander and Natasha Aruri.
6 SDGs: Sustainable
Development Goals
7 UN (United Nations). 2017.
Opening High-level Political
Forum on Sustainable
Development, Delegates Share
Successes, Challenges in
Leaving No One Behind while
Advancing 2030 Agenda.
United Nations Economic and
Social Council. Accessed 1
October 2017.
8 UN Climate Change
Conference UK 21. Greta
Thunberg condemned it
saying “COP26 Is a Failure.”
Among the notable
shortcomings was the lack of
willingness of rich countries to
compensate poorer ones for
the damages they caused and
are continuing to cause. This
was among the issues
highlighted in the plenary
session of our second
workshop, captured in
station*three_
countertopography.
detour 003_ via
Berlin
detour 002_ via
Pseudo-Concrete
Realities
detour 004_ via
Walking Debates
detour 001_ via
Brazil
6
possible in practice and that this process stands to benefit from
countertopographical9 networks of (in)formal resistance and experiments
toward reforms in all sectors and disciplines. As Omar Jabary Salamanca10
put it, we want to re-see “resistance is an infrastructure not an event;”11,12
Visual communication and critical mapping are key instruments (among
others) in the emancipation (liberation, legitimization) of narratives and
discourses, as demonstrated by many scholars and in the examples
featured here. In this logbook, we take a closer look at several
interpretations of critical mapping to investigate how and in what ways
mapping strategies and tactics have contributed to reshaping the status
quo and served to articulate and address the historically far-reaching
and interconnected origins of recent urban polycrises. With this, we hope
to humbly contribute to the countless global efforts to achieve localized
systemic reforms and emancipatory pathways.
9 We took the term
“countertopography” from
the works of Cindi Katz, as
one of the starting notions
through which we present
this research on mapping as
a tool for progressive
change. See. Katz, Cindi.
2001. “On the Grounds of
Globalization: A Topography
for Feminist Political
Engagement.” Signs 26 (4):
1213–1234.
10 Omar is currently an
FNRS research fellow in the
Faculty of Philosophy and
Social Sciences at the
Université libre de Bruxelles.
He serves on the editorial
board of Jadaliyya and Arab
Urbanism and is also a
member of the international
advisory board of Antipode,
ACME, and the French
language magazine Regards.
Omar's work focuses on the
historical geographies of
infrastructure and on
transnational social histories
of anticolonialism.
11 Omar Jabary Salamanca
has previously used
“Resistance is an
infrastructure not an event”
as a play on the phrase
“Settler colonialism is a
structure not an event” to
highlight the necessity of
considering resistance not as
punctual uprisings and
revolts, but rather as the
social, political, economic,
cultural, and environmental
formations that constitute
anticolonial struggles in the
long term. He recently
elaborated on this notion
during “Voices from
Palestine: Decolonization in
Practice,” an event that
included Muna Dajani and
Nora Akawi and was
organized and moderated by
Faiq Mari and Samia Henni
on May 2021.
12 We would like to note
that relevant perspectives
and arguments included in
this logbook were gained
from fieldwork conducted
within the framework of a
different project: “Takhayali
Ein Qiniya,” part of the
international multisite
research “Urbanization,
Gender, and the Global
South: a transformative
knowledge network,” P.I.
Prof. Linda Peake, supported
by SSHRC and a consortium
of partners. Particularly, we
are thankful to the
conversers in the “imagine
otherwise” sessions that
focused on infrastructural
violence and took place
virtually in March 2021. Our
conversers were Lana Judeh,
Lizzette Soria, Mai alBattat,
Omnia Khalil, Renad
Shqeirat, and Sahar
Qawasmi.
77
0.2 The “Mapping Change”
Project
“Mapping for Change?” started in October 2018 as an 18-month research
project, supported by the “Originalitätsverdacht” program of the
Volkswagen Stiftung, conducted and managed by LABOR K //// K LAB, TU
Berlin. Due to life events and the global COVID-19 pandemic, the
timeframe was doubled to nearly three years. However, this gave us time
to discuss our findings with more people, and to reflect on and modify
our activities and output formats to reach a wider and more diverse
audience than we had initially intended.
We do not claim to have produced “original” knowledge in this project.
We consider our contribution to be connecting insightful contemporary
mapping projects and scholarly debates with each other: directly by
means of face-to-face activities and indirectly in this logbook. We
sought to reconnect concepts that we found central to uses of critical
mapping in tackling the current precarious moment of compounded
global risks and crises. During the phase of designing our visual strategy
and elements, we noticed that by investigating the notion of “mapping
for change,” our journey resembled that of “mapping change” as it
unfolded around us, and therefore we amended the title of the project
to reflect this.
In a way, this logbook is a web-based mind-map of our key findings and
a selection of primary, secondary, and tertiary data that has enriched our
journey. Its design also serves as a table of contents. Considering, on the
one hand, issues concerning a right to visibility and own voice and, on the
other hand, the limited time the majority have to indulge in reading, we
8
13 Omnia Khalil is a Ph.D.
student at the Graduate
Center, City University of
New York (CUNY),
anthropology program,
and adjunct lecturer at
Hunter College, CUNY.
She is a cofounder of 10
Tooba | Applied Research
in the Built Environment
in Egypt. She is an
engaged scholar and
urban anthropologist and
has over 10 years’
experience in social
mapping and
participatory community
urban action planning.
14 The V.I. team included
Anna Diagne and Mai
Al-Battat
detour 208_ via a
June Encounter
detour 306_via a
January Encounter
structured our main arguments in three “stations,” each composes 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 the notion of
countertopography 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 (see detour filter) that visitors
can explore as their authors intended for them to be exhibited and be
inspired by them differently than we were.
The intellectual and technical labor invested in this project rests on many
different persons. In addition to Natasha Aruri, Katleen De Flander and
Andreas Brück, who are the three postdoctoral researchers who saw this
project through from its inception to its completion, we were fortunate
enough to have received support from several current and former LABOR
K //// K LAB colleagues – Andrea Aho, Lýdia Grešáková, Nija-Maria Linke,
Tim Nebert, Robin Hüppe, Christian Sanders, Georg Müller, and Pierre
Funcke. Omnia Khalil13 participated in the second workshop that was
organized within the framework of this project, and further, she was a
phenomenal help in structuring and writing the texts of this logbook, as
well as contributing to its contents and arguments. The Visual Intelligence
team14 – Danielle Rosales and Robin Coenen – also played a central role
in the realization of this project in various stages, in designing the visual
communication strategy and in tailoring this Mapping Change Logbook.
We are also very thankful for the time and inspiring input provided by the
participants from our two workshops: “Mapping for Change?
Understanding Critical Cartographies that influence Urban Transformation”
(June 2019) and “Mapping for Change? Cartographies of the Urban:
Intersectionality and Climate Change Adaptation” (January 2020). The
names of the participants can be found in detour 208 and detour 306 for
the two events, respectively, and some of the contributions are included
as detours in this logbook.
99
Finally, we would like to note that while this text is largely based on the
conversations that took place during the various formal and informal
activities of the Mapping Change project, the opinions presented here
are aligned with some but not all of the named persons. Equally, they do
not necessarily represent the opinions of our host institution, TU Berlin,
which has been an inspiring community and space; nor the opinions of
the Volkswagen Stiftung who’s generous grant enabled the rich
discussions captured in this mapping change logbook.
10
station*one
1111
rhythms of
resistance
12
1.1 Commun(icat)ing Solidarity
In 2017/18, after the election of Donald Trump as President of the United
States, the title of Naomi Klein’s book No Is Not Enough1 became
somewhat of a slogan on Eurocentric streets. In 2020, the spotlight
shifted back to the “I can’t breathe!” movement, which started in 2014
with the killing of Eric Garner by an NYPD officer in New York City. The
trigger this time was George Floyd, whose cold-blooded murder was
caught on video. It sent seismic shockwaves throughout the world and
echoed the struggle against anti-blackness in different ways in many
places. This also intersected with experiences since “Occupy!” in 2011
and the convergence on the “Black Lives Matter” movement in 2013 just
before Ferguson in 2014. Yet, the journey to justice for Black, Indigenous,
and People of Color (BIPoCs) is far from over.
Since the turn of the millennium, there have been many other movements
for justice that mainly manifested in cities and on their public streets and
squares. One example is the Penguin Revolution resisting the
neoliberalization of education in Chile (2006), which had reverberations
in the following years incorporating other sectors, led to a referendum
for a new constitution in 2020, and saw 35-year-old Gabriel Boric elected
as the new president in 2021. Another series of events is referred to as
the alRabee’ al’Araby (Arab Spring, starting late 2010), which has been a
long, dusty ordeal with no end in sight.2 The Indignados movement in
Spain (2011/2012, also known as Movimiento 15-M) is also well-known
and gave rise to Podemos and Barcelona en Comú, as well as other new
political frameworks. In Lebanon, Til’at Reehetkom (You Stink! 2015/2016,
triggered by the collapse of waste collection systems) contributed to new
socio-political platforms and initiatives who’s work had set the stage ripe
for Thawret 17 Tishreen (17 October Revolution in 2019). These included
1 See: Klein, Naomi.
2017. No Is Not Enough:
Resisting Trump’s Shock
Politics and Winning the
World We Need. Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
2 Includes Tunisia,
Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, in
later stages Sudan,
Algeria and Iraq. While
eurocentrism thinks of
‘spring’ as delightful,
for many it is the
season of to°z
– sandstorms that kill
blossoms, blur vision,
and bring lots and lots
of dirt. In all these
cases, the state is
governed by generals or
is dependent on their
protection, whether
official armies and
security apparatuses or
otherwise (e.g. militias).
1313
many mobilizers such as Public Works Studio and Beirut Madinati (see
detour 101). The Lebanese echoes of the Arab Spring were silenced by
the COVID-19 Pandemic and resumed after the Beirut Port Explosion on
4 August 2020. On those hot August weeks as Beirutis were still grappling
with the shock, classics like Majida El Roumi’s Qoum Ithadda (Stand Up
and Challenge, released in 1994, see detour 102) returned again as
anthems, calling for thawra! (revolution!) on the streets and squares and
resonating elsewhere.
In the examples above and many others, imagery and audiovisual
communication played a significant role in redirecting attention to grave
injustices that had been sidelined repeatedly. In contextually varying
trajectories, they succeeded in engaging people to force 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 mass3 of
society is the tool.
In addition to drawing attention, visuals—as well as music and other
media—have long proven helpful in forging and communicating solidarity
across geographic and linguistic boundaries. Since the start of the
fourth industrial revolution (a.k.a. Industry 4.0 and ‘4IR’) and the
exponential growth of virtual communication, mental constructs via
flows of news and information through different channels4 have played
an increasingly important role in mobilizing around struggles. These are
“the stories we tell”5 ourselves and others casually (e.g., by choosing to
read and share or not); some remain unspoken and others resonate in
encounters. Such processes are impossible to codify or archive because
they are boundless networks of triggered thoughts and actions of many
persons. However, changing mindsets can be observed in long-evolving
and new solidarity constellations6 that materialize in visual languages
and iconized vocabulary.
3 From physics, it is not about
majorities but the minimums
necessary to cross thresholds
to set a mass into motion or
change its direction.
4 E.g. news outlets, social
media, blogs, scholarly
publications, events, etc.
5 “the stories we tell •
engaging archives otherwise”
is the title of a seminar series
taking place as we finalize
these lines, convened by
Omar Jabary Salamanca and
Sahar A Saeidnia.
6 The expression is also a
title: “Solidarity
Constellations” is a series of
assemblies that started in
October 2021 by Eye on
Palestine and Subversive
Film. The assemblies “gather
militants, researchers and
artists to engage with the
imagination and presentness
of transnational histories of
liberation.”
detour 101_ via
Beirut
detour 102_ via
Thawraaa!
14
In the recently released book Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging
with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism, in a chapter titled
“Darkness All Around Me. Black Waters, Land, Animals, and Sky,” K.
Melchor Quick Hall argues for “nuanced mapping” to disentangle from
hegemonic perspectives and ways of seeing our lifeworlds and to create
what Ashanté M. Reese calls “geographies of self-reliance” (see detour
316). Reese urges readers 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.”7 By employing any feasible set of
techniques and mediums, “nuanced mapping” involves bringing (non-/
inter-)connected happenings into conversation with each other by means
of momentary flashes (on streets and screens, could be visual or
otherwise). It involves tracing human actions and behaviors and
portraying the building up of (transborder) momentum, paths of
progression, and/or signs of regression.8
In detour 103_via alKarama wa alAmal, we map twelve items that start
with a casual news post by an official global outlet, to then span through
stenciled icons of mobilizers, cartoons, militant research, and videos that
became intertwined before and around the 2021 political moment in
Palestine. This collage showcases one way of how nuanced mapping can
be interpreted, namely, as mapping resonance. As explained in the
detour, a year after Minneapolis sent reverberations around the world on
the still pressing issue of anti-blackness, activists in Jerusalem took
advantage of its momentum, directly conversed with it (along Beirut and
other struggles), and the new movement used creative disruption to
prompt a tectonic paradigm shift in the century-long Palestinian struggle
for justice and freedom. In a sense, this resonance map exhibits select
artifacts by non-coordinated global collectives and personal initiatives
operationalizing Omar Jabary Salamanca’s9 concept of “resistance is an
infrastructure not an event”10 in real time. The collection shows a mixture
7 Hall, K. Melchor Quick. 2021.
“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.
8 An example of a radical
mapping exposing regression is
Pablo De Soto’s “Cartography of
a Techno-political
Assassination”, see detour
001_via Brazil.
9 Omar is currently an FNRS
research fellow in the Faculty of
Philosophy and Social Sciences
at the Université libre de
Bruxelles. Previously he was an
FWO research fellow in the
Department of Conflict and
Development at Ghent
University and a Marie Curie
Global Fellow in the Department
of Middle Eastern, South Asian,
and African Studies at Columbia
University. Omar's work focuses
on the historical geographies of
infrastructure and on
transnational social histories of
anticolonialism. He serves on the
editorial board of Jadaliyya and
Arab Urbanism and is also a
member of the international
advisory board of Antipode,
ACME and the French language
magazine Regards.
10 As mentioned in
station*zero, Omar Jabary
Salamanca uses “Resistance is
an infrastructure not an event”
as a play on the phrase “Settler
colonialism is a structure not an
event” to highlight the necessity
of considering resistance not as
punctual uprisings and revolts,
but rather as the social, political,
economic, cultural, and
environmental formations that
constitute anticolonial struggles
in the long term.
detour 316_ via
Mapping Gendered
Ecologies
detour 103_ via
alKarama wa alAmal
1515
of tactics and formats that pivot around site-based claims and visions of
frontline mobilizers and the translocal and global shapes and roots of
dispossession through narratives, agency, and defiant debate.
In her analysis “On creative disruption: Taking stock of the May 2021
Palestinian uprising,”11 Rana Baker highlights Ishtibak (Arabic:
engagement) as an underlying principle of the current political moment.
She maps a change from a lingual focus on Sumud (Arabic: steadfastness,
“to remain”), which has been a dominant term since the 1980s, to a
focus on Ishtibak, which appears in short episodes of confrontation that
employ temporality and simultaneity in physical and virtual realms, both
locally and globally.
Among other things, the capturing of iconic imagery from the streets
showing “self-reliance” and the use of digital media to give resonance to
alternative nuanced narratives of “dignity and hope”12 have been key
achievements of Intifadat alWihhda (the Uprising of Unity). One example
is the iconized silhouette of Muna alKurd, who together with her twin
Mohamed alKurd13 became a symbol of the new movement and of
Ishtibak. Another is Wafa Kanaan’s picture of her bag, which accompanied
her short article that was released amidst the bombing of Gaza where
she lived in spring 2021, showing Sumud.14 Such (audio-)visual triggers
streaming through social media—be it news outlets or tweets from
personalities such as supermodel Gigi Hadid15—are the essence of TikTok
revolutions from Hong Kong to Cairo, and they are constructing noteworthy
countertopographical16 perceptions of the world.
In summer 2021, we had the pleasure of presenting our work next to
José Pérez de Lama17 and Pablo DeSoto,18 whose work has been
influential on ours, including Hakitectura’s19 mapping “Cartografiando
Gaza” (Mapping Gaza), and Pablo’s mapping on character assassination
“Cartography of a Techno-political Assassination.”20 Discussing maps of
(infra-)structural and corporeal dispossession in Palestine and Brazil
detour 104_ via
Hakitectura
11 Baker, Rana. 2021. “On
creative disruption: the May
uprising in Palestine.” ROAR
Magazine, May 29.
