The Culture and Communities Mapping Project 3030886506, 9783030886509

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Authors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Global Festival City
The Edinburgh Context
Mixed Mapping Methods
Edinburgh’s Mapping Precedents
The Structure of this Book
References
Chapter 2: Theories and Methods of Cultural Mapping
Practices of Cultural Mapping
Legacies: Thinking Critically About Spatial Knowledge
Deconstructing Maps
Maps and Practices
Five Questions for Cultural Mapping Projects
Participation
Data Types
Map Surfaces
Aims and Outcomes
Limitations
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Cultural Mapping in the City of Edinburgh
Beginnings
The First Map
The Mapping Events
The Mapping Instructions
Tangible and Intangible Outcomes
The Cultural Space Dataset
Places of Value, Risk and Community
Gentrification, Cultural Equity and the Map
Reflecting on the Culture & Communities Mapping Project
What Kind of Data Did We Collect?
How Participatory Was the Process?
What Map Surfaces Did We Use?
What Are the Outcomes of the Project?
Limitations
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Neogeography, Software Sorted Geographies and Web Maps
Software Sorted Geographies and Imaginaries
Neogeographies as Alternative Geographies
The Edinburgh Cultural Map
LeithLate Virtual Tours
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Maps, Memories and Stories of Place
Introduction
Ethnographic Accounts of Mapping
Building Community Partnerships
Research Design: Mapping During Covid
Reflective Essays on Cultural Mapping
granton:hub
North Edinburgh Arts
The Ripple Project
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

The Culture and Communities Mapping Project

Morgan Currie Melisa Miranda Correa

The Culture and Communities Mapping Project

Morgan Currie • Melisa Miranda Correa

The Culture and Communities Mapping Project

Morgan Currie University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK

Melisa Miranda Correa University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-88650-9    ISBN 978-3-030-88651-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88651-6 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we thank the many participants who took part in our mapping events—we would not have this book without your time and generosity. We also thank our supporters and collaborators at the University of Edinburgh: Vikki Jones, Research Associate for Creative Informatics at the Institute for Design Informatics, who has taken part as an invaluable researcher in many stages of the project; Josh Ryan-Saha, Director of TravelTech Scotland, who supported us in 2020–2021 and helped facilitate the funds for our 2021 round of workshops; researcher Orian Brook, who was there at our 2019 workshops; Melissa Terras at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, who has helped us receive EFI support over the years; and Catherine Magill, who, in her capacity as director of the Edinburgh Living Lab, got the project initially off the ground in its early days. Lindsay Robertson, Cultural Strategy Manager in the Culture and Events Office in the City of Edinburgh Council, was crucial for supporting the Cultural Map of Edinburgh and geting it out to the public. We also thank those in the community who have worked with us: our friends from LeithLate, Morvern Cunningham, Erin Thompson and Tom Farrington; WHALE Arts director Leah Black and Rebecca Green, who helped us recruit participants in Wester Hailes for our 2021 workshops; North Edinburgh Arts director Kate Wimpress; Toni Dickson in her capacity as Development Director at granton:hub; John Beatson, Goodtrees Director; Tristan Green, Community Action Worker at The Ripple Project and Dawn Baxter, Admin and Volunteer Manager at The Ripple Project; and Dominic

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Acknowledgements

Heslop, Centre Manager at the Oxgangs Neighbourhood Centre. We thank our Festival partners, who consulted on the shape of the 2021 workshops: Lyndsey Jackson, Deputy Chief Executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society and Julia Amour, Director of Festivals Edinburgh. We are also grateful to Stephanie Derrick, Fadhila Mazanderani and James Stewart, who offered important feedback on the final stages of the manuscript. Finally, thank you to the many funding bodies that have supported this project: The City of Edinburgh Council, the Edinburgh Futures Institute, Data Driven Innovation at the University of Edinburgh, the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council, through an Impact Acceleration Grant.

Contents

1 Introduction: The Global Festival City  1 The Edinburgh Context   2 Mixed Mapping Methods   7 Edinburgh’s Mapping Precedents   8 The Structure of this Book   9 References  11 2 Theories and Methods of Cultural Mapping 15 Practices of Cultural Mapping  17 Legacies: Thinking Critically About Spatial Knowledge  22 Five Questions for Cultural Mapping Projects  30 Conclusion  36 References  36 3 Cultural Mapping in the City of Edinburgh 41 Beginnings  43 The First Map  45 The Mapping Events  46 The Mapping Instructions  50 Tangible and Intangible Outcomes  52 Reflecting on the Culture & Communities Mapping Project  59 Conclusion  64 References  65

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Contents

4 Neogeography, Software Sorted Geographies and Web Maps 67 Software Sorted Geographies and Imaginaries  69 Neogeographies as Alternative Geographies  76 The Edinburgh Cultural Map  77 LeithLate Virtual Tours  81 Conclusion  86 References  87 5 Maps, Memories and Stories of Place 91 Introduction  92 Ethnographic Accounts of Mapping  93 Building Community Partnerships  95 Research Design: Mapping During Covid  97 Reflective Essays on Cultural Mapping 100 Conclusion 116 References 117 Index119

