Situated Mapping

Visualizing Urban Inequality between the God Trick and Strategic Positivism

Authors

  • Taylor Shelton Georgia State University

Keywords:

Critical GIS, geographic thought and methodology, housing, relational geographies, vacant property

Abstract

This paper asks, and seeks to answer, the question: what makes mapping critical? I argue that most examples of ‘doing’ critical mapping tend to fall into one of two camps with very different manifestations, goals and assumptions, whether from Donna Haraway’s invocation of – and desire to counteract – what she calls the “god trick”, or from the spirit of “strategic positivism” advocated by the geographer Elvin Wyly. The rest of the paper argues, however, that these two positions are not mutually exclusive, and that practitioners of critical mapping need not choose between the twin imperatives of destabilizing our understanding of the objectivity of cartographic knowledge and taking advantage of such a pervasive understanding in order to produce a more socially and spatially just world. Instead, I argue that it is possible to simultaneously use maps to prove that inequality exists, while also demonstrating that the ways we conventionally think about such inequalities through maps are insufficient to understand the complex realities of the processes that we are mapping. Using examples from my own research on mapping the relational geographies of vacant and abandoned properties in Louisville, Kentucky, I demonstrate one possible example of what such an approach to situated mapping might look like.

References

Bergmann, Luke, and Nick Lally. 2021. “For geographical imagination systems.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (1): 26-35

Blaut, James M. 1974. “The ghetto as an internal neo‐colony.” Antipode 6 (1): 37-41.

Bunge, William. 1971 [2011]. Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Elwood, Sarah, and Katharyne Mitchell. 2013. “Another politics is possible: Neogeographies, visual spatial tactics, and political formation.” Cartographica 48 (4): 275-292.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575-599.

Harris, Donald J. 1972. “The black ghetto as colony: a theoretical critique and alternative formulation.” The Review of Black Political Economy 2 (4): 3-33.

Harvey, David. 1973 [2010]. Social Justice and the City. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Jasanoff, Sheila, and Hilton R. Simmet. 2017. ”No funeral bells: Public reason in a ‘post-truth’ age.” Social Studies of Science 47 (5): 751-770.

Joyner, Anne Moss, and Allan M. Parnell. 2013. “Maximizing the Power of Geographic Information Systems in Racial Justice.” Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy 47: 185-194.

Kim, Annette M. 2015. “Critical cartography 2.0: From “participatory mapping” to authored visualizations of power and people.” Landscape and Urban Planning 142: 215-225.

Kurgan, Laura. 2013. Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kwan, Mei-Po. 2007. “Affecting geospatial technologies: Toward a feminist politics of emotion.” The Professional Geographer 59 (1): 22-34.

Lucchesi, Annita Hetoevėhotohke'e. 2018. “‘Indians don’t make maps’: Indigenous cartographic traditions and innovations.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42 (3): 11-26.

Massey, Doreen. 2004. “Geographies of responsibility.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 5-18.

Mogel, Lize. 2010. “Mappa Mundi.” http://www.publicgreen.com/projects/mappamundi.html

Monroe, Rachel. 2017. “Gone Baby Gone.” The New Republic, September 19, 2017. https://newrepublic.com/article/144528/gone-baby-gone-wake-housing-crisis-new-breed-real-estate-investor-destroying-america-cities

Odell, Jenny. 2014. “Satellite Landscapes.” http://www.jennyodell.com/satellite-landscapes.html

Olsson, Gunnar. 2010. Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pearce, Margaret, and Renee Pualani Louis. 2008. “Mapping indigenous depth of place.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32 (3): 107-126.

Radil, Steven M., and Matthew B. Anderson. 2019. “Rethinking PGIS: Participatory or (post) political GIS?.” Progress in Human Geography 43 (2): 195-213.

Roy, Ananya. 2017. “Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end.” Geoforum 80: A1-A11.

Rundstrom, Robert A. 1995. “GIS, indigenous peoples, and epistemological diversity.” Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22 (1): 45-57.

Schuurman, Nadine. 2000. “Trouble in the heartland: GIS and its critics in the 1990s.” Progress in Human Geography 24 (4): 569-590.

Shannon, Jerry, Katherine B. Hankins, Taylor Shelton, Amber J. Bosse, Dorris Scott, Daniel Block, Heather Fischer, LaToya E. Eaves, Jin-Kyu Jung, Jonnell Robinson, Patricia Solís, Hamil Pearsall, Amanda Rees, and Aileen Nicolas. 2021. “Community geography: Toward a disciplinary framework.” Progress in Human Geography 45 (5): 1147-1168.

Shelton, Taylor. 2017. “The urban geographical imagination in the age of Big Data.” Big Data & Society 4 (1): 1-14.

Shelton, Taylor. 2018. “Rethinking the RECAP: mapping the relational geographies of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky.” Urban Geography 39 (7): 1070-1091.

Shelton, Taylor, Matthew Zook, and Alan Wiig. 2015. “The ‘actually existing smart city’.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8 (1): 13-25.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamhatta. 2019. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press.

Valla, Clement. n.d. “Postcards from Google Earth.” http://www.postcards-from-google-earth.com/

Wood, Denis. 2011. Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas. Los Angeles: Siglio Press.

Wyly, Elvin. 2009. “Strategic positivism.” The Professional Geographer 61 (3): 310-322.

Downloads

Published

2022-03-03

How to Cite

Shelton, T. (2022). Situated Mapping: Visualizing Urban Inequality between the God Trick and Strategic Positivism. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21(4), 346–356. Retrieved from https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1941

Issue

Section

Special Issue - Doing Critical GIS