12 The Declaration of Dignity
and Hope was released with the
call for a general strike on 18
May 2021 in all Palestinian
communities across historic
Palestine, and it proved a
resounding success. It declared
the reunification of the
Palestinian people and the
struggle for justice regardless of
whether they were lower-class
citizens of Israel, in-limbo
Jerusalemites, or stateless
subjects under military rule in
the West Bank and Gaza. This
paradigm shift on the ground has
been ignored and rejected by the
Israeli and Palestinian
authorities and official
diplomacy alike. 13 Muna and
Mohammed ElKurd were named
among the “100 Most Influential
People of 2021” by Time
Magazine. Mohammed recently
delivered a powerful and
unapologetic speech at a United
Nations special meeting in
observance of the International
Day of Solidarity with the
Palestinian People, on 29
November 2021. Mohammed’s
address starts at minute 62.
14 Both examples can be seen
in the collection in detour 103_
via alKarama wa alAmal.
15 Gigi Hadid is a Californian
supermodel with a Palestinian
father. She is considered a
helpful influencer in terms of
promoting solidarity with
Palestinian narratives.
16 See: Katz, Cindi. 2001. “On
the Grounds of Globalization: A
Topography for Feminist Political
Engagement.” Signs 26 (4):
1213–1234.
17 Panel “Mappings &
Municipalism,” organized by
the European Municipalist
Network, online, 22 June
2021. Speakers included José
Pérez de Lama (Hakitectura),
Severin Halder (Orangotango
Kollektive), Natasha Aruri on
behalf of K LAB (TU-Berlin),
and Ana Méndez de Andés
(EMN) as both speaker and
moderator.
18 Seminar “Activist Mapping &
Mapping as Activism,” organized
by The Lines of Flight Research
Group at Sheffield School of
Architecture, online, 29 June
2021. Speakers included Pablo
de Soto, Liz Mason-Deese,
Sebastian Cobarrubias Baglietto
& Maribel Casas-Cortes, and
Natasha Aruri on behalf of K LAB
(TU-Berlin).
19 See detour 104_via
Hakitectura
20 See detour 001_ via Brazil
16
(and other places) using same questions disturbs political frames and
prejudices about alliances and causes of wretchedness. Such layering and
borrowing of experiences contributes to the incremental resetting of
relational perceptions and what constitutes the “other.” Besides their
documentative nature and original formats and designs, Pablo’s
cartographies, classes, and exhibitions can be seen as a continuous re-
sketching of what we consider new and emancipated definitions of
internationalist solidarities against capitalist violence.
The aforementioned rhythms of socio-political movements around the
globe point to the long-evidenced links between political economies of
austerity and militarization, disaster capitalism and modern forms of
slavery. They prove the inextricable relationship between tackling the
climate crisis (keyword: climate change adaptation) and addressing the
sanctioned dispossession and oppression of the majority of the world’s
population. This violence, which has many manifestations including in
infrastructures of human settlements large and small (e.g., inaccessibility
to drinking water, location of toxic waste dumps, affordable housing crisis),
is taking place across the board.
Therefore, and as reflected in the various parts of this logbook, we
understand critical mapping in a broader sense as processes of visual
conversations (collective reflexive un-/re-/new-making) and
communication (solidarity through re-/co-learning, socializing knowledge).
We commenced this research as an exploration of ways to read, understand,
and engender urban spatial transformations and therefore strategies,
tactics, and typologies in the use of critical cartographies to serve liberatory
change. These remained key domains in our analyses as mapping the
kinds of individual features is important for creating nuanced perspectives.
Notwithstanding, the findings we share in this logbook are less focused on
the varying interpretations of critical mapping methodologies (which
always differ depending on context and conditionalities) and more focused
on the question: How can mapping contribute to commun(icat)ing
solidarity and giving resonance to rhythms of resistance?
1717
1.2 Resonance of Imaginaries
In 2015, the ad-hoc collective of cultural initiatives Die Allianz bedrohter
Berliner Atelierhäuser21 (AbBA) rolled down a banner on the façade of the
city-owned Haus der Statistik (HdS) in Berlin: a 45,000 sq.m. abandoned
and for-sale socialist complex. The banner stated “Arising here for Berlin:
spaces for art, culture, and society”22 (see detour 105). This visual prank
leveraged a coup against normative and institutionalized capitalist
mechanisms of management of public wealth by publicizing an imaginary
(creating an illusion) that was widely celebrated. This made the anti-
capitalist demands hard to silence and the building complex was
ultimately pulled from the hands of speculators. Since 2018, the
consortium Koop5, which includes ZUsammenKUNFT e.V.,23 has been
testing solutions for new hybrid models of public ownership intended to
serve what is locally referred to as Gemeinwohl, which means “the
common good” and encompasses mechanisms of “public interest.”
In terms of legislative protections for civic mobilizers and accessibility
to limited monetary and spatial resources, Berlin is a paradise even
when compared to other Western cities and states. The operational
conditions of the Koop5 and Berliner activists are by no means
comparable to those in Brazil, Turkey, or many other countries where
initiatives have no or close to no resources and supportive structures
and where people literally disappear for voicing disapproval against
their hegemonic governments.
In Jerusalem North, since around 2015, several small initiatives have
been tirelessly trying to assemble. Varying in their stories and missions,
they work to protect the socio-environmental and agrarian ecosystem
around Wadi elDilb. An inspiring example is that of the Sakiya collective
21 In English: The
Alliance of Endangered
Ateliers
22 Original banner text in
German: “Hier entstehen
für Berlin: Räume für
Kunst, Kultur und
Soziales”.
23 Haus der Statistik is
now led by the
consortium Koop5 that
brings together the
formalized cooperative
ZUsammenKUNFT Berlin
e.V. (its founding
members were the
mobilizers of the civic
motion) and four partners
from politics and
administration.
detour 105_ via
Haus der Statistik
detour 106_ via
Sakiya
18
which sees itself as a ‘progressive academy’ (see detour 106). Slowly but
steadily, Sakiya and other mobilizers are imagining new viable scenarios
that can counter the dominant capitalist urban development agendas
(Chinese, Saudi, and the like). After about six years, these are still “ideas
in progress” because, unlike conditions in Berlin, Jerusalem suffers from
a Puerto Rican-style disaster capitalism with a Syrian twist: Puerto Rican
in the sense that shock (man- or nature-made) is a frequently recurring
state of being in which the mass destruction of infrastructure and
livelihoods is not an episodic anomaly, and Syrian in the sense that
regimes of despots and militarized neo-religious groups practice their
ethnopolitics and proxy wars unhindered.
Based on this example, in neocolonial geographies the question
is less about dates or categories of disasters and more about overlapping
of patterns (rhythms), shifts in types of challenges, resonance in local
politics, and limitations on civic mobilizers. Measures that are introduced
temporarily in response to shocks often become permanent and add to
vulnerability, as illustrated in the cartographies and other visual materials
produced by Léopold Lambert and collected in his recent book States of
Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum.24 Yet,
there are episodes of hope that border on imaginaries, caress temporal
situated narratives, and inspire further resistance against dispossession.
An empowering example with no fairy-tale ending (yet) is that of the
Kolektiv Ministarstvo Prostora25 (Ministry of Space Collective, a.k.a.
Institute of Urban Politics), which has been utilizing various mediums
(including mapping) to synthesize and communicate knowledge to
change political discourses across scales, from local to global forums.
As explained in detour 107, the Belgrade Waterfront project, a capitalist
redevelopment project on a central area in the city (which was based on
backroom dealings between local politicians and a UAE investor), does
not genealogically differ from hundreds of others. However, the
24 See detour 204_ via
States of Emergency:
Lambert, Léopold. 2021.
États d’urgence (States of
Emergency): Une histoire
spatiale du continuum
colonial français.
Toulouse: PMN.
25 See the Ministarstvo
Prostora website or in the
CMMM.eu Timeline
detour 107_ via
Ministarstvo
Prostora
1919
Ministarstvo Prostora and the engaged community in which they are
embedded succeeded in using the moment to gain more long-term
momentum around questions of viability, dignity, and exploitation in
the city.
It was around the time of the initial protests in 2014 that a yellow
inflated duck became an easily recognized symbol of dissent against
ruling parties and their entourage (see detour 107). This originated
from the fact that the word “duck’ is pronounced like the Serbian word
for “fraud.” Several years later, the Ne da(vi)mo Beograd (Don’t Let
Belgrade D[r]own) movement has become a political power to be
reckoned with, and the yellow duck continues to symbolize the
persistence of the problems and resistance against them in protests,
music, and street art.
In October 2021, the Ministarstvo Prostora / Ministry of Space released
the 20-minute film “Belgrade 2041: Back to the Future,” which is
guided by the questions: “What kind of city do we want to live in? How
do we deal with growing problems, and what are we doing to make our
city an adequate place to live in 20 years” (see detour 108). About a
month later, some of the prophecies made in the film materialized. In
late November 2021, a wave of protests erupted due to governmental
moves that would ease expropriation of properties and mining for toxic
metals. They have been taking place on Saturdays ever since26
reminiscent of Belarus some two and a half years ago. However, this
time instead of the protests taking place in the wake of hijacked
elections, they started with a five-month countdown to what is being
described as detrimental elections. Will the results Will the results
resemble more Croatian or Czech trajectories? Will they bring winds of
change or more “weiter so”27?
26 This text was finalized
in January 2022.
27 German for:
continuation of the same.
detour 108_ via
Belgrade 2041
20
While we have to wait to answer the questions above, as the experience
with the Ministry of Space and others have repeatedly demonstrated,
conquering new terrains in virtual realms does not diminish the need to
improve visibility in the (reclaimed) physical spaces of cities. In
Afghanistan, and in what can be seen as an example of thinking of
resistance as an infrastructure and not as an event, artist Shamsia
Hassani28 used city surfaces as her canvas and changed the streetscapes
of Kabul (see detour 109). She gave wings to countless people, even if
imaginary and short lived. She engaged in skilling new generations
through her work in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Kabul University and in
spreading calls for human rights and freedom for girls and women.
Although Shamsia’s artwork in the streets might have been mutilated or
erased by now, the echo of her imaginaries is still there.
Mobilizers such as Shamsia Hassani, Ministarstvo Prostora, the Dignity
and Hope movement, and ZUsammenKUNFT Berlin use temporary and
temporal imaginaries as a tactic to disrupt the status quo. It is not only
about the “wars,” but also about the battles between the wars. It is
about the resonance of the imaginaries after the initial moment of
encounter or impact, when the new perception materializes with a new
vocabulary and positionality. What is the future of this era of compound
crises and unfolding change? Recent stories such as that of Pegasus
spyware and others add to reasons for pessimism; yet, optimism can be
borrowed from new generations of activists, scholars, and others who
are re-establishing lost connections between knowledge production
and small politics.
28 See: Shamsia Hassani
detour 109_ via
Shamsia Hassani
2121
1.3 A Partisan Journey
While the COVID-19 pandemic is still unfolding at full tilt, it has revealed
grave systemic impotencies and exemplified how reality is anything but
what the SDG slogan “leave no one behind” would suggest. Five years
of statements, group photographs, and billions of dollars for the
promotion of the concept failed to shame the self-acclaimed democratic
regimes into foregoing patent rights on vaccines. At a time when the
media were still reporting that a majority of EU citizens favored a waiver
of patent rights on vaccines, the few debates that took place on the
topic at academic institutions have had no impact. It is worth noting
that European academia have become increasingly selective about
publicly engaging with ethical questions and taking a stance (using its
own power and privileges) on polemic issues, with far-reaching impacts
for justice and the health of democracies. The late Desmund Tutu is
attributed with saying: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you
have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the
tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not
appreciate your neutrality.”29
Since the 1960s, social transformation protests have often started at
and rippled out from universities, with Chile and Hong Kong as two recent
examples. With the neoliberalization of educational systems30 in most
parts of the world, our community seems to have been “toned down,”
depoliticized, and therefore often regarded as “out of tune” by
communities of mobilizers, be those activists, local politicians, artists,
etc. This schism is often swept under the carpet with the excuse of “the
gap between academia and practice,” but in reality it is about patriarchal
systems and precarious labor, among many other shortcomings. The
domain of restructuring and decolonizing higher education is a vast and
29 See Oxford Reference
30 See: Smith, Yves.
2021. “McDonaldization
of German Universities.”
naked capitalism,
November 17.
22
crucial field to explore and shape, but it is not per se at the center of this
logbook. Nonetheless, it is a concern that is reflected in all three stations.
Another overarching question for us is how to confront and deactivate
the global “anti-politics machine” from the different positions and living
conditions. The term was coined by James Ferguson in his works on
neoliberal developmentalism and bureaucratization in Lesotho.31 In
urban realms, global and national governance systems address
“development” using borrowed words and new jargon (e.g., urban
regeneration, resilience programs),32 and the resulting policies more
often than not frame complex and conditional transformation processes
as linear, calculable, and feasible ventures. Unrooted “expat policies”
and “manual approaches” are systemically creating precarious local
realities. Indeed, it is hard to miss the friendly relationship between
missionary urbanism33 and authoritarian guerrilla statesmen34 who are
legitimized by official diplomacy, donor structures, and university
curricula, as well as many other actors.
The questions above go hand in hand with others on how to scale back
commercialization and consumption to afford healthy lifeworlds,
environments, and civic economies that capture wealth at the base.
While there are many different proposals, they all hinge on changing
mindsets and tackling the “last mile problem.”35 (see detour 110).
As stated elsewhere in this station, deconstructing infantilizing frames
that limit perspectives and potential scopes of action and self-reliance is
essential to these processes (e.g., formal vs. informal, developed vs.
underdeveloped or developing, Global North vs. South, etc.).
These and other questions served as guides and the basis for the activities
we conducted in the research project that produced this Mapping Change
logbook. In the exploration phase before officially commencing, we
organized the workshop “The Power of Mapping: Critical Mapping as an
Instrument for (New) Municipalist Movements?” within the framework of
31 See: Ferguson, James.
2009. The Anti-Politics
Machine: Development,
Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in
Lesotho. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
Press.
32 See: Kaika, Maria.
2017. “Don’t call me
Resilient Again!: the New
Urban Agenda as
immunology … or … what
happens when
communities refuse to be
vaccinated with ‘smart
cities’ and indicators.”
Environment and
Urbanization 29 (1):
89–102. DOI: 10.1177/
0956247816 684763.
33 Missionary urbanism
is used to refer to policy
mobility and assemblages
that are led by large
private capital and donor
frameworks. It is the kind
of urban design and
decision making that
gives more power to
expats and experts than
to everyday mobilizers;
where “community-led”
often translates to
concealing
“participatory” elements
in programs without
allowing critical voices to
(co-)lead processes. It
reproduces spatial
development concepts
such as CBDs (central
business districts) and
SIDPs (strategic
investment and
development plans) and
many other (recycled)
models that promise
salvation, while
themselves creating
further obstacles to the
already harsh realities.
34 Guerilla statesmen is
used to refer to political
leaders who started their
careers in militarized
resistance groupings then
moved into neoliberal
suits. They speak the
market and bureaucracy
language fluently, and
they operate
governmental
apparatuses and public
resources like clans and
mafias, albeit legitimate.
See: Aruri, Natasha.
2015. “Rediscovering
Little Sins:
Palestinianhood,
Disobedience, and
Ramallah.” RLS PAL
Papers, November; and,
Hadda, Toufic. 2016.
Palestine LTD.
Neoliberalism and
Nationalism in the
Occupied Territory.
London: I.B.Tauris & Co.
Ltd.
35 See detour 110_via
TEDIndia, a talk by
Sendhil Mullainathan
“Solving social problems
with a nudge”, 2009.
detour 111_ via
Urbanize!
detour 110_via
TEDIndia
2323
the 2008 Berlin Urbanize! Festival (see detour 111). In this three-hour
workshop, we focused on what constitutes critical mapping and what
does not. With a diverse group of participants (urban activists,
practitioners, academics), we discussed how militant research can
endorse progressive socio-political agendas and, in a similar vein, how to
deal with scales and thresholds, (non-)appropriabilities and other
fundamental questions. While militant research is also not at the center
of this logbook per se, it also resonates in the different stations.
After setting up the Mapping Change project and conducting exploratory
desk research, in June 2019, we organized a 1.5-day “show-and-tell-
and-imagine” workshop titled “Understanding Critical Cartographies
that influence Urban Transformation,” inviting a colorful group of thirteen
innovative hybrid academics, practitioners, and artists (see detour 208).