About the Authors

Morgan Currie  is Lecturer in Data and Society in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include open and administrative data, automation in the welfare state, data justice, critical GIS and cultural mapping. She is principal investigator of The Culture & Communities Mapping Project and co-leads the Digital Social Science Research Cluster at Centre for Data, Culture & Society at the University of Edinburgh. Currie had written about maps and published articles on the historic maps created by the Department of Defence of the proto-internet, ARPANET—a series of maps throughout the late seventies and eighties that show the infrastructures’ expansion across the US and beyond—and on the web maps that resulted from Los Angeles’ open data programme since it began in 2013. Melisa Miranda Correa  is a Chilean architect with an MPhil in Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh University and is a PhD candidate in the same programme and a tutor. She worked as an urban consultant in Chile between 2012 and 2016, where she taught herself GIS while working with geographers and sociologists. Sharing Tania Rossetto’s fascination with maps (2019a), she has continued her architectural practice through mapmaking, manipulating GIS software, design and postproduction of maps. She identifies as someone who, as Soja put it “interprets the world by assertively foregrounding a spatial perspective. I put space first, before seeing things historically or socially…” (Soja 2008, 11). Combining mapping with spatial interest, she c­ reates maps in accessible formats which activate conversations with her participants, allowing them to hear their stories and ix

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revealing their mental maps of the urban and rural space (Miranda-Correa 2020)—an ethnographic approach she calls mapping as listening (Ingold 2011; Hall 2020). From her perspective, maps capture the relationship between people and place and allow deep communication with participants, since both parties must agree on the map’s content. In four years of cultural mapping practice, she has realised that in the act of mapping collective spaces, there is a process of social transformation when mapping reveals moments of personal and mutual acknowledgement, making visible people’s sense of place.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7

Matrix of cultural mapping practices First version of the basemap for workshops Itinerant map with participants at TechCube Categories suggestions and stickers placed on basemap during the Storytelling Centre workshop Mapping instructions Map of valued spaces Map of places at risk Screenshot of our website map: www.edinburghculturalmap.org Google Map’s search for care homes Our care homes dataset Landing page of leithlatevirtualtours.co.uk Untitled mural pop-up box with sidebar including Cameron Foster’s audio recording Edinburgh Pallete pop-up box with sidebar showing two artist’s studios Extract of the Edinburgh city scale map. This section shows the three hubs discussed in this chapter, North Edinburgh Arts, granton:hub and The Ripple Project Participants working on the A3 maps with stickers and pencil Basemap sent to participants of Granton area Georgia’s photographic sequence of Granton harbour Georgia’s co-authored map of Granton Gina Fierlafijn Reddie’s photo of Granton Beach Gina Fierlafijn Reddie’s photo of Granton Walled Garden

32 46 47 49 51 55 56 62 75 75 83 84 85 98 100 101 102 103 104 106

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Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13

Gina Fierlafijn Reddie’s Gasholder photo NEA basemap used during workshops Allison’s sea view photo from her balcony Lucy’s photo of the Botanic Gardens’s tree Restalrig basemap, with The Ripple project in the middle Robert’s sister’s photo of the dovecot (photo credit: Victoria Lowe)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Global Festival City

Abstract  Chapter 1 introduces Edinburgh, the global festival city. Since its start in the mid-twentieth century, Edinburgh’s festivals have ignited heated discussion around the definition of culture, who gets to define it, the accessibility of Edinburgh’s cultural spaces and how festivals relate to a flourishing local scene of artists and creative producers. Edinburgh is also a global city, and an unregulated short-term let market has driven up housing costs for its residents, affecting the affordability of space for cultural producers as well. The capital of Edinburgh offers important context for the Culture & Communities Mapping Project. We describe our project in relation to past mapping projects that have used Edinburgh as both backdrop and subject, and we introduce ourselves and how we approached the project from two very different academic trajectories, at least at first. We contextualise the contents of this book and describe the major arguments found in each chapter. In this book, maps serve as our object of study and also facilitate research, that, through the process of mapping, help us reflect on how we understand space, place, community and culture. Keywords  Edinburgh • Festivals • Global city • Cultural mapping

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Currie, M. Miranda Correa, The Culture and Communities Mapping Project, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88651-6_1

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A community map widens the concept of a place…People should look at community maps to realise that we all see and use a place in different ways. One city is many cities, because each person thinks about it in a different way. —John Quiroga in Brown (2019)

This book is about the Culture & Communities Mapping Project, which began in Edinburgh as a series of cultural mapping exercises with artists and art institutions in 2018, then led us into collaborations with several grassroots art and community hubs across the city and resulted in two online interactive maps. When the project began, we set out to survey Edinburgh’s cultural infrastructure across its 154 neighbourhoods—we wanted to understand how these spaces relate to the local communities surrounding them and how Edinburgh’s considerable cultural resources are distributed across the city. Beginning in 2021, we shifted our focus to ask how communities that live well outside the city centre value the cultural spaces in their local neighbourhoods and what kinds of cultural infrastructure they would like to see grow around them. In the process of pursuing the project, our understanding of what counts as culture, and how to define a cultural space, changed considerably, from a narrow definition that focused on places where acts of artistic creation could take place, to a fuller one that accounts for the cultural practices of everyday life, whether walking trails or joining friends in community gardens or visiting places of childhood memories. Throughout this book, the reader will encounter many maps—historic maps and new maps; maps we designed and maps created by others; maps that exist on the World Wide Web and printouts of maps that people touch, fold, annotate and draw on; maps that serve as our object of study and analysis and also maps that facilitate research—that, through the process of making them, help us reflect more generally on how we create knowledge about space, place, community and culture.