As described in station*two, in this workshop we used our own and other
projects to reflect on ways to see and design mapping processes beyond
binaries, through (land)scapes, and across literacies. We questioned
what skilling in critical mapping means and what it requires. We discussed
how mapping can be seen less as “sketching” (quickly capturing and
coding data) and more as “craft*ing”: understood as a practice based on
key procedural features of slow time for nurturing tacit knowledge and
on embeddedness in the social for engendering intersectional knowledge.
Based on the last exercise, in January 2020, we organized a medium-
sized 2.5-day symposium titled “Cartographies of the Urban:
Intersectionality and Climate Change Adaptation.” The goal of this third
“space of encounter” was to expand our views on thematically relevant
discussions through an intimate and engaging program. It was around
three times the size of the preceding workshop and involved around 45
people (mostly scholars) from varying disciplines and living situations
(see detour 306). The program was designed around the overarching
question of how to layer Cindi Katz’s notion of “countertopography” with
detour 208_ via a
June Encounter
detour 306_ via a
January Encounter
24
the concept of “situating mapping in craft*ing,” while also addressing the
highly technocratic (managerial) domain of “climate change adaptation”
together with “intersectionality” as a frame of analysis. Our main
discussions and several of the contributions are described in station*three.
In the initial proposal, the last activity was conceived and communicated
as an international symposium and was then adapted with lessons and
conditionalities to what ultimately resembled more of a workshop. The
unclarities that were caused by using the word “symposium” in
communication materials were the subject of an open feedback
discussion that included other aspects and that delivered constructive
criticism on the formats and languages of knowledge mobilization
activities.
The other two stations in this logbook, station*two and station*three, are
largely based on the conversations that took place during the
aforementioned workshops and the discussions around them. In
this station*one we sought to lay out the key themes, spheres, political
questions and structural elements that formed the trajectory of the
Mapping Change journey, which was informed by lessons and knowledge
from many interlocutors to whom we remain in deep gratitude.
2525
26
station*two
2727
situating
mapping in
craft*ing
28
2.1 Expedition or Exploration?
Shortly after the deadly 1967 Detroit Riot, then 18-year-old community
mobilizer Gwendolyn Warren teamed up with Dr. William Bunge to create
the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute. Following the principle
that “it is not the function of geographers to merely map the earth, but to
change it,”1 they organized classes, workshops, and research that
mapped racial inequalities and injustices, often using unorthodox
methods. They programmed the themes and itineraries to challenge
perceptions and decision-making paradigms on existential affairs and to
highlight the needed spatial transformations. Although short-lived, it
remains a frequently cited “model for running a community-controlled
extension school to the university that was driven by values and focused
on how to make abstract college subjects relevant to communities facing
daily challenges to their survival”2 (emphasis added, see detour 201).
Historically and today, providers of maps and visual illustrations to
decision-makers dress themselves in the robes of scholarly neutrality,
but there is nothing neutral about mapping as illustrated in recent
publications such as “Data Feminism” by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren
F. Klein (see detour 202), “Cartographie Radicale / Explorations” by
Nepthys Zwer and Philippe Rekacewicz (in French, see detour 203), and
“States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum”
by Léopold Lambert (in French, see detour 204). As extensive as critical
cartography literature is, maps are an exercise of power and therefore,
with any map, one should investigate and question the overtly and
covertly advocated politics, as well as whose interests are being served.
Put shortly, what is the cartographic intention?
1 See: Kanarinka. 2013.
“The Detroit Geographic
Expedition and Institute:
A Case Study in Civic
Mapping.” MIT Center for
Civic Media, August 7.
2 Ibid.
detour 201_ via
Detroit
detour 202_ via
Data Feminism
detour 203_ via
Cartographie
Radicale
detour 204_
via States of
Emergency
2929
Today’s mapping practices build on centuries of long-standing traditions
from empires that sought to inventorize and classify human communities,
species, environmental features, and topographies, and their potential
(ab)uses. As Benedict Anderson3 explains in his book “Imagined
Communities,” maps—similar to other colonial socio-spatial reengineering
tools (e.g., museums, monumental architecture)—fragment socio-
environmental landscapes and set pathways for appropriation. Examples
include the early European colonial expeditions, like the ‘scientific’ one
led by Humboldt to the Americas (see detour 205), and continue in
contemporary settler-colonial practices. With regard to colonial mapping,
one example that comes to mind is the 1940–1948 “Village Files” (see
detour 206), which saw Palestinian communities and landscapes
mapped by the zionist Haganah militias prior to the ethnic killing and
expulsion (commonly referred to as “ethnic cleansing”4) that started in
1947/8.5 A second more recent example is the spatial surveys and maps
linked to the proposals for the Coastal GasLink pipeline,6 the construction
of which is dispossessing and displacing the Wet’suwet’en—a First
Nations people in today’s Canada where struggles for justice remain
unresolved, as explained in detour 207_via Audra Simpson.
There are countless other stories before, in between, and after these two
examples from the Mediterranean Sea and North America. The reason
why we chose these two is because, as Audra Simpson argued in her
Keynote7 address “We Are Not Red Indians (We Might All Be Red Indians):
Anticolonial Sovereignty Across the Borders of Time, Place and
Sentiment,” we need to ask “how these processes may be re-narrated
and comprehended in a global, comparative framework including not
only analysis, but also struggles for justice” (see detour 207).
The twentieth century saw many revolutions and increasingly weaponized
wars that caused mass destruction. It saw the shifting of world orders
from overt colonialism to neo-colonialism in the shape of global neoliberal
3 See: Anderson, Benedict.
2006. Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed.
London: Verso.
4 On a saved yet no longer
accessible Facebook post in
July 2021, a ‘friend of a
friend’ wrote a comment
imploring everyone to stop
using and find an alternative
term to “ethnic cleansing.”
Eradicating communities
should not be downplayed by
using the term “cleanse”
which implies “making clean.”
Murder and cleaning should
not be a normal co-
association. On a different
level, this points to the
question: What happens when
our archives are easily
censored and manipulated?
In a response to digital
surveillance and repression,
during the summer 2021
events, Arabic speakers
developed the tactic of
leaving the dots of letters out
of words, thus making the
contents unidentifiable to
algorithms (as shown in one of
the twelve elements of detour
103_via alKarama wa alAmal).
5 While global diplomacy
treats alNakba as the period
between 1947 and 1949/50,
recent news headlines in
January 2022 from the Naqab
Desert support the Palestinian
narratives that it was not an
isolated event but rather a
peak in a longer timeline
before it and since. The
evidence requiring this
paradigm shift is abundant
and engraved in physical
(infra)structures of
communities and fluid
borders as indicated by
multiple contemporary
scholars. Example: See
Weizman, Eyal. 2020.
“Ground Truth: Reading Aerial
Images of the Naqab from the
Ground Up.” Jerusalem
Quarterly 81: 37-51.
6 See: Brown, Alleen, and
Amber Bracken. 2020. “No
Surrender: After Police
Defend a Gas Pipeline Over
Indigenous Land Rights,
Protesters Shut Down
Railways Across Canada.” The
Intercept, February 23.
7 The Keynote address “We
Are Not Red Indians (We
Might All Be Red Indians):
Anticolonial Sovereignty
Across the Borders of Time,
Place and Sentiment” by
Audra Simpson was delivered
at the 7th International
Conference of Critical
Geography (ICCG 2015) on 26
July 2015 at the Friends
Schools Upper Campus in
Jerusalem North. The title
was a reply to Yasser Arafat’s
statement in one of his last
interviews, “we [Palestinians]
are not red Indians,” as an
entry point into a passionate
opening address to an
international group of more
than 350 scholars and
activists that combined
examples from Canada,
Palestine and other places.
detour 205_ via
Humboldt
detour 206_ via
The Village Files
detour 207_via
Audra Simpson
30
capitalism and its systems of governance and administration. And today,
as Industry 4.0 unfolds at full speed, mapping remains a double-edged
sword. It serves both as a central tool in extracting data to consolidate
power and preserve the oppressive status quo and as a tool for resistance,
as outlined in station*one_rhythms of resistance, where one finds the
framework of this Mapping Change logbook.8
After setting up the project and conducting exploratory desk research, in
June 2019 we organized the 1.5-day “show-and-tell-and-imagine”
workshop titled “Mapping for Change? Understanding Critical
Cartographies that influence Urban Transformation.” We invited a colorful
group of thirteen innovative hybrid academics, practitioners, and artists
(see detour 208) to an interactive program with six sessions that
combined inputs, exercises, breaks, and meals. This station*two_
situating mapping in craft*ing describes some of the key topics we visited
and our team’s reflections on them since. Here we build on the
conversations that started with a set of questions and then meandered
through experiences that were shared in discussions, be they the result
of the labor of those around the table or others. Our goal was to exchange
ideas on how to see and design mapping processes beyond binaries,
through landscapes, and across literacies and mediums.
Therefore, in this workshop we also questioned what skilling means in
critical mapping, what it requires, and how mapping can be seen less as
“sketching” (recording and categorizing data) and more as “crafting,” a
sensorial performance. We exchanged opinions on how such skilling in
and practices of mapping can depend on two key procedural features:
first, slow time that nurtures values and inner compasses (keyword 1:
tacit knowledge); and second, the essentiality of embeddedness in the
social for engendering intersectional knowledge (keyword 2: dialectic
laboring). We will elaborate on these keywords in the following two
entries of this station but would like to note that these texts do not give
8 This Mapping Change logbook
was produced within the
framework of the research
project “Mapping for Change?
Critical Cartography Approaches
to Drive Socio-Environmental
Urban Transformations,” funded
by the Volkswagen Stiftung and
based at K LAB, Institute for
Urban & Regional Planning, TU
Berlin.
detour 208_via a
June Encounter
3131
justice to the rich discussions that took place. Four short reflection texts
that were drafted by some of the workshop participants a few days after
our program concluded were very helpful to the process of navigating
through the complex webs of topics and in knitting together the selection
included here. It was an exercise to re-integrate field notes (see detour
filters) as part of the working agenda and to collectivize thoughts before
they are filtered out by exhausted routines and limited frameworks of
end products, such as this logbook.
The final third of our workshop program was dedicated to scenario
building. We asked: If the funds and wo/manpower were available, what
would your contemporary urban mapping expedition look like? Sub-
questions included: Where would you go? What is the intention? Who
would be part of your team? What would you take along? Which mediums
and languages would you use to amplify appropriability and steer clear of
exploitation? The four imaginary mapping expeditions sounded like great
plans to do one day, and naturally everyone had spontaneous adjustments
and more questions.
For example, with regard to the topic of needing to problematize used
language, we found it impossible to decouple the term “expedition” from
its colonialist past, even with stories such as that of the Detroit Geographic
Expedition and Institute. We thought about “counter-expedition” as it
would parallel the frequently invoked terms counter-cartography and
counter-mapping. However, “counter” is often interpreted in the sense
of reacting to a preceding event, while the goal is to reflect pro-activeness
in tackling anticipated challenges in realities of compound crises.
We therefore carried this question with us to station*three_
countertopography and decided to temporarily use Philippe Rekacewicz’s
suggestion of the term “exploration” instead, until we find a better one.9
9 Depending on the linguistic
and cultural viewpoint,
“explorations” could also be
associated with the “age of
explorations,” that of
exponentially growing numbers
of European colonial expeditions
and violence.
32
In the same line, we had a short but lively discussion about the terms
“strategies, tactics, and typologies,” in which we did not reach a
conclusion. However, everyone agreed that critical mapping cannot be
decoupled from tactical spheres if the exercise (exploration) is driven
by values and defines a cartographic intention that resituates small
politics within knowledge production processes, similar to the Detroit
Geographic Expedition and Institute. An interesting reflection on the
tense relationships between these terms can be found in detour 209_
via Field Notes 1.
Similarly, when starting the project, instead of using the word
“craftsmanship” we used craftswo/manship. Later, discussions led to
the need to use craftspersonship. Such processes of questioning and re-
tailoring our terminology accompanied us and were essential for critical
conversations to unfold and mature. Ultimately, we decided to title this
entry craft*ing because critical cartographies that influence urban
transformation are (among other things) ones that succeed in forging a
continuum between niche and mass production as signified by
“craftspersonship” and “craft,” respectively.10 Craft*ing involves
combining case-specific nuances and readerships with dynamic
processes and uses: in other words, combining tacit knowledge and
dialectic laboring. As critical mapping is overwhelmingly associated with
tackling injustices, we wish to point out that it is a tactical and gendered
practice that serves at scales (small and large) that impact trajectories
and improve livelihoods (of one person or more). It is about continuities,
where ends meet new beginnings. So, what does a return to mapping as
a “craft” require in terms of skilling?
10 As described by Richard
Sennett, see detour 210_via
handiCRAFT 2016, minute
05:00.
detour 209_ via
Field Notes 1
3333
2.2 Tacit Knowledge
In “Craftsmanship may suggest a way of life that waned
with the advent of industrial society—but this is
misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic
human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own
sake.”
– Richard Sennett, The Craftsman11
As part of his address at the opening of the exhibition “handiCRAFT:
Traditional Skills in the Digital Age” in 2016,12 Richard Sennett relates
craftsmanship13 in music with that in programming and notes the laboring
processes as performances in artisan spatializations (see detour 210).
He describes it as a quality that is embedded in the making, as an additive
skill that is developed through “slow time,” in learning to dwell on the
things we do. He explains how capitalism has no interest in craftsmanship
because it is looking for “instant hits” of innovation that feed continued,
rapid consumption and interchangeable names. It is interested neither
in skilling people and the qualities of the performance nor in the durability
of the produced and accumulated objects (the foundational concept of
sustainability). The productive imperative privileges the “creative act”
(delivering a marketable product) over the additive act, that of
experimenting with hybrid combinations, modes, and methodologies
and accumulating techniques along lifetimes of changing technologies.
Sennett demonstrates that nurturing “tacit knowledge” means
discovering the many ways to perform one activity in order to favor
polychromatic production (the variable combinations of skills and
techniques a craftperson can employ) over technical monochromatism
11 See: Sennett, Richard.
2009. The Craftsman. New
Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
12 The exhibition
handiCRAFT: Traditional Skills
in the Digital Age took place at
the Museum for Applied Arts
(MAK) in Vienna from 14
December 2016 to 9 April
2017.
13 Richard Sennett uses
“craftsmanship” and we are
aware that it is an established
term. However, in view of the
debates that accompanied
this project, we are using
“craftspersonship” in our
writing.
detour 210_ via
handiCRAFT 2016
34
(what an operator does). This requires time to repeat, re-calibrate, and
often start over. Citing examples as a cellist himself and conversations
with programmers, he emphasized the essentiality of time for what he
called tacit-explicit-tacit rhythms of training,14 for trial and error in
problem solving, for learning through absorbing and responding to
resistances to ultimately “recover the social world of craftsmanship.”
In the past, the kinds of time governance described by Sennett were
more predominant in curricula in schools of architecture and other socio-
spatial disciplines than they are today. The same applies to mapping
exercises and processes. The neoliberalization of training programs (and
all life spheres) continues to shorten duration and resources, while
extending targeted outputs. Around the globe, policy frameworks like
the Bologna Process15 make curricula more structured and less
exploratory under the pretext of internationalization and efficiency,
among other standard sets of indicators of “good practice.” However, it is
hard to ignore the many consolidations of capitalist value systems that
systemically tame the emancipatory learning potentials in classrooms
and later in professional spheres.
In an opinion piece in the ArchDaily about crafting in the digital age,16
Guy Horton wrote that “craft is defined by intention and attention, by
caring about the outcome and in relation, caring about the end-user.” He
described digital craftspeople as those who employ programs and
robotics to push beyond the boundaries of the interfaces of the individual
tools to fulfil a vision or idea and distinguished them from mere consumers.
The differentiation between the ability to operate tools in parallel and
that of setting them into conversation is an issue that relates to another
thematic thread, namely that of the alleged divide between digital and
hand-drawn maps. This is a dichotomy that mapping as a craft dismantles
because “the core question is more about humanism and poetry through
dilemma,” as Annette Kim17 said, and about the “creation of maps that
seek to become,” as Eugenio Tisselli wrote.18
14 Sennett gives the
example of musicians
learning the various
techniques of vibrato, see
detour 210_via
handiCRAFT 2016
15 See: European
Commission. 2022. “The
Bologna Process and the
European Higher
Education Area.”
European Commission.
Accessed November 19
2021.
16 See: Horton, Guy.
2013. “The Indicator:
Craft in the Digital Age.”
Archdaily, February 18.
Accessed 30 November
2021.
17 Annette Kim is
Associate Professor at the
USC Sol Price School of
Public Policy and Director
of the Spatial Analysis
Lab, SLAB. See detour
211_via Los Angeles
18 See: Eugenio Tisselli’s
reflection, detour 212_via
Field Notes 2
detour 212_ via
Field Notes 2
detour 211_ via
Los Angeles
3535
Digital tools have become a dominant medium for producing maps,
particularly in relation to large datasets that are aggregated into coded
categories. On the one hand, large data pools provide essential meta
perspectives for analyses of particular issues and patterns, and they
could assist, optimize, and augment processes of managing a common
space.19 They offer options such as creating time geographies, adding
multimedia inputs, working at varied scales, and enjoying archival
qualities.20 On the other hand, however, categorizations that make it
possible to program digital operation systems lead to the abstraction
and simplification of complex realities into pixels that are loaded with
information. These provide little to no visibility of the conditionalities
that gave rise to the protocoled patterns.
With the diversity in today’s digital cultures and kinds of access to
technologies, it is not possible to define how different people in different
places read and interact with maps. Ultimately, maps are “a performative
language like any other.”21 However, the abundance of digital applications
facilitating the production of maps (often described as democratization)
has on some levels been disempowering because technical limitations
feed into the homogenization of expressions and flattening of languages
(i.e., collapsing of differences, akin to the homogenization of spatial
development strategies). Similarly, the visual neutrality of digital mapping
tools often creates “clean surfaces” and sidelines the chaotic emotions
that people typically associate with the messiness of their everyday lives
and spaces.
While speaking about his work in Tanzania where he observed women
farmers folding their gowns in particular ways to carry their mobile phones
at their waists,22 Eugenio Tisselli argued that “the digital is, in our time,
one of the most human manifestations available.”23 He does not underplay
the complications and dependencies that result from such processes of
technologization, the associated risks of detachment between bodies and
19 Ibid.
20 See: Ilana Boltvinik’s
reflection, detour 213_via
Field Notes 3
21 See Nepthys Zwer and
Philippe Rekacewicz's
reflection, detour 209_via
Field Notes 1
22 See detour 214_via
Furtherfield
23 See Eugenio Tisselli’s
reflection, detour 212_via
Field Notes 2
detour 213_ via
Field Notes 3
detour 214_ via
Furtherfield
36
their social and physical environments due to mediatization and
hyperconnectivity, or the resulting vulnerability to data abuse.
Referring to one of her projects around Moritzplatz in Berlin, Larissa
Fassler argued that while digitally produced maps are often similar in
their language, the monotony can be broken by incorporating a hand-
drawn layer (see detour 215). Drawings overlaying or underlying a digital
map can act as a “layer of seduction” that distorts the visual code, slows
the reader down, adds intimacy, and encourages imagination by removing
the impression of completion. In addition, drawing by hand makes one
see things in a different way because of the time spent and the attention
invested in the activity of making (e.g., downloading vs. tracing a nolli
map), which helps analyze and capture the relative situatedness of
places and events. Particularly when speaking about participatory or
community-led activities, we should note that although digital maps are
often considered more accurate or closer to reality than hand-drawn
maps, observations have shown that in group meetings people feel easier
about changing hand-drawn maps as they consider digital maps to be
“closed” or final. This might change in the next few years or decades as
more people gain literacy and access to digital tools, but for the time
being, that is not the case.
Therefore, it is important to recognize that digital tools are not a substitute
for manual skills. Besides the fact that manual mapping techniques
increase the independence of field work in terms of visual capturing and
expression (with less technological intimidation), they are essential for
understanding, learning, and creating tacit-explicit-tacit rhythms of
practicing knowledge about city spaces, variations in compositions, and
reading possibilities. Hence, a return to mapping as a craft that combines
craftpersonship does not mean using specific tools or techniques (shape
of the toolbox). Rather, it involves lots of time embedding inner compasses
that pivot around critical understandings of the physics and sociology of
detour 215_ via
Moritzplatz
3737
explorations and the outside world. It means that mapping processes
can be (dis)assembled and adjusted to best serve the cartographic
intention and contribute to provoking scaled creative disruption and
nudging mindsets.24
Since many critical mapping projects set off to contribute to social
change, Elisa T. Bertuzzo asked: “Do we expect too much of maps?”25 We
believe the answer is no for various reasons. As Nepthys and Philippe
wrote, maps are never used alone, but rather as a basis to start or describe
a discussion. As Ilana noted, the act of mapping entails observation,
negotiation, and socialization as necessary mediums for building
solidarity, changing value systems and therefore mindsets. And as Elisa
herself argues, mapping as a craft involves collectivizing, as illustrated in
the following entry.
Ultimately, skilling in critical mapping is less concerned with destinations
and products and more with the journey and the tactical interim stations
that bridge utopic futuristic spatial imaginaries with solving violent
realities. In this sense, Flussbad Berlin26 offers an impressive scenario.
However, in spite of the progressive potential of a city like Berlin, after
more than three decades since the first sketch, co-founder Jan Edler
reminds us that the battle is long from over.
Seeing oneself more as a subjective social being and less as an assumed
neutral professional is essential in acknowledging the political nature of
practices such as mapping, urban planning, and design. It is necessary to
produce generations of practitioners who are able to connect to the lives,
needs, and languages of masses and niches, who possess the ability to
debate openly and democratically, and who have an attitude of conscious
positioning against hegemonic power. With this in mind, how can we
rethink the realms that encourage radical yet feasible and reflexive
interpretations of mapping?
24 For more on creative
disruption, see
station*one_rhythms of
resistance/1.1
commun(icat)ing
solidarity.
25 See Elisa T. Bertuzzo’s
reflection, detour 216_via
Field Notes 4
26 See detour 003_via
Berlin: Flussbad Berlin,
Process and
Flussbadpokal.
detour 216_ via
Field Notes 4
38
2.3 Dialectic Laboring
“At its core […] disposable time is social time; it is a source
and outcome of the creation of wealth. Disposable time is
best understood not as waste but as wealth and potential
wealth, as something to be shared, to be played with, to
be reimagined as the very fiber of what it means to be a
person, to be social.”
– Cindi Katz 2011: 57 (emphasis in original)
Around 2014/2015, the art research collective TRES27 developed the
“Rough Fish!” game, which employs experiential mapping to stir the
public debate on waste and pollution. Ilana Boltvinik and Rodrigo Viñas
describe it as two-dimensional social cartography that combines “getting
your hands dirty” with a virtual mise en scène (see detour 217). They
started with a field study on canal ecosystems to draw their parameters.
Then they designed a mapping process that combined “active fishers”
and “observers” around a set of tasks that included collecting litter, geo-
locating and archiving each piece through an app, and replacing each
piece with an orange ball that registered the continued journey. The
resulting maps of catching locations, litter categories, and trajectories
were then exhibited together with the collected items. Parallel to the
exhibit, they organized (public) events for collective reflection. This game
is part of a larger portfolio of art-based endeavors in which TRES employs
intimate engagement (production of more complex relationships with,
for example, objects or social prejudices) and varied visual communication
strategies to link scientific knowledge about waste with the less-
pronounced issues of infra/structural violence. They regularly use games
27 See: TRES art
collective
detour 217_ via
Rough Fish
3939
as these provide settings that allow people to lower their guard and
exchange more freely.
Linked to the spheres of gaming, Cindi Katz28 notes that there is a need to
(re)legitimize “disposable time” and “play time” as these constitute “a
non-instrumentalist state of being and an openness to becoming.’29
While analyzing impacts of economic restructuring, deskilling, and social
reproduction among other relevant issues, her arguments resonate with
those for ‘slow time’.30 We had the pleasure of conversing with Cindi Katz
about her work and the intersections with critical mapping as described
in station*three_countertopography.31 Meanwhile, this entry continues
with a focus on some of the principles surrounding value-driven processes
of mappings, which see explorations as an act of “destabilizing centers,
exclusions, and knowledge domination.”32
As mentioned earlier in this station and as Ilana Boltvinik summarized in
her reflection,33 there are three main issues that should be defined at the
outset of a mapping exploration: the cartographic intention (narratives,
authorship), the technical boundaries and possibilities, and the shift in
focus from the map to the act (performance) of mapping. While Henri
Lefebvre’s triad of perceived-conceived-lived space and his theories on
spatial production have become widely known,34 setting this analytical
framework into dialectic operational plans in professions preoccupied
with spatial organization and resource flows—including mapping—
remains a terrain under development. While lived spaces are physically
made mainly of concrete, people’s perceptions and behaviors within
them are dynamic and vary with time, age, technologies, culture, and
social ethos, among other factors.
When setting off to design a mapping exploration, it is helpful to consider
David Harvey’s35 call for understanding the tensile relationships between
six “moments” (physics) that surround the organization of human labor
28 Katz, Cindi. 2011.
“Accumulation, Excess,
Childhood: Toward a
Countertopography of risk
and waste.” Documents
d'Anàlisi Geogràfica, vol.
57/1: 47-60.
29 Ibid. (2011: 56)
30 See previous entry:
station*two_situating
mapping in craft*ing/2.2
Tacit Knowledge
31 Cindi Katz was a
speaker and discussant at
the second workshop
organized within the
framework of this
Mapping Change project,
titled “Cartographies of
the Urban:
Intersectionality and
Climate Change
Adaptation”, 16-18 Jan
2020, at K LAB, TU Berlin.
32 See Ilana Bolvinik’s
reflection, detour 213_via
Field Notes 3.
33 Ibid.
34 See: Lefebvre, Henri.
2009. The Production of
Space. 2nd ed. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
35 See: Harvey, David.
2009. Cosmopolitanism
and the Geographies of
Freedom. New York:
Columbia University
Press, 237-239.
40
processes: 1. technology (hard and soft, human knowledge), 2. nature
(ecosystems, phenomena, and human impacts), 3. the act of producing
(from raw materials to utility), 4. the sustenance of daily life (socio-
ecological life processes), 5. social relations (networks, hierarchies,
gender, and racial exclusions), and 6. mental conceptions of the world
(including languages, ideological meanings, moral judgments). The
interaction between these moments is continuous and relational, where
a change in one impacts the others. Planning with these moments in
mind, while taking note of changes occurring over the lifetime of a
mapping exploration (from conception, through field work, until
communication), helps provide a deeper understanding of the
situatedness of the activities within particular geopolitical conditions,
anticipate challenges and respond to them.
Cindi Katz, David Harvey and many others have been arguing for creating
new systems that capture wealth within communities and fend off the
capitalist logic of accumulation by dispossession. With the turn of the
millennium, terms like “participatory” and “community-led” became
omnipresent in developmental discourses, and since the 2009-2010
financial crisis, the domains of “common good” and mechanisms of
“public interest” have regained attention. However, when emphasizing
the need to collectivize our labor processes as mappers and scholars,
Elisa Bertuzzo highlighted in her reflection36 the need to understand our
work as a “highly specialized endeavor of individuals or teams” and that
by collectivizing she intends “that the very process of knowledge
production, not just the final outcomes, is opened up by the researcher
to include the questions, doubts, representations, constraints, biases of
the social groups involved; and to allow these to impact, contaminate,
and influence the research.” (emphasis added, see detour 216)
While making her argument on what collectivizing constitutes, Elisa also
notes that participatory features (whatever operational interpretations
36 See Elisa T. Bertuzzo’s
reflection, detour 216_via
Field Notes 4
37 Punam Khosla is a
scholar-activist and
University lecturer in the
Social Justice and
Community Studies
Department at Saint
Mary’s University in
Halifax. Punam’s teaching
focuses on the operations
and contestations of race,
class, gender and
sexuality as multiscalar,
material, interlocking
economic, social and
spatial contours and
structured inequalities.
Her current research
theorizes the corporeal
logic of everyday
gendered, racialized and
sexualized violence. She
has extensive community
and professional
experience as an
educator, organizer,
cultural curator, policy
analyst, researcher and
public speaker in
academic, government,
media, arts and
community-based
organizations. Khosla’s
intellectual work builds
on a long activist history
and seeks to theorize the
cul-de-sacs and
questions that haunt
social movements in their
quest for deep social
transformation.
detour 216_ via
Field Notes 4
4141
they might have) are not a prerequisite for the legitimacy of the issues
being raised by a map. This also resonates with Punam Khosla 's phrase37
“objectivity is necessary but overrated.” As we note in several entries in
this logbook, while legitimacy is often linked to objectivity and neutrality,
more of the opposite is needed if we are serious about facing the global
challenges and improving paradigms of climate change adaptations
(behavioral and infra/structural) beyond niches and professional
disconnections (silos).
At the heart of the notion of “collectivizing” (similar to “commoning") lies
the need to identify and knit together individual vested interests. Scales
can be micro, meso, exo, or macro and can range from a parcel or street
to a neighborhood or district and beyond. Scale is defined by the context,
the available resources (labor, time, money), the anticipated hurdles,
and, above all, the disabling and enabling conditionalities around
craftspersons and performers. Seen from this perspective, one could say
that collectivizing in crafting stands for temporary solidarity frameworks,
which are intended to achieve something specific based on imaginaries
formed around acts of small politics. Thus, institutional (in)compatibility
is less relevant than reflexive and nonbureaucratic terms of reference
that give rise to and constitute creative disruption.38
Varying literacies and interpretations are decisive dimensions for
mapping change, and it is naïve to assume that a politicized map will be
read consistently across social groups and economical-political agendas.
In this regard and at a workshop that we organized within the framework
of a parallel project,39 Clancy Wilmott explained that cartography as a
discipline represents a particular concept of space and place that is very
inherent to Eurocentric epistemes of space and utility. This has nothing
to do with, for example, worlds that produced the utilitarian Micronesian
Stick Chart (see detour 218_via Fibers and Shells). Rephrasing Audre
Lorde, Clancy said: “The map is not neutral, it is a tool of the master’s
37 Punam Khosla is a
scholar-activist and
University lecturer in the
Social Justice and
Community Studies
Department at Saint
Mary’s University in
Halifax. Punam’s teaching
focuses on the operations
and contestations of race,
class, gender and
sexuality as multiscalar,
material, interlocking
economic, social and
spatial contours and
structured inequalities.
Her current research
theorizes the corporeal
logic of everyday
gendered, racialized and
sexualized violence. She
has extensive community
and professional
experience as an
educator, organizer,
cultural curator, policy
analyst, researcher and
public speaker in
academic, government,
media, arts and
community-based
organizations. Khosla’s
intellectual work builds
on a long activist history
and seeks to theorize the
cul-de-sacs and
questions that haunt
social movements in their
quest for deep social
transformation.
38 For more on creative
disruption see
station*one_rhythms of
resistance/1.1
commun(icat)ing
solidarity.
39 The scoping workshop
“Setting the Grounds”,
5-6 March 2020, at K LAB,
TU Berlin. It was
organized within the
framework of the
practice-oriented
research project “Critical
Mapping in Municipalist
Movements”, supported
by the Robert Bosch
Stiftung. A report on the
workshop can be viewed
here.
40 Lorde, Audre. 1984.
“The Master’s Tools Will
Never Dismantle the
Master’s House.” in Sister
Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. Ed. Berkeley,
CA: Crossing Press.
detour 218_ via
Fibers and Shells
42
house,”40 one that was designed to displace and dispossess people
across the world, formerly in colonial eras and now in geographies of
neocolonialisms.
Therefore, crafting in critical mapping requires acknowledging that maps
(be it a casually produced plan by hand or in a CAD system that an
architect sees as “just a sketch”) can be read and used in various ways,
including against their cartographic intention. Notwithstanding, when
mapping is seen as an act, it most often serves the externalization of
concerns, creates dialogue, and nudging sociopolitical paradigms on
existential issues.
The points above refer to the need to finetune one’s tacit knowledge of
what pluralism means and implores tactical thinking about the visual and
textual languages of socioenvironmental projects. This includes
internalizing resistance and normalizing shortcomings (failures) as
integral elements of journeys. Critical mappers always ask anew: When
does visibility lend power and when does it do the opposite? What are
better systems of mapping and representation that balance the right to
be forgotten or invisible with the need to communicate scientific
information to enable anticipatory rather than responsive actions? What
forms may come across as intimidating in which contexts? Why are some
kinds of activist maps illegible or prone to misinterpretation at scales
beyond niches?
In exploring works that provide guidance in navigating such questions,
we found Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s six Principles of
Feminist Data Visualization very helpful as they capture the core elements
of what a mapping praxis informed by feminist theory should do:41
1. Rethink Binaries – beyond oppositional categories and
exclusions, and re-establish continuums between nature and
culture, reason and emotion, the body and world.