The Edinburgh Context Fundamental to this project is the broader context of Scotland’s capital. Edinburgh’s renown, aside from its dramatic skyline and medieval castle, is for the major festivals that transform the city during the months of July and August. The city during this time doubles in size as tourists pour in

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and the streets in its medieval centre transform into beer gardens, pop-up venues and makeshift spaces for buskers and street performers. The festivals have long been a site of cultural contestation. Historian Angela Bartie (2013) describes a fundamental tension that began in 1947, the year that saw the launch of Edinburgh’s first major festival, the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama. City officials at the time quite presciently saw culture as an economic boost to Scotland’s burgeoning, post-war tourism industry, and the festival gathered some of the world’s most celebrated artists to the capital. There  they performed to audiences in fur coats and white ties from the city’s professional classes, along with civil leaders, ministers and members of the major churches, the Church of Scotland and the Episcopal and Free churches (Ibid). That same year, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival launched as a challenge to its high-culture counterpart. The Fringe eschewed curation, breaking down social barriers by embracing a much more liberal, secular moral code—Bartie describes one incident in which councillors and ministers were mortified by a performance of a naked model attached to a wheel spinning across McEwan Hall at Edinburgh University in 1963 (Ibid). Fundamentally, unlike the International Festival, with its carefully curated line-up of artists, the Fringe operated as a freewheeling, free-­market affair, offering space to anyone who could secure a venue during the month of its activities. As a result, it  widened participation to artists and audiences alike. Since its start in the mid-twentieth century, Edinburgh’s festivals have ignited heated discussion around the definition of culture, who gets to define it, the accessibility of Edinburgh’s cultural spaces and how festivals relate to a flourishing local scene of artists and creative producers. Who, during festival season, is the city’s culture for, its elites or wider society? What kinds of culture should receive support—should it be the traditional high arts of music, theatre, and opera, or circus, Scottish folks singing, and more experimental forms of expression (Bartie 2013)? And how should artists be supported—should they be flown in from other continents or nurtured locally? Though seven decades have passed since the festivals’ start, these are still the critical questions at the heart of Edinburgh’s cultural policy. Even today, the Fringe is eyed warily by local artists as a victim of marketisation, with London-based corporations controlling its major venues. In an op-ed for one of Edinburgh’s major cultural newspapers, The Skinny, local curator and arts promoter Morvern Cunningham (2020) pillories the Fringe’s “fundamentally capitalist approach to creativity” that

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“has inevitably resulted in a disproportionate array of unrepresentative narratives on display each year; namely those of the white, the straight and the wealthy.”1 Intimately related to the controversy around its festivals is Edinburgh’s role as a global city. Edinburgh accounts for a major part of the UK’s exports in services (second only to London as of 2014) (Centres-for-Cities 2017). Another key economic driver is tourism. The festivals, combined with the status of the City’s Old and New Towns as UNESCO world heritage sites, have increased the number of visitors from around the globe from 3.27 million in 2010 to 5.3 million in 2019, bringing £3.3 billion in  tourist-related spending in 2019 (ETAG 2016; VisitScotland 2019). The University of Edinburgh contributes as well to this internationalisation by attracting global students and visitors. Edinburgh’s ambitions as a global festival city, while bringing in significant revenue, have taken a toll on its urban space. Writing in 2010, Castells found that European cities generally face challenges generated by the global city phenomenon, with Barcelona as the paradigm of an urban centre challenged by rising rental prices and housing problems caused by tourism. Barcelona’s business centres and tourist-focused areas create social  segregation and urban marginality, driving citizens from the city centre into social housing programmes built in the outskirts of town. Speculation in the housing market has left few available places for new housing except in areas far from tourist attractions. Less tangibly, tourism erodes an area’s sense of community, with temporary visitors coming and going while feelings of over-crowdedness increase. The Castells sentence should be: ‘Reflecting on the spread of global cities across Europe since the 2000s, Castells wrote in 2010 that the service markets of these cities and their ‘space of flows’— spaces that host businesses and services that facilitate synchronous, real- time interactions across the globe—will have an impact on the local citizens by “blurring the meaningful relationship between architecture and society” (449). The global city, in other words, is not simply a place where business services create digital connections to other global locales; its digital, speculative markets also transform local life and the socioeconomic relations among residents, taking a very real material toll on urban space. Cobarrubias and Pickles (2008) call this 1  The Fringe addresses this critique with their Diversity, Accessibility and Inclusion Awards. The problem has also been addressed with initiatives begun by non-official parties. For example, in 2018, Jess Brough founded Fringe of Colour to address the scarcity of Black people and people of colour at the festival, and the website Euan’s Guide gives out the Accessible Edinburgh Festival award to venues that are accessible to disabled populations.

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transformation by a city into a global hub a process of deterritorialisation as global markets and international businesses create new social and economic stratifications within the cities they inhabit. Like Barcelona, Edinburgh’s gentrification is a well-known phenomenon among residents. Particularly, the northern dock-side neighbourhood of Leith—traditionally a major port town annexed by Edinburgh in 1920—has transformed from a working-class part of town to one of ‘the coolest neighbourhoods in the world’, according to Time Out magazine, with Michelin star restaurants, cafes, art galleries and a grassroots creative scene. The neighbourhood was the site of the escapades of junkies and drunks in Irvine Welsh’s book (and film by the same name) Trainspotting, and it still ranks high in terms of Scotland’s main poverty indicator, the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. A 2009 journal article by urban geographer Brian Doucet describes how, even a decade ago, long-time residents of the area felt a lack of belonging due to the changes around them as people moved into the area. Compacting this issue more recently, residents of Leith face another problem: the increase in tourist accommodations. A 2020 map of Airbnb and short-term lets in Edinburgh, based on a survey by the Scottish Green MSP Andy Wightman (Pooran 2020), shows that Leith is now among the biggest hotspots of short-term rentals outside the city centre. Holiday lets, which the city Council currently does not regulate, have resulted in rising rents and a dire housing crisis, according to Edinburgh’s largest renter’s union (Mitchell 2020). Airbnb’s expansion in Edinburgh follows a market logic driven by the demand for profitable short-term tourism rent. During the festival season in 2015, flat prices increased by a third of their original value (Ferguson 2015); four years later, this trend continues. According to Citylets Quarterly’s 2019 report, flat rent in Edinburgh reached a pre-Covid peak on average with a five percent increase in comparison to 2018 (Citylets 2019). In some extreme cases, it is more profitable to rent flats only during festival weeks than to rent them throughout the year on a long-term contract, which explains why it is increasingly difficult to find a place to live in the city centre. The map of short-term lets published by MSP Wightman reveals how this reality is affecting more and more residents—a clear example of the gradual process of deterritorialisation as tourism drives gentrification (though currently unanswered is  the  question of  whether