40 Lorde, Audre. 1984.
“The Master’s Tools Will
Never Dismantle the
Master’s House.” in Sister
Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. Ed. Berkeley,
CA: Crossing Press.
41 See detour 202_via
Data Feminism
4343
2. Embrace Pluralism – confront implicit and explicit
subjectivities of the designer’s decisions on data display,
recognize that self-disclosure facilitates pathways to
multiple truths.
3. Examine Power and Aspire to Empowerment – face
hierarchies, acknowledge users as a source of knowledge, and
reconnect with the communities that informed and enabled the
work.
4. Consider Context – counter homogenization by resituating the
data design process, namely, through the particular social,
cultural, and material context in which knowledge is produced
and the ways an output might be received.
5. Legitimize Embodiment and Affect – acknowledge the
importance of experiences and expertise that are derived from
sensation and emotion as on par with more quantitative
methods of knowing and experiencing the world and as a way to
engage readers.
6. Make Labor Visible – pay attention to (the overwhelmingly
gendered) undervalued forms of labor and give credit for the
resulting artifact. At every stage, make sure the process makes
the bodies that shape and care for the data visible.
The issues and arguments laid out in this station*two_situating mapping
in craft*ing point to the need to experiment more with mapping
methodologies that sensibilize understandings of the intersectional
socio-spatial composition of cities, without the jargon that dominates
work around the notion of “intersectionality.” We need to expand our
understanding of the spatially embedded violence that perpetuates
dispossession and precarity. For professionals and craftspersons vested
40 Lorde, Audre. 1984.
“The Master’s Tools Will
Never Dismantle the
Master’s House.” in Sister
Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. Ed. Berkeley,
CA: Crossing Press.
41 See detour 202_via
Data Feminism
44
in the urban, a paradigm shift is needed from the dominant techno-
managerial approaches (smart-everything) to ones that incorporate
carefully designed operational frames that are less shackled by concrete
indicators and bureaucracies and more informed by disposable time and
play time. Embeddedness in the social means combining key issues from
the humanities, with specific spatio-temporal political claims for dignified
living conditions.
This understanding served as the basis for our second workshop, which
is described in the following station*three_countertopography, where we
had the pleasure of conversing directly with Cindi Katz, Ilana Boltvinik,
Catherine D’ignazio, Punam Khosla, and Philippe Rekacewicz—together
with other speakers and participants—about what value-driven tactical
mapping looks and could look like. Meanwhile, at the end of this station,
we note that a return to mapping as craft*ing for creative disruption must
find ways to identify and connect rooted persons and movements for
justice. It is a process of continuous re-making and a very flexible tool
that enables resistance.
Thus, to embed tacit analytical practices (inner compasses) in operational
paradigms (dialectic laboring), as craftspersons we need the skill of
aimless observation: a foundational method in the humanities used to
establish a knowledge-culture in which creating a design, a plan, or a
map is not the target, although it could be a potential outcome. We need
the skill of care to see the city less through the lens of utility and efficiency
and more through the subjectivities and the “perceived–conceived–
lived” welfare of the people residing in particular places and territorialities.
And, we need the skill of reading gendered spatial violence; systemic,
social and environmental violence are 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.
40 Lorde, Audre. 1984.
“The Master’s Tools Will
Never Dismantle the
Master’s House.” in Sister
Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. Ed. Berkeley,
CA: Crossing Press.
41 See detour 202_via
Data Feminism
4545
Nurturing skills of observation, care, and reading spatial violence involves
humanizing production processes and recovering a social world of
craft*ing in mapping. It means rethinking the realms that encourage
radical yet feasible and reflexive interpretations. As children today are
instinctively pinching surfaces to zoom and press for expected hyperlinks
and user interfaces to reveal embedded layers of information, a creative
challenge for future mappers is to create maps that carry multiple,
pluralistic readings. Mappings that raise new questions around the
spatial materializations of social and systemic injustices and violence.
Mappings that raise awareness and boldly articulate matters of concern.
Mappings that encourage public debate and inspire change.
46
station*three
4747
counter
topography
48
3.1 Anticolonial Mapping
In June 2021, Hanan Sabea1 and Martina Rieker2 convened an intimate
virtual encounter between seven scholars with varying imagined
worlds3 to converse about their works, which spanned from India,
Egypt, and other geographies to Argentina. The invitation to the
“Research Methodologies: Ethnography, Precarity, and the Everyday”4
workshop consisted of many questions starting with how “to reveal the
nuances of precarity and the everyday, [...] how to engage the
contemporary and its messiness [...]. How to explore the duration of
waiting, how to think waiting, but also why has waiting as a technology
of governance captured the imagination of so many scholars?” and
finally: “How does methodological experimentation open up spaces to
revisit the topo of decolonization”?
Some of the questions that Hanan and Martina posed resonate with
issues we addressed in our first Mapping Change workshop,5 which
closed in June 2019 with a scenario-building exercise on how mapping
explorations can be conceptualized and programmed such that they
contribute to larger initiatives for justice. Besides the dimensions that
are covered in station*two_situating mapping in craft*ing and center on
slow (disposable) time for situated and networked labor,6 in discussing
their three imaginary scenarios, the participants repeatedly returned to a
very similar question: Under what conditions can a mapping exploration
(process and outcomes) claim to be anticolonial? This question cannot
be decoupled from that of, how does coloniality operate and manifest
itself today?
1 Hanan Sabea is an
Associate Professor of
Anthropology at the
American University in
Cairo. Her research on
dynamics of land and
labor on plantations in
colonial and postcolonial
Africa, state-subject
relations, and the
production histories and
memories, is part of her
forthcoming monograph
Present Pasts: Coloniality
of Power and Laboring
Subjects on Sisal
Plantations in Tanzania.
Her current research
projects include shifting
meanings of the political;
meanings, affects and the
aesthetics of
revolutionary times;
irregular migration;
gender and regional
gatekeeping constructs;
and knowledge
production in the social
sciences. She has
co-edited several
volumes and has
published articles in
Africa, Journal of
Historical Sociology,
African Studies, Feminist
Africa, International
Journal of African
Historical Studies,
International Journal of
Working Class History,
and Cultural
Anthropology.
2 Martina Rieker is the
director of the Institute
for Gender and Women’s
Studies at the American
University in Cairo, where
she also served as
Associate Dean of the
School of Social Sciences
and Humanities from
2005-2009. She is the
co-founder and
co-coordinator (with
Kamran Asdar Ali) of the
Shehr Comparative Urban
Landscapes Research
Network, founded in 2003
with a focus on theorizing
the urban from the
perspectives of the
Middle East, South Asia
and Africa. She has
co-edited several
volumes and has
published articles in
Social Text, Journal of
Middle East Women's
Studies, New Left Review,
Jerusalem Quarterly, and
others.
3 Coined by Arjun
Appadurai, See:
Appadurai, Arjun. (1996)
2008. Modernity at Large:
Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Reprint,
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 33.
4 This workshop was part
of a series under the
same title: “Research
Methodologies:
Ethnography, Precarity,
and the Everyday.” The
session in which we took
part took place 7–8 June
2019, organized online by
Hanan Sabea and Martina
Rieker, American
University of Cairo.
5 Workshop: “Mapping
for Change?
Understanding Critical
Cartographies that
influence Urban
Transformation,” 6–7
June 2019, at K LAB, TU
Berlin. See detour
208_via a June Encounter.
6 Summary: The
workshop focused on
exchanging ideas about
how to see and design
mapping processes
beyond binaries, through
landscapes, and across
literacies and mediums. It
also questioned what
skilling means in critical
mapping, what it requires,
and how mapping seen as
“crafting” hinges on two
key procedural features:
first, slow time, which
nurtures values and inner
compasses (keyword 1:
tacit knowledge); and
second, the essentiality of
embeddedness in the
social for engendering
intersectional knowledge
(keyword 2: dialectic
laboring).
4949
As many detours in this logbook narrate, contrary to dominant discourses
that treat colonialism as a thing of the past, it is a continued reality that
materializes in various forms of political economies and governance
mechanisms, infrastructures of discontinuity and dependency, increased
vulnerabilities, and overwhelming precarity. Therefore, building on the
questions left unanswered from the first workshop, we designed a second
Mapping Change workshop titled: “Cartographies of the Urban:
Intersectionality and Climate Change Adaptation” (described in this
station*three). A short summary video of the encounter can be watched
in detour 301.
Closely related to our foci, in its first episode “Decolonize Berlin” (released
4 October 2019), the Decolonization in Action Podcast Series7 spoke to
Noa Ha8 about the relationship between German colonial history and
Berlin today, and asked: “In what ways does colonialism continue to
shape Berlin institutions and the city of Berlin itself?” (see detour 302).
In response, Noa Ha explained that colonial relationships are
reconstructed in many intertwined everyday spaces, and they can be
traced through the gendered social hierarchies and their mirror image of
the (un)availability of and the (in)accessibility to infrastructural services,
including noncommercial public space. She noted that an example of
how coloniality is reproduced in Germany today can be seen in the
conversations on migration, which racialize the other. Such discourses
are connected to casual urban educational and knowledge production
frameworks and spaces, which themselves are colonially structured.
Examples vary from museums (e.g., detour 303_via Defund Humboldt),
to botanical gardens, to the high number of streets named to
commemorate figures of European colonial movements, while few are
named after those who resisted them.
Universities and research institutions also have their place in past colonial
activities, as well as in the coloniality of the present, be it in terms of the
7 See: Ha, Noa and Tahani
Nadim. 2019. “Decolonizing
Berlin (Part 1).”
Decolonization in Action,
Podcast Series. Produced by
Edna Bonhomme and Kristyna
Comer. Berlin, Germany.
8 Dr.-Ing. Noa K. Ha is a
postcolonial urban researcher.
She taught and conducted
research at universities and
research institutions in Berlin
and Dresden. She is currently
a guest lecturer in the MA
Spatial Strategies at the
Weissensee Kunsthochschule
Berlin. Currently she is
leading the National Racism
and Discrimination Monitor
(NaDiRa) at the German
Center for Integration and
Migration Research (DeZIM).
Her work focuses on
postcolonial urban research,
migrant-diasporic memory
politics, critical integration
research and racism critique.
Her publications have
appeared in various edited
volumes, journals and
catalogs.
detour 301_ via
Workshop 2
Highlights
detour 302_via
Decolonialization in
Action
detour 303_ via
Defund Humboldt
50
types of political ideologies underlying curricula or in the types of
professionals they train.9 Often urban planners, designers, scholars, and
development professionals resemble trained officers of empires,
although many view their labor as apolitical, benevolent, and serving
“the nation.” Such approaches are not limited to institutions or nationals
of the Global North, but also include people from the Global South who
were trained into what Frantz Fanon termed “Black Skin, White Masks.”10
In his book, Fanon argues that “It is the racist who creates the inferiorized”
and that “the colonized are given the choice between inferiority and
dependency. Outside these options there is no salvation.”11 The last
statement resonates with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s criticism of the
Eurocentric politics of infantilization which “consigned Indians, Africans
and other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting room of history. In doing
so, it converted history into a version of this waiting room.”12 The uprisings
that perforated the past decade point to the fact that the structures of
these waiting rooms–today’s regimes of neocolonialism—are cracking,
but still to be dismantled.
Not only have processes of surveying and mapping human and material
capital served extraction and dispossession, but as Benedict Anderson
wrote,13 maps as visual and spatial projections (together with monumental
architecture and museums) have also been employed to create imagined
communities and constructed national identities that engender ethnicized
socio-political hierarchies.14 While Arjun Appadurai expounds how cities
are mostly translocalities, geographies of arrival and departure for people
and their fortunes,15 the novelist Toni Morrison reminds us in her book
The Origin of Others that building up and reinforcing dehumanizing
categories of otherness have been recurring. She explains how such
processes are necessary for supporting contemporary understandings of
“national” security and belonging, as well as to justify exploitation.16
9 Noa Ha additionally notes
that while ‘decolonization’ of
knowledge, knowledge
production and city-making
practices seems to have
become an acknowledged
necessity; nonetheless, the
term ‘decolonial/ization’ is
often used to fig-leaf what in
essence is a continuation of
past and present hegemonic
hierarchies and discourses.
See detour 302_via
Decolonization in Action.
10 See: Fanon, Frantz. 2008.
Black Skin, White Masks.
Translated and edited by Richard
Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
11 Ibid. pp. 73–74.
12 See: Harvey, David. 2009.
Cosmopolitansim and the
Geographies of Freedom. New
York: Columbia University Press,
40.
13 See: Anderson, Benedict.
2006. Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed.
London: Verso.
14 Arjun Appadurai expands on
Benedict Anderson’s work by
examining the relationships
between five dimensions of
global cultural flows and
considers the five landscapes a)
ethnoscapes, b) mediascapes, c)
technoscpaes, d) financescapes,
and e) ideoscapes as the building
blocks of what he calls “[…]
imagined worlds, that is, the
multiple worlds that are
constituted by the historically
situated imaginations of persons
and groups spread around the
globe.” See: Appadurai, Arjun.
(1996) 2008. Modernity at Large:
Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Reprint,
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 33.
15 See: Appadurai, Arjun. 2003.
“Sovereignty without
Territoriality: Notes for a
Postnational Geography.” In The
Anthropology of Space and Place:
Locating Culture, edited by Setha
M. Low and Denise Lawrence-
Zúñiga, 337-349. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
16 See: Morrison, Tony. 2017.
The Origin of Others. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
5151
Focusing on structures and manifestations of social oppression, Kimberlé
Crenshaw, who is credited with the introduction and development of
intersectional theory,17 notes that systemic change requires tackling the
problem of patterns of recognition and behaviors at the everyday level.
In order to create the needed shifts in mindsets that in turn could
(eventually) trickle up to support work at administrative and policy levels,
society has to reach a critical mass to acknowledge an issue as a problem,
an injustice needing action. As an example, in an address titled “The
Urgency of Intersectionality” in 2016 (see detour 304), Crenshaw
mentioned how the names of Black male victims of police brutality and
anti-Black violence in the United States are more often noted by society
than those of Black women and how the “Say Her Name!” initiative came
as a response to the overwhelming myopia to gendered racial violence.
This problem of recognition—where the facts and the individuals
implicated by problems do not fit the dominant mental frames and
perceived priorities—is mirrored in contemporary approaches to tackling
environmental crises and climate change. International agendas (e.g.,
the 2030 Agenda18) and many environmental justice initiatives focus on
quantifiable numerical data, such as those related to greenhouse gas
emissions, sustainable energy sources (technical and technological
solutions), and “smart” management and optimization. Such frameworks
sideline and blur discussions on coloniality and the afterlives of
colonialism and slavery (social and structural violence),19 as well as the
spatial and policy materializations of these omissions in the urban.20
Discourses such as those mentioned above are not unique to the realms
of environmental politics. They are a continuation of the “anti-politics
machine” that reduces poverty to a technical sectoral problem rather
than what it is: ideological and systemic.21 The opinion that we live in an
era of neocolonialism in the shape of rogue (disaster) capitalism that
feeds off of privatizing protections at the expense of BIPoC bodies and
17 See: Crenshaw, Kimberlé.
1989. “Demarginalizing the
Intersection of Race and Sex: A
Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine,
Feminist Theory and Antiracist
Politics,” University of Chicago
Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139-167.
18 See: The 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development,
United Nations.
19 Take the example of
pay-scales and benefits of
laborers in international
development organizations, how
nationality, race and gender
create variable renumeration
values for same labor.
20 See: Checker M. 2018.
“Environmental Gentrification:
Sustainability and the just city”.
In The Routledge Handbook of
Anthropology and the City, edited
by Setha Low, 199-213. London:
Routledge.
21 The term “anti-politics
machine” was coined by James
Ferguson in his criticism of the
Washington Model of
international development that
since decades continues to be
propagated by the World Bank
and IMF among other
international frameworks. See:
Ferguson, James. (1994) 2009.
The Anti-Politics Machine:
Development, Depoliticization,
and Bureaucratic Power in
Lesotho. Ninth Reprint,
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
detour 304_ via
TEDWomen
52
fortunes was reiterated by the guest speakers and discussants22 at the
plenary: “MORE THAN ACKNOWLEDGING DIFFERENCE! mobilizing
intersectionality as compass in urban climate action” (a video recording
of the event can be viewed in detour 305).23
The public plenary was the official opening of our three-day closed
workshop, which brought together a group of about forty-five international
participants from various fields (see detour 306). It took place after a
warm-up in the shape of a field exercise24 in the area around “Kotti,” as
Berliners dub the Kottbusser Tor juncture (see detour 307). The
workshop25 consisted of eight segments (sessions) varying in length
between ninety minutes to six hours. Similar to the first workshop, the
program combined inputs (public plenary and methods lab), exercises
(field trip and working groups), breaks and meals, as well as “prep notes”
and “counterimaginaries.” The last two refer to two categories in the
detour filters that refer to, respectively, extracts from a compilation of
short papers by the participants that were shared in preparation for the
event26 and four concepts that were developed by working groups and
discussed in the closing assembly: “Trash Monsters,”27 “Open
University,”28 “Panic Room,”29 and “Are We All in the Same Boat?”30
The guiding question during this event was: How can we operationalize
Cindi Katz’s concept of “countertopography” to support the global
rhythms of resistance to neocolonialisms? To concretize our debates and
link to today’s urgencies, participants were invited to explore whether
and how intersectionality as a frame of analysis can alter the ways
communities—scholars, practitioners, politicians, activists, artists—think
about needs and potentials in defining what a justice-seeking climate
change adaptation constitutes for them. As captured in the following
entries in this station, we exchanged views on how maps and the
processes that produce them can contribute to shifting paradigms on the
climate crisis away from an emphasis on technological and technocratic
22 The guest speakers were:
Ilana Boltvinik (video), Catherine
D’Ignazio (video), Imeh Ituen
(live), Keisha-Khan Perry (live),
Cindi Katz (live). Philippe
Rakacewicz was the first
discussant.
23 The plenary was a public
event that was attended by a
mixed crowd of about 120
people, ranging from professors
to students and from
non-academics to colleagues. It
took place at PlaWi, Café
PlanWirtschaft (Planned
Economy), the student’s
cafeteria at the Institute for
Urban & Regional Planning, TU
Berlin.
24 The exercise, which included
lunch at Haus der Solidarität –
KiezKantine (an activist-run
kitchen and space for
socialization and mobilization at
Oranienstraße 45 in Berlin-
Kreuzberg), was conceptualized,
designed, and organized by Lýdia
Grešáková, Tim Nebert, and
Robin Hüppe, to whom we and
all participants of the workshop
are grateful.
25 We would like to note that,
initially, this activity was
conceived and communicated as
an international symposium, but
later the program was amended
to what ultimately resembled
more of a medium-sized
workshop than a symposium.
The unclarities that were caused
by using the word “symposium”
in communication materials
were the subject of an open
feedback discussion that
included other aspects and that
delivered constructive criticism
on the formats and languages of
knowledge mobilization
activities such as ours.
26 In total, the compilation
included 18 short papers of
around 2,000 words in length; in
this entry, we share short
extracts from a select few.
27 Working Group 1: Dulmini
Perera, Eugenio Tisselli,
Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, Karl
Beelen, Lana Judeh and Omnia
Khalil (see detour 309_via
Counterimaginary 2)
28 Working Group 2: Marlene
Wagner, Benedikt Stoll, Alina
Schütze, Matthew Crabbe, Luise
Haufe, Nicolas Fonty, Mandu dos
Santos Pinto.
29 Working Group 3: Diana
Lucas-Drogan, Grit Burgow, Lisa
Wagner, Zuzana Tabackova.
30 Working Group 4: Antonia
Buchard-Levine, Hişar Ersöz,
Nepthys Zwer, Nuno Grancho,
Romain Leclercq (see detour
308_via Counterimaginary 1
detour 305_ via
Plenary
detour 308_ via
Counterimaginary 1
detour 309_ via
Counterimaginary 2
detour 306_ via a
January Encounter
detour 307_ via
Kotti
5353
dimensions that consolidate hierarchies and depart from the historically
far-reaching systems of racial violence and domination and infantilizing
development frameworks.
54
3.2 (In)Visibilizing Zeroes
“Cartography is more than a representation of the
territory: it becomes a political act; either an act of
resistance against power, control, surveillance; or an act of
propaganda at the service of the powerful to enslave
people and impose their (totalitarian) vision of territories.”
– Philippe Rekacewicz, June 201931
In the “Methods Lab,”32 Philippe Rekacewicz shared some of his maps,
including one that traces the spatial reorganization of a terminal in Oslo
Gardermoen Airport in 2005, 2006, and 2007 (see detour 311). No text is
necessary to explain what he wished to express: incremental remodeling
of the space to maximize consumerism, a problem that echoes beyond
the walls of airports. Simple lines, indicative colors, and a few (optional)
sentences articulate the cartographic intention, which is to make a
statement against the monopolization of space by profit-oriented
functions. As Philippe notes, while airports are exclusive spaces by nature
(to those who can afford the costs), the same mechanisms are applied to
public city spaces (e.g., streets, stations), from which undesired bodies
(e.g., informal vendors, homeless persons) are constantly chased away.
In a study conducted within the framework of the international Hungry
Cities Partnership titled “Mapping the Informal Food Economy of Cape
Town, South Africa,”33 Jane Battersby, Maya Marshak, and Ncedo
Mngqibisa offer important insights into the vital role played by informal
vendors in ensuring access to food by the urban poor. The paper, which
aims to inform better policies and debunk misinformation (e.g., that
refugee Somali vendors are driving South Africans out of business),
31 See detour 208_via a
June Encounter.
32 The “Methods Lab”
took place on the morning
of the second day of
workshop two, and
provided space for
participants to talk freely
with Cindi Katz about her
concept of
countertopography and
potential ideas for how it
can be operationalized.
Philippe Rekacewicz also
spoke briefly about some
of his works and insights
as a veteran cartographer.
The video recording of the
session can be viewed in
detour 310_via Methods
Lab.
33 See: Battersby Jane,
Maya Marshak and Ncedo
Mngqibisa. 2016. “HCP
Discussion Paper No. 5:
Mapping the Informal
Food Economy of Cape
Town, South Africa.”
Hungry Cities Partnership.
detour 310_ via
Methods Lab
detour 311_ via
Monopolized Space
5555
provides an elaborate review of the context and a vast amount of collected
data, which they visualized in fifteen bar charts, two graphs, one pie
chart, and two maps. The maps show the spatial distribution of informal
vendors in the two examined wards using icons that represent the
informal retail type, with official streets as the only other layer demarcating
the territory. Although they explain that “[t]he mapping exercise revealed
the existence of distinct geographies of informal trade,”34 the wards’
spatial components and distribution (e.g., formal or informal housing
block, a school or a supermarket, a parking lot or a farm) are not included.
This blurs the correlation between locations of vending and everyday
flows of purchasers. The twenty data illustrations depend on the text for
meaning and, sadly, as visual products they do little in helping “view the
formal and informal sectors as part of the same food system and to
generate policy and planning responses that acknowledge the role of
both in meeting local food security needs.”35
The aforementioned problem reappears in research and publications,
where significant fieldwork and intellectual discussions are restricted by
“budgetary benchmarks” that (predominantly) value communication
through text and (niche) events. It is true that visual formats such as
infographics and graphic summaries are gaining traction. However, too
often research financing and time constraints result in situations where
data visualization is conducted either through desktop programs (such
as in the case of the “Mapping the Informal Food Economy of Cape Town”
paper) or through commercial designers and agencies who have little
connection to the topics of the text, processes of its development, or the
political intention of the authors. In such cases, elements are often
standard sets of graphics, and customization is marginal. Subsequently,
the reach of findings as well as potentials for dissemination and impact
(be they on public discourse or policy) are narrowed down. As elaborated
in station*two, such mapping practices are more the product of one-size-
fits-all sketching than polychromatic crafting. From this perspective, how
34 Ibid. p. 6.
35 Ibid. p. 18.
56
can intersectional experiences with violence be captured and expressed
in mappings that seek to influence realities and policy?
As Keisha-Khan Perry36 illustrated in stories from her work that double-
pivots on activism and scholarship and expands on Kimberlé Crenshaw
and Punam Khosla,37 there is an urgency to understand racial capitalism
and how it crosscuts climate change. She shared stories of Black women
who were dispossessed of their apartments with no wrong-doing due to
“Stop and Frisk” and similar policing practices of incarceration of Black
and brown people; of the successive disasters that keep visiting the “US
Colony of Puerto Rico;” and of violations against human rights defenders,
among others. She argued that “these intersections [with violence] matter
because they impact identity as well as erotic and bodily autonomy; they
impact experiences with violence as well as experiences with justice;
they impact inclusion in governance as well as exclusion from it.”38
Intersectionality as a lens of analysis overlaps racism, sexism, and class
discrimination, which engender precarious lives, in order to reveal and
confront the system beyond professional and disciplinary silos.
Understanding human networks, social hierarchies, and correlations of
temporal (violent) events is fundamental for determining methods and
scales of operating against dispossession (e.g., see detour 312) and,
equally, for recognizing emancipatory social transformation experiments
as “slow cooking,” as resting in dureé.39 Finding ways to depart from
infantilizing, fast-tempo developmentalism (which includes research
funding hierarchies) and defining pathways for interrupting the free game
of guerrilla-statesmen,40 from Sri Lanka (see detour 313) to Colombia
(see detour 314) and elsewhere are fundamental to enabling public
interest oriented frameworks such as those we describe.
In Colombia, 177 human rights defenders were murdered in 2020, a
staggering 53 % of the total 331 cases documented by the Front Line
36 Keisha-Khan Perry
was among the speakers
at the second Mapping
Change workshop. She
was born in Kingston,
Jamaica and migrated to
the United States at the
age of 10. She is professor
of Africana Studies at
Brown University where
she has taught classes
focused on and
researched questions of
race, gender and politics
in the Americas, urban
geography and questions
of citizenship, intellectual
history and disciplinary
formation, and the
interrelationship between
scholarship, pedagogy
and political
engagement.“ Her full Bio
can be viewed on her
webpage here.
37 In her address Keisha-
Khan Perry notes that she
draws from the work of
Punam Khosla, who was
also set to be among the
Plenary Speakers and
participated in several
preparatory meetings
since the
conceptualization phase.
Punam’s work on violence
stems from her long
experience as mobilizer
and intellectual, as an
openly lesbian Canadian
of Indian heritage who
was born in 1961 in then
British East Africa.
Punam’s house was in
today’s Uganda, her
school in today’s Kenya,
and her engagements on
the African continent as
mobilizer and
communicator spanned
from Cape Town to Sudan.
Punam was a contributor
to a Field Exercise we
organized on the margins
of a High-Level event in
Nairobi, November 2016,
see detour 004_via
Walking Debates.
38 See: detour 305_via
Plenary, minute 1:03:40.
39 See: detour 210_ via
handiCRAFT 2016
40 Guerilla statesmen is
used to refer to political
leaders who started their
careers in militarized
resistance groupings then
moved into neoliberal
suits. They speak the
market and bureaucracy
language fluently, and
they operate
governmental
apparatuses and public
resources like clans and
mafias, albeit legitimate.
See: Aruri, Natasha.
2015. “Rediscovering
Little Sins:
Palestinianhood,
Disobedience, and
Ramallah.” RLS PAL
Papers, November; and,
Hadda, Toufic. 2016.
Palestine LTD.
Neoliberalism and
Nationalism in the
Occupied Territory.
detour 312_ via
Prep Notes 1
detour 313_ via
Prep Notes 2
detour 314_ via
Guardia Fuerza
5757
Defenders in their Global Analysis.41 In the report, it was noted that 69 %
of killings targeted people defending land (e.g., against logging, mining),
indigenous people, and environmental rights, 28 % of which were people
involved in women’s rights. They also document how the COVID-19
pandemic served despotic and corrupt regimes—which enjoy diplomatic
legitimacy at international fora—in oppressing and incarcerating en
masse human rights defenders in life threatening conditions. Tragically,
the numbers do not account for many cases where information or contact
to defenders is not available.
Layla Saad, the former deputy director and policy advisor of the UNDP
World Centre for Sustainable Development – RIO+ Centre, used to repeat
at events attended predominantly by high-level and white-collar
individuals that if the claim is achieving environmental sustainability and
ending injustices, then, without centralizing the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948)42 and protecting civic mobilizers and human rights
defenders, there is no grounds for any project.43 The urgency to extend
protection and voice to those who are countering violence in its various
forms is an issue that can also be heard in the work of Leilani Farha, UN
Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. Her work involves
finding political solutions for fighting against vulture capitalism, which is
de facto re-engineering cities (with vulnerable communities suffering
most), and calls for considering housing as a human right.44
While experiences vary widely according to locational conditionalities,
global anticapitalist movements continue to experiment with mapping
methods to help curb the discriminate distribution of power, resources,
and flows in and around urban spaces. Some of these relate to the
expanding realms and utilizations of radical cartography (see detour
315). As argued in the anthology “Mapping Gendered Ecologies, Engaging
with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism” (see detour 316), the
degree of success in forging paradigm shifts is closely interlinked with
41 See: Front Line
Defenders. 2020. Front
Line Defenders Global
Analysis 2020. Front Line
Defender. Accessed
October 22 2021.
42 See: UN (United
Nations). 1948.
“Universal Declaration of
Human Rights.” UN.
Accessed 22 October
2021.
43 In the period between
2016 and 2017, Katleen
De Flander and Natasha
Aruri (co-authors of this
Mapping Change Logbook)
collaborated with Layla
Saad, who was guest
moderator and
contributor to several of
the events organized by
the Global Soil Forum,
IASS (the unit was
dissolved in 2017).
44 For more about the
mission of Leilani Farha,
see the film Push (Push),
which documents many of
her meetings, remarks,
and conclusions. The film
clarifies why and how real
estate (80 % of which is
housing) became the
most profitable economic
sector globally, valued at
four times the global GDP.
Despite the promises of
governments since the
2008/9 financial crisis,
evictions and
inaccessibility to
adequate housing are at
record highs due to
speculation and money
laundering.
detour 315_ via
Anti-Eviction
detour 316_ via
Mapping Gendered
Ecologies
58
the disentanglement from hegemonic ways of seeing lifeworlds, as well
as with re-creating self-reliance through frameworks that counter the
shrinking of socialized security nets and associated legislations.
Many scholars and practitioners have been advancing concepts and
methods to provide for better understandings of multi-layered
complexities, global flows, and crises (e.g., the theory of planetary
urbanization45). Notwithstanding, with the advent of the computerized
sensing and modeling of big data, global trends of producing scientific
knowledge and decision-making (particularly with regard to the urban)
have increasingly relied on “evidence-based” and “smart” (quantitative)
methods.46 However, approaches that focus on what is capturable and
up-scalable (e.g. to draw a theory) are a problem because they flatten
and abstract the messiness of everyday life. In this regard, Annette Kim
noted that “[our] cool maps couldn’t be used to help policies. Our metrics
or map layers couldn’t engage with regulations or policy levers which
wanted numbers.”47 Therefore, in station*two, we argued in favor of
humanizing maps and mapping processes.
Emphasizing the problem of power imbalances and disconnection (as
opposed to continuums), Linda Peake48 and Jeff Brugman49 call for a
change of perspective: namely, to focus on the central role of social
reproduction, social agency, and infrastructural spatializations in either
creating rooted transformation or in increasing disjuncture.50 As the
highly inflexible, labor- and time-intensive, two-dimensional master
plans remain a dominant tool in urban spatial planning and administration,
critical mapping explorations need to find ways to communicate what
everyday life means. Particularly, how do we give visibility to blurred or
invisible structural and spatial relations (and the kinds of triggers) that
produce indignity and impact physical and mental health among other
dimensions of vulnerability and precarity? In other words, how can maps
visualize ethnographic data? The answers vary depending on the context,
45 See: Brenner, Neil, ed.
2013. Implosions/
Explosions: Towards a
Study of Planetary
Urbanization. Berlin:
Jovis.
46 In 2015, the
Symposium “Beware of
Smart People! Redefining
the Smart City Paradigm
towards Inclusive
Urbanism” took place at
TU-Berlin, and included
contributions by Saskia
Sassen, Adam Greenfield,
and others. The event
critically discussed the
opportunities and
challenges offered by the
Smart City paradigm.
Andreas Brück was part
of the organization team.
47 Annette Kim
participated in Workshop
1, see detour 208_via a
June Encounter.
48 See: Peake, Linda,
Darren Patrick,
Rajyashree N. Reddy,
Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz,
Sue Ruddick, and Roza
Tchoukaleyska. 2018.
“Placing Planetary
Urbanization in other
Fields of Vision.”
Environment and Planning
D Society and Space 36
(3): 374-386.
49 See: Brugmann, Jeb
(2009). Welcome to the
Urban Revolution: How
Cities Are Changing the
World. New York:
Bloomsbury Press.