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the Covid-19 pandemic will keep numbers down, even as tourism opens back up). The pressures of Edinburgh as a global city have direct implications for the local cultural sector, particularly artists who need space for studios or rehearsal but find themselves unable to pay rent in culturally vibrant but expensive  areas. Sensitive to these concerns, in 2014  the City brought together a committee of cultural experts to outline directions the city could take to support local artists (Edinburgh-Culture 2015). The DesireLines project hosted public workshops and an online survey asking for feedback from the creative sector on the challenges it faces and for any ideas to address these problems. The committee articulated several steps to take, including venue price regulation as local artists continue to struggle to pay high rents due to price inflation from festival season tourism, and making more flexible, multi-purpose, affordable spaces, such as churches, available for rehearsals. This particular ‘action line’ led to a website called EPAD (Edinburgh Performing Arts Development), dedicated to helping local artists find available spaces. The DesireLines report also declared that culture should be available to all residents and visitors, despite their economic situation, and recognised that most festival events remain unaffordable for many residents; venues are concentrated in the city centre, making them less accessible to families living in the outskirts (Edinburgh-Culture 2015). In terms of general cultural access, DesireLines suggested producing cultural maps of the city to make information about cultural activities and resources more visible to its residents. The Culture and Communities Mapping Project began in response to this last recommendation. One of our original goals was to give visibility to cultural spaces spanning the city, outside the centre, that are traditionally underrepresented in depictions of Edinburgh but important to the local communities that use them. Our aim at the start was to find and highlight these less-visible spaces, then see how they related to local communities of artists and residents more generally. We also wanted to understand issues of cultural equity and deterritorialisation across the city. How well do Edinburgh’s cultural arbiters, such as the Council and festivals, serve the city’s communities, including those living in its most deprived areas? Researching non-traditional, peripheral culture in Edinburgh has raised questions about gentrification, internationalisation and the inequality that  has characterised Edinburgh’s city planning across its different neighbourhoods since at least the mid-eighties (Knox 1984).

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Mixed Mapping Methods Before explaining the layout of the book, it is important to mention that the Culture & Communities Mapping Project is only the latest in a series of projects that map Edinburgh culture, including several from the University of Edinburgh. One of these is LitLong Edinburgh,2 a website and mobile application with an interactive map of Edinburgh for exploring the settings of the works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. The app guides users through the city’s literature in situ based on what team behind the project calls ‘loco-specific literature’, the non-fictional place names that appear in works of literary fiction. The team curated and geolocated text passages of some 16,060 locations appearing in 47,000 literary excerpts;  users can affiliate  a particular spot in Edinburgh  with these passages (Alex et al. 2015). Also app-based is Curious Edinburgh, created by Niki Vermeulen from the School of Social and Political Science. The app provides self-guided walking tours of scientific and historic events and of specific areas, such as the Granton neighbourhood, a place with a rich industrial past as the site of the world’s first electric car factory. Another project, Mapping Edinburgh’s Social History, or MESH, was an initiative from the School of History, Classics & Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh that mapped a pool of historical data on Edinburgh’s social life—mortality, taxes, property ownership, population and poverty—going back to the fifteenth century (MESH 2015). The same researchers involved in MESH created Visualising Urban Geographies (National Library of Scotland 2021) to offer georeferencing and analysis tools to historians not familiar with GIS software (Rodger 2014). Beyond the University, Edinburgh World Heritage (EWH) has online interactive maps that commemorate the Edinburgh-based sculptor and designer Eduardo Paolozzi and two historic areas of town, Kirkyard and Canongate. All three are beautifully designed illustrations of the city that you can click through to pull up pop-up windows.3 More similar to the projects we will describe in this book, EWH commissioned artist Hanna Rye to hand illustrate a community map of Edinburgh based on a community mapping workshop. Also taking a participatory approach was a  LitLong Edinburgh, https://www.litlong.org.  While still online, the maps’ pop-ups were not working when we last tried them in July 2021. 2 3

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five-year initiative by Scotland Urban Maps, a department within National Records Scotland, which maps Glasgow and Edinburgh through stories told by residents. The latter project ran until 2019, with different artists illustrating people’s recollections and experiences  (National Library of Scotland  2021). Artist John Quiroga, whose quote opens this chapter, paired with the non-profit The Welcoming to create an illustrated map capturing newly arriving residents’ first impressions of the city. Artist Holly Summerson illustrated another map for Scotland Urban Maps of stories about the experiences of Edinburgh’s LGBT community. Similar to the University projects described above, the Culture & Communities Mapping Project is a research effort—we use cultural maps as starting points to raise research questions and begin relationships that lead on to other stages of research. However, our work is quite different from the  University  projects outlined above, since our focus is not historic—we do not use maps to anchor a city location to a particular historic text or event. Rather, our efforts are more similar to the EWH community map and the Scotland Urban Maps initiative, since we use maps to talk to people, hear their stories and understand how residents perceive their city in different ways. Some of the maps we design are intentionally unfinished. They remain dynamic objects that our research can inform in an iterative manner, reflecting the ever-changing context of the city,  as we describe further in Chap. 3.

Edinburgh’s Mapping Precedents Important to this project is how we, as co-investigators from different academic fields, have approached this effort. Both of us are immigrants to Edinburgh from across the Atlantic—Morgan from the US and Melisa from Chile—and we have been struck by the city’s summer transformation into a cramped amphitheatre of artists and international visitors. We ourselves are part of this internationalisation, since Edinburgh University hosts us both. We came to the research questions described in this book from very different disciplinary perspectives, at least at first. One of us, Morgan, is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies department at the University of Edinburgh. Morgan draws  from a background in both critical data studies and information studies, looking at maps as texts that have ideological agendas that can reveal sites of power and resource flows (Fidler and Currie 2015, 2016) and shape the same geographic spaces they attempt to model, whether by drawing boundaries or creating new categories and concepts designating space (Currie and Hsu 2019). Melisa is an architect and tutor at the Edinburgh College of Art and comes

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from a background steeped in landscape theory, participatory map-­ making, and action research. Her research practice actively uses maps to begin conversations between her participants, help them hear each other’s stories and explore their mental maps of urban and rural space (Miranda-­ Correa 2020)—an ethnographic approach she calls ‘mapping as listening’4 (Ingold 2011; Hall 2020). Together we devised a project that, methodologically, would combine these perspectives—a critical, reflexive approach towards the epistemologies of maps and mapping, with a study that creates maps and uses them to facilitate community-based discussions and stories rooted in local memory, identity and culture.

The Structure of this Book This book’s structure follows the Culture & Community Mapping Project over four years, from 2018 until 2021. Throughout, we invite the reader to explore our online maps—the cultural map of Edinburgh and the LeithLate Virtual Tour—at www.edinburghculturalmap.org. In the next chapter we coalesce much of the existing literature on cultural mapping and put it in conversation with other fields of geography and cartography. We begin with counter- and indigenous-mapping practices dating from the 1970s, before looking at participatory maps created in urban contexts, along with cultural mapping projects carried out by city agencies for cultural policymaking. Cultural mapping, as defined in much of the literature reviewed here, gives citizens an opportunity to create spatial knowledge about place or shape its cultural policy, and we argue that practices of cultural mapping consist of a research field in and of itself. We then place this literature in conversation with the fields of critical cartography and cultural geography, a body of research that examines the complex relationships that map makers have with the spaces they represent, some fraught with political and decolonial struggles. This theoretical work at times approaches maps as texts shaped by the political contexts of their creation as well as their creators’ choices, which, in turn, play a powerful role in shaping or controlling the places they depict. We also look at non-representational understandings of maps, a lens that focuses less on what maps depict than on how they are used in everyday life or for political or artistic ends. Throughout, this chapter offers examples of historical and more contemporary maps that exemplify these very different epistemologies and aims. We end with five questions based on our review of this diverse set of work, and we use these questions to think about the Culture 4

 Inspired by Suzzane Hall’s concept of drawing as listening as an ethnographic practice.

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& Community Mapping Project’s conceptual and methodological approaches in the third chapter. The third chapter details processes and decision-making behind a specific cultural mapping project consisting of seven public mapping events held between March and July 2019. The events attracted  around 115 people from the cultural sector who took part in identifying valued spaces and community hubs across the city. We describe our methodology, entailing taking our map to various community events, adopting an iterative approach to data collection, and capturing intangible information as quantitative data. These methods contribute to ideas about the tactile aspects of maps, such as annotating, pinning and putting stickers on paper maps, and can be of pragmatic use for other cultural mapping projects. We also describe how we processed participant feedback, turning it into an open dataset of cultural assets that we display as an interactive map on a public website.1 We close with an analysis of this project using the theoretical frameworks and questions introduced in Chap. 2.  Chapter 4 examines our processes of designing two web-based cultural maps in 2020. We contrast the intent of these community maps with Google Maps and the algorithms it uses to rank spaces and businesses based on commercial indicators and optimisation techniques. These techniques, we argue, may not be accessible to small-scale cultural initiatives such as local gardening activities, which can obscure these spaces, as a result, from their own communities. The chapter then uses the concept of neogeography to introduce alternative and non-commercial mapping practices that have grown in the last few decades alongside commercial search engines and online maps. We position our own maps as neogeography: first the Edinburgh Cultural Map, resulting from our 2019 participatory events, then the LeithLate Virtual Tours, created in collaboration with the grassroots arts initiative LeithLate. Our analysis suggests the need for more diverse, participatory GIS efforts for mapping culture. The book’s fifth chapter describes a second round of cultural mapping exercises that we carried out with six communities in Edinburgh in 2021. This phase of research draws on one of the main findings of the mapping events from 2019, that Edinburgh is a fragmented city, home to areas where many citizens cannot afford tickets to its major events and often feel cut-off from the activities in the city centre. These areas nevertheless have a strong sense of identity and local culture that are less visible in the well-­ known narratives about Edinburgh. This chapter contributes to ongoing conversations about the inclusiveness of Edinburgh’s cultural and