50 See: Aruri, Natasha.
2021. “Re-imagine Urban
Antispaces! For a
Decolonial Social
Reproduction.” In A
Feminist Urban Theory for
our Time: Rethinking
Social Reproduction and
the Urban, edited by Linda
Peake, Elsa Koleth,
Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz,
Rajyashree N. Reddy, and
darren patrick, 186-214.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley
& Sons.
5959
political intention, and available technologies and skills. “This Is Not An
Atlas” (see detour 317) contains noteworthy observations and relevant
lessons from mapping experiences in a wide range of places.
An example of visualizing socio-spatial pluralism and rethinking binary
categories is Bill Rankin’s dot map “A Taxonomy of Transitions” (see
detour 318). It employs gaps and gradients and gives a very different
understanding of Chicago’s realities in comparison to the typical
choropleth maps. The latter kind of maps collapse the differences within
district borders and are typically used by policymakers in their proposals
on spatial reorganization and administration. Rankin argues51 that instead
of reinforcing ideas of absolute territoriality, by showing space as layered
and perforated, changing abruptly at times and gradually at others, a
map can provoke slippages, overlaps, and various kinds of diversity. In a
sense, this example invites critical mappers to experiment with granularity
to reveal where and how dispossession is happening as a path to explore
how current urban (sub)boundaries can be dismantled and decolonized.52
The question of who has power and who does not underlies Catherine
D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s book “Data Feminism” (see detour 202). It
explores how data can challenge power differentials when visualizations
reveal customary practices, inequalities, and biases. According to them,
feminism is very good at asking “who” questions: Who is mapping? Who
is it about? Who is it for? With whose data, values, perspectives, and
interests? Who are the people that go uncounted? Their work implores
us to stop considering mapping as a mere analysis-support tool and to
regard it as a commitment to action, to challenging patriarchal paradigms
and hierarchies with content, form and process. It promotes alternative
principles for data harvesting, processing and communication, and
decision-making on mediums and displays that allow for plural
expressions and bring back the human scale.
51 See: Rankin, Bill.
2010. “Cartography and
the Reality of
Boundaries.” Perspecta
42: 42–45.
52 Another example is
the work of Antonia
Burchard-Levine and a
group of co-authors
“MERA” shown in detour
319_via Prep Notes 3.
detour 317_ via
Orangotango
detour 318_ via
Chicago
detour 319_ via
Prep Notes 3
detour 202_ via
Data Feminism
60
In a similar line, Jer Thorp53 suggests that one of the first questions we
should be asking about any dataset is: “What is missing?” and “What can
we learn from the gaps?” Andy Kirk points to the importance of “The
Design of Nothing” (see detour 320) in visual communication strategies.
He asks, “How do we give zeros a home? How do we represent nothing?
What does the absence of data mean?” The importance of this issue is
twofold: on the one hand, to normalize the visualization of nulls, zeros,
and non-categories as normative, and on the other hand, as a statement
against sidelining anomalies and discordances.
In view of the arguments made in this station and preceding ones,
decisions along anticolonial mappings rely on concepts and frameworks
that are based on dialectic understandings of the interrelationships
between five elements: Harvey’s space-time compression,54 Cindi Katz’s
space-time expansion,55 Arjun Appadurai’s imagined worlds,56 Naomi
Klein’s disaster capitalism,57 and Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s
seven feminist principles of data visualization.58 Methodologies of
mapping explorations should combine staged59 yet loosely organized
moments of encounter in temporary artisan spatializations (e.g.,
workshops, field exercises) with extended, open-ended, pseudo-
concrete60 conversations within networks. Therefore, anticolonial
mapping explorations are collectivized61 performances that hinge on
many skills, including those of aimless observation, care, and reading
gendered violence.62 They are emotional, sensorial, messy, flexible,
longitudinal, guided by value-driven tacit knowledge, and equipped with
a good nose about when and where visibility is needed and when it is
disempowering.
Finally, mapping as an anticolonial practice acknowledges that the gap
between viewpoints of dispossessed bodies and those who have little
experience with violence cannot be bridged. It seeks to give legitimacy
and space to knowledge produced in precarious geographies, particularly
53 See: detour 320_ via
OpenVis, quoted by Andy
Kirk, minute 08:46.
54 See: Harvey, David.
1990. “Between Space
and Time: Reflections on
the Geographical
Imagination.” Annals of
the Association of
American Geographers 80
(3): 418-434.
55 See: 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.
56 See: Appadurai, Arjun.
(1996) 2008. Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 33.
57 See detour 321_via
Hurricane Colonialism
58 See detour 202_via
Data Feminism, and see
entry 2.3_Dialectic
Laboring
59 See detour 209_via
Field Notes 1
60 See detour 002_via
Pseudo-Concrete
Realities
61 See detour 216_via
Field Notes 4
62 See entry 2.3_
Dialectic Laboring, and
see Omnia Khalil’s
“Geography and Violence
in Cairene Post-
Revolutionary Times” in
detour 322_via Prep
Notes 4
detour 320_ via
OpenVis
detour 321_ via
Hurricane
Colonialism
detour 322_ via
Prep Notes 4
6161
by Black women and women of color. It designs its targets and processes
around supporting networks and contributing to enabling frameworks. It
pays attention to the roles and meanings of zeroes, value distortion, and
gives resonance to tactical disruption by artists and mobilizers of justice
movements in many places, in spite of algorithmic and political censoring
and assassination.63 Yet, as Cindi Katz asked our team in a meeting
between the first and second workshops, how can a countertopography
of knowledge and resistance be seen and put together without her being
the shuttle between the places, e.g., between Howa, rural South Sudan,
and Harlem, New York?
63 See detour 001_via
Brazil and detour 103_via
alKarama wa alAma
62
3.3 Counterimaginaries of
Dissensus
“[W]ithout romanticizing the local scale or any particular
place, I want to get at the specific ways globalization
works on particular grounds in order to work out a
situated, but at the same time scale-jumping and
geography-crossing, political response to it. Tracing the
contour lines of such a "countertopography" to other sites
might encourage and enable the formation of new
political-economic alliances that transcend both place and
identity and foster a more effective cultural politics to
counter the imperial, patriarchal, and racist integument of
globalization.”
– Cindi Katz, 200164
In an address titled “Topographies of Hope” (see detour 323) at the Haus
der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), organized by the multisite research project
Refiguration of Spaces, Cindi Katz asserted that “space hides
consequences” of state violence and racial domination. She told of how
the contour lines reflect “oppositional position(s)” that take shape in
retrospective but seldom at offsets of situated scholarly journeys. She
closes with a statement, a warning against exacerbating insecurities and
injustices, foreclosing glimpses of different futures in the present, locking
people into nothingness, and reminds us that accumulation by
dispossession requires resistance. “Hope, it is important to remember, is
the mediated presence of possible futures, here and now,” “and it can be
64 See: Katz, Cindi.
2001. “On the Grounds of
Globalization: A
Topography for Feminist
Political Engagement.”
Signs Journal of Women
Culture and Society 26 (4):
1216.
65 See: Katz, Cindi.
2019. “Topographies of
Hope.” Lecture. Summer
School 2019 of the
Collaborative Research
Center. SFB 1265 - Re-
Figuration of Spaces.
Accessed November 19
2021.
66 The plenary took
place on 16 Jan 2020
under the title “More
Than Acknowledging
Difference! Mobilizing
Intersectionality as
Compass in Urban
Climate Action”, at PlaWi,
TU Berlin, see detour
305_via Plenary.
detour 323_ via
SFB 1265
6363
found in the alternative worlds of children, in their boxes of props and
toys, which if picked up, could reveal new worlds of undercommons.”65
Four months after this address, Cindi returned to Berlin and engaged
with us at the second Mapping Change workshop on how to operationalize
her concept of countertopography in anticolonial maps.
The plenary66 of the workshop featured five speakers, two via pre-
recorded videos (Ilana Boltvinik and Catherine D’Ignazio, whose works
highly influenced ours as reflected in station*two), three in person, and
Philippe Rakacewicz as the first discussant before opening the floor for
discussion. The three in-person speakers were Keisha-Khan Perry, Cindi
Katz, and Imeh Ituen.67 Delivering the first speech from the floor, Imeh
set the tone for the conversations that followed by providing maps and
illustrations evidencing that the brunt of climate-change-related
disasters is carried by Black and brown people. She used Germany and
Ethiopia as an example of one low-risk and one high-risk country,
respectively, and informed participants that at the time of her speech, 16
days after the start of 2020, Germany had produced as much greenhouse
emissions as Ethiopia does in four years. She called the climate crisis a
genocide against Africans and other disposable colored people (including
those in the North), and other speakers concurred.
With the advancement of technologies and people’s access to knowledge
and knowledge-sharing possibilities, data and its visualizations are
increasingly used to challenge and change power relations. Nonetheless,
as housing justice movements and experiences of mapping projects such
as Who Owns(ed) Boxi (see detour 324) and Leerstandsmelder (see
detour 325) show,68 there is still a long way to go before regimes of data
transparency and accountability are established. Many mapping projects
related to housing justice suffer from high inaccessibility to land and
property registries (e.g., by journalists, scholars, activists), which
impedes possibilities for early detection and response to attacks by
65 See: Katz, Cindi.
2019. “Topographies of
Hope.” Lecture. Summer
School 2019 of the
Collaborative Research
Center. SFB 1265 - Re-
Figuration of Spaces.
Accessed November 19
2021.
66 The plenary took
place on 16 Jan 2020
under the title “More
Than Acknowledging
Difference! Mobilizing
Intersectionality as
Compass in Urban
Climate Action”, at PlaWi,
TU Berlin, see detour
305_via Plenary.
67 Imeh Ituen is a
Research Associate at the
Department of Global
Climate Policy at the
University of Hamburg
and part of Black Earth, a
BIPoC environmental and
climate justice collective
in Berlin.
68 Also see: Who Owns
Berlin / Wem Gehört
Berlin project.
detour 324_ via
Boxhagener Platz
detour 325_ via
Leerstandsmelder
64
vulture capitalism. Incomprehensibly, large real-estate companies often
enjoy the same privacy (data protection, invisibility) as an apartment
owner. The problem of the lacking transparency and accountability of
capitalists and comprador governments has also been the culprit behind
failed international climate projects since the “Earth Summit” in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992.69
The mobilizers and supporters of the “Deutsche Wohnen & Co.
enteignen” campaign (see detour 326), who protest the “wholesale of
Berlin” to investors, know that their claims have no constitutional
grounds at the moment. However, their dedicated unpaid labor is
spurred on by projects such as Berlin vs. AirBnB (see detour 327), and
is inspired by journeys and models such as Flussbad Berlin e.V. (see
detour 003); whose work has been highly visual, forging experiential70
and policy continuums. They imagine solutions, loop scenarios, and
forge alternative political-economic alliances that turn the tides, as the
Häuser Bewegen GIMA (see detour 328) is doing by addressing the
urgency of the right to housing.71
As the examples in this logbook and the literature show, maps not only
illustrate the world but re-describe it. They provoke past and new
perceptions of networks, lineages, associations, and representations of
places, people, and (dis)connection. Maps reproduce spaces. Critical
mapping reproduces social relations. The power of maps lies in the ability
of drawings to “do work,” to create and transform places according to the
wishes of those who make them. This recognition comes from
understanding maps as much more than what we perceive through sight.
Over 80 % of the fastest growing cities are subject to rising temperatures
and thus an increase in disasters such as flash floods, droughts, fires,
hurricanes, etc. caused by climate change.72 Although most of these
cities are in the Global South (particularly Africa and Asia), their fate is
69 See: UN (United
Nations). 1992. “United
Nations Conference on
Environment and
Development, Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, 3-14 June
1992.” UN. Accessed
October 22 2021.
70 Makeshift spatial
rearrangements
combined with social
activities that materialize
the notion of premature
gratification, a term
coined by Katherine
Shonfield to describes
engagements that are
propositional and
locational, seeking
long-term consequences,
while constituting ‘brief
disobedience’
undertakings as a ‘means
to advance proposals in
advance of advancing
proposals’; see: Thomas,
Helene, and Liza Fior.
2014. “Brief Disobedience
and Premature
Gratification.” In
Make_Shift City:
Renegotiating the Urban
Commons, edited by
Francesca Ferguson,
150-153. Berlin: Jovis.
71 We understand
‘Housing’ as a broad term
that goes beyond ‘having
a shelter’ and
encompasses the
worriment about
sustenance for everyday
people. As a framework it
brings together aspects of
infrastructure, education,
access to non-
monetized/-
commercialized spaces of
socialization (which is as
central to mental health
as water and clean air),
and therewith spaces that
cater for just and secure
social production and
reproduction. Viability
and sociability of
buildings, sustainability of
invested and
operationalization
resources and energy, and
other technical
parameters also play a
role. For more see the
report “Setting the
Grounds” that
summarizes key
discussions of a workshop
K LAB organized in March
2020, within the
framework of the
multisite research project
“Critical Mapping in
Municipalist Movements
– CMMM.”
72 Based on data of the
Climate Change
Vulnerability Index
(CCVI). See: Verisk
Maplecroft. 2018. “84%
of World’s Fastest
Growing Cities Face
‘Extreme’ Climate Change
Risks.” Verisk Maplecroft,
November 18.
detour 326_ via
Deutsche Wohnen
Enteignen
detour 327_ via
Airbnb vs. Berlin
detour 328_ via
Häuser bewegen
6565
interconnected with the Global North as the main producer of greenhouse
gases, the largest consumer of natural resources (mostly grown or
extracted and shipped in from elsewhere), and the main proponent of
cheap labor and precarious work. While the term sustainable growth
appears in most if not all national and international strategies and policies
at the various levels, a “legitimate” alternative to the umbilical relationship
between “economic growth” and socio-ecological exploitation has yet to
be defined.
Arturo Escobar is a veteran engaged intellectual and politician with many
published works. “Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking
of the Third World” (see detour 329) is a fundamental read for
understanding what “development” is and for dismantling the premises
of diplomatic financing as pathways for Global Southerners to de-under-
develop and democratize their geographies. He encourages us to routinely
un- and re-think processes and relations and to challenge what we
consider (il)legitimate norms and codes for happenings in the world
around us, such as in his recent publication on “Degrowth,
Postdevelopment, and Transitions.”73 Drawing similar contours to those
by contributors to our project, Escobar reminds us of the quintessence of
anticonsumerist value systems and social networks for socializing risks,
buffering shocks, capturing wealth at community levels, and for creating
materializations for the right to flourish.
In an address at the Urban Futures 2050 conference in Lisbon in 2014,74
geographer and planner Mee Kam Ng defined the right to flourish as the
human threshold of “capability to function and the somewhat higher
threshold that constitutes a good human life.”75 Social movements are
protests of and resistance against the collusion of state apparatuses and
neoliberal capitalism, which gave rise to the “pressure cooker”
environment in many cities today, where:
73 See: Escobar, Arturo.
2015. “Degrowth,
Postdevelopment, and
Transitions: a Preliminary
Conversation.”
Sustainability Science 10:
451-462. doi: 10.1007/
s11625-015-0297-5
74 See: Urban Futures
- Squaring Circles:
Europe, China and the
World in 2050, 10-11
October 2014, at Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation,
Lisbon, under the
European Commission’s
Seventh Framework
Programme: URBACHINA
(European Project on
Sustainable Urbanisation
in China. Historical and
Comparative
Perspectives, Mega-
trends towards 2050).
75 See: UN (United
NatiSee: Ng, Mee Kam.
2014. “The Right to
Human Flourishing and
the Production of Space:
Implications for the
Planning of Future Cities.”
In Urban Futures -
Squaring Circles: Europe,
China and the World in
2050 Keynotes. Edited by
Olívia Bina, Luís Balula
and Andrea Ricci, 40-45.
Lisbon: Institute of Social
Sciences, 41.
detour 329_via
Encountering
Development
66
[...T]he rights to human flourishing require subjective
efforts as well as a nurturing objective environment. These
can only be realized through a value transition or a
reframing process of what community psychologists would
call the ecosystem of our lives from individual to micro-
(family, schools, work units), meso- (combination of micro-
systems), exo- (neighbourhoods, world of work, district
cities) and macro-systems (cultural values, customs and
institutions). [... S]trength involves ‘the capacity to cope
with difficulties, to maintain functioning in the face of
stress, to bounce back in the face of significant trauma, to
use external challenges as a stimulus for growth, and to
use social supports as a source of resilience’.