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economic policies through three reflexive essays capturing  stories about Edinburgh’s little known areas. We carried out this ethnographic writing exercise in partnership with cultural institutions working in neighbourhoods outside the city centre and that include areas of high deprivation. The workshops combined two participatory methods, cultural mapping and photo-elicitation, to facilitate participants’ stories about belonging and their memories of places they value in their neighbourhood and around the city. This experience contributes to our understandings of the tactile and performative aspect of maps, building on Tania Rosetto’s work on the interactions between the participants and map surfaces (2019a,b). We explore the tactile experience of combining auditory and visual senses while using maps and images for storytelling. This interaction, activating multiple senses at once, allowed participants and researchers to immerse ourselves in the memories and emotions of the storyteller. The book’s contribution is both theoretical and methodological. We take a self-reflexive approach overall, drawing on a variety of critical theoretical lenses, iterative mapping procedures and visual methodologies. Supported as the authors are by the University of Edinburgh, we had the privilege of receiving several funding opportunities to develop aspects of the project further. We became, in effect, neophyte cartographers experimenting with map forms and mapping processes, an opportunity that wouldn’t have been possible with one-off funding. A part of this experimentation involved trying out different ways of hearing from residents through maps, and, as a consequence, representing Edinburgh through the voices of its inhabitants and their distinctive stories about the city.

References Alex, Beatrice, Claire Grover, Jon Oberlander, Ke Zhou, and Uta Hinrichs. 2015. Palimpsest: Improving Assisted Curation of Loco-specific Literature. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32 (1). Bartie, Angela. 2013. The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-War Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brown, Emma. 2019. More than a Map: Alternative Visions of Scotland’s Cities. We Go Behind the Scenes with the Scotland’s Urban Past Community Mapping Project to See Glasgow and Edinburgh Through Fresh Eyes. Historic Environment Scotland. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://blog.historicenvironment. scot/2019/05/community-­maps/. Castells, Manuel. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

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Centres-for-Cities. 2017. Cities Outlook 2017. 01 Where Do UK Cities Export to? Centres for Cities. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://www.centreforcities. org/reader/cities-­outlook-­2017/uk-­cities-­export/. Citylets. 2019. Citylets Report. Mixed Signals. City Lets, Home of Scottish Letting. Cobarrubias, Sebastián, and John Pickles. 2008. Spacing movements: The turn to cartographies and mapping practices in contemporary social movements. Routledge. Cunningham, Movern. 2020. Building Edinburgh Better in a Post-Pandemic World. Creative Producer Morvern Cunningham Presents a Manifesto on the Cultural Crisis Facing the City of Edinburgh—‘You’ll Have Had Your City?’. The Skinny. Currie, Morgan, and Umi Hsu. 2019. Performative Data: Cultures of Government Data Practice. Journal of Cultural Analytics. https://doi.org/10.22148/ 16.045. Edinburgh-Culture. 2015. Desire Lines. A Call to Action from Edinburgh’s Cultural Community. Culture Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh Council. Accessed 19 July 2021. https://cultureedinburgh.com/resources-­reports/desire­lines-­booklet. ETAG. 2016. Tourism in Edinburgh. Key Figures. Edinburgh Tourism Action Group. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://www.etag.org.uk/wp-­content/ uploads/2016/11/Facts-­and-­Figures-­2016-­Final.pdf. Ferguson, Brian. 2015. Renting cost ‘soars by third’ in Edinburgh Festival. The Cost of Renting a House Has Risen by Almost a Third for the Edinburgh Festival Season, According to Research. The Scotsman. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://www.scotsman.com/arts-­and-­culture/ renting-­cost-­soars-­third-­edinburgh-­festival-­1998122. Fidler, Bradley, and Morgan Currie. 2015. Production and Interpretation of ARPANET Maps. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. https://doi. org/10.1109/MAHC.2015.49. ———. 2016. Infrastructure, Representation, and Historiography in BBN’s Arpanet Maps. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38 (3): 44–57. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2015.69. Hall, Suzanne. 2020. Drawing as listening. 238 (Architektur Ethnografie). Ingold, Tim. 2011. Anthropology is Not Ethnography. Routledge. Knox, Paul L. 1984. City Profile – Edinburgh. Cities 1 (4): 328. MESH. 2015. Mapping Edinburgh’s Social History. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://www.ed.ac.uk/history-­c lassics-­a rchaeology/research/research-­ projects/mapping-­edinburgh-­s-­social-­history. Miranda-Correa, Melisa. 2020. Mapping Landscapes of Movements: Representing Indigenous Space Signification. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 16 (2): 117–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1177180120917485.

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Mitchell, Hilary. 2020. Scottish Government Announce Airbnb Crackdown with More Powers for Local Councils. Housing Minister Kevin Stewart Announced that Councils will be Able to Bring in a Licensing Scheme for Airbnbs and Other Short-Term Lets from Spring 2021. Edinburghlive. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-­news/scottish-­government­announce-­airbnb-­crackdown-­17534113. National Library of Scotland. 2021.  Visualising Urban Geographies. About the Project. Accessed 26 July 2021. http://geo.nls.uk/urbhist/index.html. Pooran, Neil. 2020. Map Shows Holiday Flat Hotspots Around Edinburgh  – Including Leith and Corstorphine. Andy Wightman’s Homes First Survey Shows the Growth in Airbnb-Style Flats Isn’t Limited to the City Centre. Edinburghlive. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-­ news/airbnb-­hotspots-­edinburgh-­leith-­corstorphine-­17726877. Rodger, Richard. 2014. When History Meets Geography: The Visualising Urban Geographies Project. In Mapping Spatial Relations, Their Perceptions and Dynamics. The City Today and in the Past, ed. Susanne Rau Ekkehard Schönherr, 3–17. Heidelberg; New York; Dordrecht; London: Springer. Rossetto, Tania. 2019a. Object-Oriented Cartography. Maps as Things. Oxon and New York: Routledge. ———. 2019b. The Skin of the Map: Viewing Cartography Through Tactile Empathy. Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 37 (1): 83–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818786251. VisitScotland. 2019. Edinburgh & The Lothians. Scotland’s Capital and the Surrounding Area. Accessed 26 July 2021. https://www.visitscotland.org/ research-­insights/regions/edinburgh-­lothians.