– Mee Kam Ng, 2014 76
Coming from similar arguments, in a paper titled “Don’t call me resilient
again!”77 Maria Kaika criticizes the New Urban Agenda and the SDG’s
dependency on old methodological tools (e.g., indicators). Emphasizing
the disempowering role of institutional frameworks of “modernization”
paradigms that do not work, she proposes to better monitor and articulate
practices of dissensus.78 International development organizations and
“city-splitting” institutions promote manuals of “good governance”
practices that focus on consensus-building (i.e., negotiating
compromises), while standard participatory activities reproduce roles
and power positions. Instead, she advocates for scaled work centered
around small community-based collectives such as Initiative 136 (K136)
in Thessaloniki, Greece. Such actors voice demands, often refuse to be
included in formal processes, and shift the focus toward establishing
new hows. Their methods alter the criteria for choosing interlocutors and
radically change frameworks to create the conditions necessary for
democratizing the production of new imaginaries.
76 Ibid. p.42
77 See: Kaika, Maria.
2017. “’Don’t Call Me
Resilient Again!’: The New
Urban Agenda as
Immunology … or … What
Happens When
Communities Refuse to be
Vaccinated with ‘Smart
Cities’ and Indicators.”
Environment and
Urbanization 29 (1):
89-102. doi: 110.1177
/0956247816684763.
78 Maria Kaika argues by
saying, “stop focusing on
how to make citizens
more resilient ‘no matter
what stresses they
encounter,’ as this would
only mean that they can
take more suffering,
deprivation or
environmental
degradation in the future
[…], focus instead on
identifying the actors and
processes that produce
the need to build
resilience in the first
place […], and try to
change these factors
instead.” (Ibid. p. 7.)
6767
As explained in station*zero_mapping change, we started this journey
from a politically committed academic agenda to explore how maps and
mapping serve as a tool for progressive change and how methodologies
can be reconsidered or improved in future initiatives within and beyond
academia. Therefore, we would like to draw this entry to a close by
concluding that anticolonial mapping is about narrating stories of
dissensus and dissent, raising consciousness, countering segregation,
and creating rhizomatic ecologies of anticapitalist knowledge sharing
and solidarity.
Today it is difficult to disassociate maps from geographic territories.
However, as Elisa T. Bertuzzo noted at the margins of the first mapping
change workshop,79 in “The Practice of Everyday Life”80 Michel de Certeau
reminds us that until the Middle Ages, the function of maps was not to
demarcate places but to narrate. That is to say, maps were “journals” of
itineraries used to represent and retell the events that occurred along
the way. Today, when people draw a map or explain one to others, they
still usually start to tell a story. Maps as narrations speak to varied
subjectivities through visual correlations instead of logical concatenation.
What the detours of our logbook show is a microcosm in a galaxy of actors
that translate radical cartographic ideas into storytelling and awareness-
raising acts that create imaginary and real maps that encourage new
consciousness. Applying intersectionality as an analytical lens means
examining the multiple forms of violence and (spatial) exclusion that
people experience simultaneously and registering these occurrences not
as anomalies or “displacement,” but as recurring inferiorization and
elimination of communities and people. Operationally, this means
opening up the mapping process and its product(s) to contamination and
dissensus, where countertopography is “a way of seeing common
grounds across difference.”81 While the realities of children in different
locations are certainly different, the root causes and mechanisms of de-
79 See: detour 208_via a
June Encounter.
80 See: Certeau, Michel
de. 1984. The Practice of
Everyday Life. Translated
by Steven Rendall.
Berkeley: University of
California Press.
81 From Cindi Katz‘
contribution to the
plenary, see: detour 305_
via Plenary .
68
skilling and robbing opportunities transcend these differences. If we re-
imagine the world through machine space, or displacement, or waste,
different kinds of relations emerge; as demonstrated by the “Trash
Monsters” counterimaginary (see detour 309).
Real and mentally constructed spatial segregation is a manifestation of
state and social violence and is hard to miss, particularly in urban areas.
It can be seen in the discriminate distribution of social infrastructures,
such as childcare, health, and sanitation, and the racialized distribution
of hazardous infrastructures, such as waste collection facilities, chemical
industries, and highways that dissect and isolate neighborhoods of
othered communities. Along the same lines, if we place mundane
practices such as gerrymandering and gentrification on territories of self-
described democracies next to settler-colonial tactics of confiscating
land and racialized access to resources and rights, then the difference
becomes blurry and what emerges is a common governance paradigm:
Apartheid (see detour 330_via Wadi elDilb). Therefore, anticolonial
mapping is a practice that reveals invisible and unrecognized forms of
discrimination and the spatializations of neo-slaveries. In addition, it
discloses how burdens and vulnerabilities are systematically placed on
gendered, socially othered, and disposable populations.
With the hype around big data, smart sensors, and evidence, it is
important to re-humanize mapping to better understand the structures
of racial discrimination. In this regard, while many argue that nation
states granted people more freedoms in comparison to colonial times,
the opinion of Arjun Appadurai, Cemil Aydin, and Rana Dasgupta is that
this is not very accurate, as expressed in their conversation about the
question of “Have Nations Killed Cosmopolitanism?” (see detour 331).
Among other central issues, they point out that the birth of nation states
was accompanied by an increase in racialized restrictions on movement,
which suppress not only the economies and social relations of the
detour 309_ via
Counterimaginary 2
detour 330_ via
Jerusalem
detour 331_ via HKW
6969
inferiorized, but also collaborative critical knowledge production and
sharing across borders.
Seen from this perspective, anticolonial mapping is focused less on
finding truths and more on revealing and reconnecting situated discordant
knowledge across space and time. It is a ritual of un- and re-learning, of
re-questioning political intention, and of incremental resistance in the
shape of pseudo-concrete, sensorial disruption and makeshift spatial
(re)claiming. It is a practice of resisting expulsions while revealing
territories of hope, a practice that integrally creates ecologies of
rhizomatic knowledge82 production and socialization, within localities
and with tendrillar exiles.
In realms of practice such as those mentioned above, countertopography
involves planting seeds and growing rhizomatic networks of oppositional
positionality against the intersectional forms of violence that
simultaneously fuel environmental destruction and climate change and
bring devastation. It also means aligning positionalities among
counterparts to collectively imagine alternative paradigms and engender
ecologies that recognize the bodies and minds of Black and brown people
as the primary sites and infrastructures fending off missionary
developmentalism and apartheid governmentalities. It is a practice
interested in understanding the rhythms of growth and the shrinking of
socialized security nets that reduce vulnerability, enable flourishing and
dignity in spite of precarity, and resonate hope in the face of the
“protracted” disaster that colonialism is.
82 In “A Thousand
Plateaus” Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) describe
the rhizomatic mode of
knowledge as one that
allows for multiple,
non-hierarchical entry
and exit points in data
representation and
interpretation, as
opposed to an
arborescent (hierarchic,
tree-like) conception of
knowledge. A rhizome,
they say, is characterized
by “ceaselessly
established connections
between semiotic chains,
organizations of power,
and circumstances
relative to the arts,
sciences, and social
struggles,” and can be
described by the six
principles of connectivity,
heterogeneity,
multiplicity, asignifying
rupture, and cartography
as opposed to
decalcomania. They
elaborate that a rhizome
is a “map and not a
tracing” See: Deleuze,
Gilles, and Felix Guattari.
1987. A Thousand
Plateaus. Translated by
Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
70
Detours
Station 0
001 via Brazil Cartography of a Techno-political Assassination,
Pablo DeSoto
002 via Pseudo-Concrete Realities The Plague of Fantasies,
Slavoj Žižek
003 via Berlin Flussbad Berlin e.V.,
Flussbad Berlin
004 via Walking Debates Conversing with Mobilizers in Nairobi and Berlin,
Katleen De Flander and Natasha Aruri (conveners)
Station 1
101 via Beirut Stage-setting ‘Thawret 17 Tishreen’,
Public Works Studio, Beirut Madinati
102 via Thawraaa! Qoum Ithadda (Stand Up and Revolt),
Majida El Roumi and Elie Shwayri
103 via alKarama wa alAmal Mapping Resonance,
Mai alBattat and Natasha Aruri
104 via Hakitectura A “Posse” Between Digital and Physical Space,
Hackitectura
105 via Haus der Statistik AbBA Banner on HdS,
ZUsammenKUNFT e.V., Projekt Haus der Statistik
106 via Sakiya Art, Science, Agriculture,
Sakiya
107 via Ministarstvo Prostora The Belgrade Waterfront Project and Ne da(vi)mo
Beograd,
Critical Mapping in Municipalist Movements (CMMM)
108 via Belgrade 2041 Belgrade 2041: Back to the Future,
Kolektiv Ministarstvo prostora
109 via Shamsia Hassani Shamsia Hassani,
Shamsia Hassani
110 via TEDIndia Solving Social Problems with a Nudge,
Sendhil Mullainathan at TEDIndia
111 via Urbanize! Roundtable at ZKU, Berlin,
Katleen De Flander, Julia Förster and Natasha Aruri
7171
Station 2
201 via Detroit The Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute,
Gwendolyn Warren and Dr. William Bunge and team
202 via Data Feminism Data Feminism,
Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
203 via Cartographie Radicale Cartographie radicale / Explorations,
Nepthys Zwer and Philippe Rekacewicz
204 via States of Emergency États D'urgence, une Histoire Spatiale
du Continuum Colonial Français,
Léopold Lambert
205 via Humboldt Géographie des plantes Équinoxiales: Tableau
physique des Andes et Pays voisins, 1805,
Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland
206 via The Village Files Scouting Palestinian Territory, 1940-1948:
Haganah Village Files, Aerial Photos, and Surveys,
Rona Sela
207 via Audra Simpson We Are Not Red Indians (We Might All Be Red Indians),
Audra Simpson at ICCG2015
208 via a June Encounter Who was at Workshop 1?,
Mapping Change Team
209 via Field Notes 1 June 2019 – Behind Radical Maps,
Nepthys Zwer and Philippe Rekacewicz
210 via handiCRAFT 2016 Richard Sennett: Craftsmanship,
Richard Sennett at MAK
211 via Los Angeles ethniCITY: Linguistic Landscape Data,
SLAB
212 via Field Notes 2 June 2019 – Bodies and Digital Maps,
Eugenio Tesselli
213 via Field Notes 3 June 2019 – Alternative Imaginaries?,
Ilana Boltvinik
214 via Furtherfield Community Memory through Appropriated Media:
An Interview with Eugenio Tisselli,
Marc Garrett
215 via Moritzplatz Forms of Butality,
Larissa Fassler
216 via Field Notes 4 June 2019 – Notes and Questions,
Elisa T. Bertuzzo
217 via Rough Fish A Pervasive Game in Manchester,
TRES Collective
218 via Fibers and Shells Micronesian Stick Chart,
National Geographic Society
72
Station 3
301 via Workshop 2 Highlights What Did We Do?
Mapping Change Team
302 via Decolonialization in Action Episode 1, Part 1: Decolonizing Berlin,
Edna Bonhomme and Kristyna Comer
303 via Defund Humboldt Defund the Humboldt Forum,
Decolonize Berlin, Bundnis/Verein
(Alliance/Association)
304 via TEDWomen The Urgency of Intersectionality,
Kimberlé Crenshaw at TEDWomen
305 via Plenary More Than Acknowledging Difference!
Mobilizing Intersectionality as Compass in Urban
Climate Action,
Mapping Change Team
306 via a January Encounter Who was at Workshop 2?,
Mapping Change Team
307 via Kotti Warm-up: Walking Debate around Kottbusser Tor,
Mapping Change Team
308 via Counterimaginary 1 Are We All in the Same Boat?,
Antonia Buchard-Levine, Hişar Ersöz, Nepthys Zwer,
Nuno Grancho, Romain Leclercq
309 via Counterimaginary 2 Trash Monsters,
Dulmini Perera, Eugenio Tisselli,
Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, Karl Beelen,
Lana Judeh and Omnia Khalil
310 via Methods Lab Feminist Data Visualization and Countertopography
in Mapping,
Mapping Change Team
311 via Monopolized Space The Duty Free Shop Project,
Philippe Rekacewicz
312 via Prep Notes 1 Forensic Empathy: Mapping Death in the
US-Mexico Borderlands,
Jonathan Jae-an Crisman
313 via Prep Notes 2 Institute of Utmost Environmental Justice,
Dulmini Perera
314 via Guardia Fuerza Himno de la Guardia Indígena - Guardia Fuerza,
Parranderos del Cauca Cuatro Más Tres feat. La
Perla, Ali Aka Mind, Andrea Echeverri, Carlos Arturo
Villamarin, Chane Meza, Derly Eliced Musse Pasu,
Eulalia Yagari & Gregorio Merchan
7373
315 via Anti-Eviction The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP),
AEMP
316 via Mapping Gendered Ecologies Mapping Gendered Ecologies, Engaging with and
Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism ,
K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk (eds.)
317 via Orangotango This Is Not an Atlas,
Orangotango
318 via Chicago A Taxonomy of Transitions - “Dot Map”,
Bill Rankin
319 via Prep Notes 3 MERA,
Antonia Burchard-Levine
320 via OpenVis The Design of Nothing: Null, Zero, Blank,
Andy Kirk
321 via Hurricane Colonialism Hurricane Colonialism: the Economic, Political, and
Environmental War on Puerto Rico,
The Intercept
322 via Prep Notes 4 Geography and Violence in Cairene
Post-Revolutionary Times,
Omnia Khalil
323 via SFB 1265 Topographies of Hope,
Cindi Katz at SFB1265
324 via Boxhagener Platz Who Owns Boxi?,
David Amacher, Dominik Berton, Michael Gegg,
Felix Jaekel, Hendrik Lehmann, David Meidinger,
Léonie Schwöbel and Helena Wittlich
325 via Leerstandsmelder Leerstandsmelder (Vacancy Reporter),
Leerstandsmelder
326 via Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen,
Initiative “Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen“
327 via Airbnb vs. Berlin Airbnb vs. Berlin,
Alsino Skowronnek, Lucas Vogel and Jonas Parnow
328 via Haüser Bewegen Häuser Bewegen GIMA (Move Houses),
Häuser Bewegen GIMA
329 via Encountering Development Encountering Development.
The Making and Unmaking of the Third World,
Arturo Escobar
330 via Jerusalem Settler Colonial Gerrymandering,
Mapping Change Team
331 via HKW Have Nations Killed Cosmopolitanism?,
Arjun Appadurai, Cemil Aydin, Rana Dasgupta
74
Contributors
Abdelrahman Helal
Alina Schütze
Andrea Aho
Angela Million
Annette M. Kim
Annika Lesem
Antonia Burchard-Levine
Benedikt Stoll
Carolin Genz
Catherine d’Ignazio
Cindi Katz
Dagmar Pelger
Diana Lucas-Drogan Dulmini
Perera
Elisa T. Bertuzzo
Eugenio Tisselli
Grit Burgow
Hişar Ersöz
Ilana Boltvinik
Imeh Ituen
Iva Čukić
Jonathan Jae-an Crisman
Karl Beelen
Keisha-Khan Perry
Lana Judeh
Larissa Fassler
Lisa Wagner
Luise Haufe
Lýdia Grešáková
Mandu dos Santos Pinto
Marlene Wagner
Matthew Crabbe
Melanie Herrmann
Nepthys Zwer
Nicolas Fonty
Nija-Maria Linke
Nuno Grancho
Omnia Khalil
Philippe Rekacewicz
Punam Khosla
Robin Hüppe
Romain Leclercq
Séverine Marguin
Stella Flatten
Tim Nebert
Zuzana Tabackova
Photography at Workshop 2 by:
K LAB and Poppy Imogen Illsley
Videos of Workshop 2 by:
Poppy Imogen Illsley
Catering by:
Chaos Kitchen,
Stadtfrauenküche, VEG’D
7575
Notes
76
7777
Notes
78
Imprint
© 2022
Texts by kind permission of the authors.
Pictures by kind permission of the photographers/holders of the picture
rights.
Special thanks to all people involved in creating this logbook, for their
perseverance and tireless support!
Authors:
Natasha Aruri, Katleen De Flander, Andreas Brück
Support in conceptualization and structuring: Omnia Khalil
Editorial support: Mai AlBattat, Christian Sander, Georg Müller, Pierre
Funcke
Design concept, elaboration, and setting: K LAB & visual intelligence
Cover: visual intelligence
Made with love in Berlin @ LABOR K //// K LAB
The Mapping Change Logbook was made possible with the support of
the Volkswagen Stiftung.
This work – except for quotes, figures and where otherwise noted – is licensed under
the Creative Commons Licence CC BY 4.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Published online on the institutional Repository of the Technische Universität Berlin:
DOI 10.14279/depositonce-15560
http://dx.doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-15560