CHAPTER 2

Theories and Methods of Cultural Mapping

Abstract  In this chapter, we review literature on cultural mapping that has served as the intellectual underpinnings of the Culture & Communities Mapping Project, beginning with indigenous counter-mapping in Canada, largely considered the foundation of cultural mapping. We discuss how the methods and applications of cultural mapping have since expanded to encompass an array of spatial practices for studying cultural identities and the cultural assets of an area, with methods ranging from participatory community asset mapping to the use of online GIS maps to drive cultural policy. This chapter also takes us through some of the major theoretical writings about cartography, drawing on scholars of critical cartography and cultural geography who ask us to read maps as constructed texts or arguments communicating the political context of their creation. We then draw on scholarship that looks at how maps act in the world—at their role as everyday objects or as aesthetic and political expressions. These writings lead us to a series of questions that people can ask to think about their own cultural mapping work—about the choices to make concerning what kinds of information to collect, how participatory the project should be, what materials to use, what the aims ultimately are and how to understand the project’s limitations. Keywords  Cultural mapping • Critical cartography • Cultural geography • Counter-mapping • Non-representational geography © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Currie, M. Miranda Correa, The Culture and Communities Mapping Project, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88651-6_2

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Maps invite us to locate ourselves in relation to whatever they show, to enter the labyrinth that is each map and to find our way out by grasping what is mapped. They are always invitations to enter, to arrive, to understand, in a way that is different than the invitations of visual and written art. I’ve also learned that people delight in maps in a very particular way. (Rebecca Solnit in Kelley 2012)

There is something delightful about maps, points out writer Rebecca Solnit, the author of several books of artist maps. When we look at a map, we want to locate ourselves on it, or find the places we have been or want to visit. We pull up maps on our phones to see what is around us, to understand the spatial contexts of different places, whether out of curiosity or to anticipate a day of commuting or errands. We hang printed maps on the walls of our offices or homes or buy books of maps, such as Solnit’s, to enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of cartographic illustrations. The method of cultural mapping takes this basic cartographic delight and puts it to use for the purposes of research. Cultural mapping harnesses maps both as prompts and mediums: maps activate memories, they prod people to reflect on the meaning of a place, and they also capture and communicate these details by creating new maps. But beyond this general spatial orientation towards understanding culture, there is little methodological coherence among cultural mapping projects. There are no single set of practices or approaches to adopt, and the purposes across cultural mapping projects range widely, from indigenous land reclamation processes to participatory art expressions, city planning, cultural policymaking and academic research. In this chapter, we go through a rich set of literature on cultural mapping that has served as the intellectual underpinnings of the Culture & Communities Mapping Project. These works offer a guide to orient our own cultural mapping work among many different possible approaches. We begin with indigenous counter-mapping in Canada, largely considered the foundation of cultural mapping, before UNESCO’s adoption in the nineties of the method as a more inclusive and sensitive way to set global policy around intangible and indigenous cultural heritage. We discuss how the methods and applications of cultural mapping have since expanded to encompass a freewheeling array of spatial practices for studying cultural identities and the cultural assets of an area, with methods ranging from participatory community asset mapping to the use of online GIS maps to

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drive cultural policy. This chapter also takes us through some of the major theoretical writings about cartography, drawing on scholars of critical cartography and cultural geography who ask us to read maps as constructed texts or arguments communicating the political context of their creation. We then draw on scholarship that looks at how maps act in the world—at their role as everyday objects or as aesthetic and political expressions. These writings lead us to a series of questions that people can ask to think about their own cultural mapping work—about choices concerning the kinds of information to collect, how participatory the project should be, what materials to use, what the aims ultimately are and how to understand the project’s limitations. We end with five questions, which we return to in Chap. 2 as we reflect on the first round of cultural mapping events we carried out as the Culture & Communities Mapping Project in 2019.

Practices of Cultural Mapping In your mind’s eye, imagine a map composed of thin, hand-drawn lines, some of them dotted, in pink, blue, mustard and purple ink, with a legend in the right-hand bottom corner. The legend links the colours and line types to different pathways travelled by hunters who are tracking various animal species—seals, geese, polar bears, and others—across a large expanse of land. The illustrator was Henry Hokshun, an Inuit hunter. The map tells his personal history of travelling and hunting in Canada’s Gjoa Haven region. Hokshun created the map in 1973 as part of the Inuit Land Use and Ecological Mapping Project, itself part of growing movement expressing discontent against the environmental degradation caused by Canada’s extraction industries. Researchers for the mapping project travelled the region, collecting oral histories and personal maps of Inuit territory and recording stories of where people, like Henry, hunted and trapped, fished, travelled and settled. The researchers combined many of the maps from Inuit participants into a record of their traditional lands to build evidence for Inuit land claim negotiations with the Canadian government. Like cloth in a bigger tapestry, the Hokshun map played a part in telling a more complete record of the Inuit’s collective past and of Inuit territory, helping negotiate indigenous land reclamations. Since the 1970s, minority and indigenous people around the globe have used counter-maps as legal documents to redress longstanding power inequalities. “From its inception, cultural mapping has been understood

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as a bridge between subordinated or marginalised voices and those in a dominant position,” writes Nigel Crawhall, an expert on protected cultural areas, in his 2007 reflections prepared for the UNESCO commission for cultural policies and intercultural dialogue. “Cultural mapping is the exercise of representing a previously unrepresented world view or knowledge system in a tangible and understandable geo-referenced medium” (Crawhall 2007, 17). If the colonisers have too long decided what counts as evidence and knowledge about the world, counter-maps create evidence for marginalised perspectives as part of efforts to restore historic injustices (Craib 2017). Counter-maps have also diversified traditional conceptions of culture and offer a way to include minoritised voices in cultural policymaking. In a paper for the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development in 1998, cultural policy scholars Bennet and Mercer discuss how counter-mapping facilitates a more collaborative, inclusive approach to cultural policy, which they argue could bring administrative goals more in alignment with local knowledge and local needs concerning territory and cultural traditions. Crawhall (2007) found that cultural mapping broadens concepts of what counts as cultural expression by capturing intangible heritage—the “embodied, ephemeral, transitory, tactile, and affective elements” of life, such as the oral cultures of nomadic pastoralists or ephemeral indigenous rituals and performing arts (Longley and Duxbury 2016, 3)—that is not easily commodified and has traditionally been ignored by cultural policymakers. The concept of cultural mapping has  broadened beyond indigenous geographies to encompass local geographies of many sorts, including urban contexts, remote islands and classrooms. One of the first books that captures a wide breadth of cultural mapping projects is Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, published in 2015 (Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and MacLennan). The editors offer a compendium of case studies and reflections on the topic, and they define cultural mapping as a set of participatory tools that communities can use to capture cultural assets, building a collective knowledge base for local or city plans and other strategic purposes. Maps, as the book’s examples show, are an incredibly handy way to bring people together to survey environmental features and valued assets of a city or neighbourhood and to  negotiate planning for local culture. Mapping, the book argues, sparks memories, feelings, stories about relationships and rituals, visions for the future of a place. Maps can build collective knowledge about what makes a place meaningful, and the results can be idiosyncratic and rich, capturing how a place’s identity is fluid,

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dynamic and sometimes contested, constantly created and reinvented through “the layering and interweaving of place-making” as the city changes over time (Pillai 2015, 168). One example from Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry is a project called Cherita Lebuh Chulia: Living on Chulia Street 1945–1970, by artist and cultural researcher, Kuah Li Feng, in 2013–2014. The project documents the past of George Town, a vibrant UNESCO World Heritage Site in Malaysia. Feng and her researchers conducted oral histories with traders and residents of the street and collected photos and memorabilia that captured the post-war time period up to 1970. One of the results is a guide map of Chulia Street that takes a long rectangular shape and shows an aerial view of a conventionally plotted cityscape featuring a main street and outlines of buildings. The map is dotted with enlarged illustrations of people’s heads and prominent buildings of the area to highlight frequently recalled events and popular local characters whom participants associated with the street. The researchers also drew a comic book of illustrated memories and filmed a documentary to go with people’s reflections. The researchers then held a public exhibition on Chulia street with these artefacts on display, a testimony to the significance of street’s past to the groups involved in the project. According to Pillai (2015), writing about this event a year later, it “provides a clue as to what aspects of cultural heritage need to be protected or emphasized” (166). The Chulia street mapping project brings together the participants’ collective memories about the street; at the same time, it creates visual and verbal objects that could be used for planning in the area. Like the indigenous counter-maps, Feng’s community mapping project makes intangible memories concrete in ways that could influence the future direction of the place. Living on Chulia Street is just one of the many case studies described in Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry. But the range covered by the book shows that there is simply no one definition or way of doing cultural mapping, just as there is an endless range of reasons for doing it. The editors acknowledge that cultural mapping is still a motley meta-field of research and practice: “Such a state of affairs leaves us to wonder whether what we have is an array of methodologies in search of a field or an emerging field in search of appropriate methodologies” (Duxbury et al. 2015, 16). The book offers examples, for instance, of cultural mapping as an academic research method and pedagogical tool, with a few chapters devoted to sending students out to explore urban environments. The book also surveys how cultural mapping has been widely adopted by governments to

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involve communities in cultural planning and policy. One chapter discusses the Creative City Cultural Mapping Toolkit—widely adopted by municipalities in Canada and other parts of the world. The toolkit offers a blueprint for planners or communities to create various inputs, whether maps, reports, or visual aids that can inform city planning in a more inclusive way, helping participants identify cultural assets beyond traditional art institutions and cultural heritage. Administrators might use the resulting data to locate geographic patterns and systems or gaps and outliers in ways that can play into decision-making in, for instance, urban revitalisation projects. Cities and municipalities have also designed cultural maps as economic and planning tools, often in light of population shifts and gentrification. The Arts and Culture department in London’s City Hall, for instance, created The Cultural Infrastructure Map of London in 2019 as  part of an effort to address the effects of steep rent  prices on its creative sector. According to a press release about the project, “there has been a worrying decline in London’s cultural spaces, with the numbers of LGBT+ venues and grassroots music venues stabilising in the last year following a decade of steep decline” (Londonassembly 2019). The map comes with a clickable list of icons that pull up different types of cultural spaces—skate parks, night clubs, community centres and production studios, among  many others, and has layers about transport and demographics. All the underlying datasets on the map are downloadable. The point is to show planners and developers the patterns across city neighbourhoods or the distinctiveness of particular places, in the hope that they’ll use this information to nourish local culture in the face of London’s prohibitive cost of living. The web-based London Map did not come about through a participatory process; it falls more in the tradition of rationalised and evidence-based approaches to public management of arts planning and creative facilities. There are many examples of officials using cultural mapping to make the economic and social benefits of cultural assets calculable for planning or investment decisions. Lee and Gilmore (2012) describe four such cases in regional UK governments—the researchers find these projects take a ‘a policy-based determinism’, since they use the cultural asset maps to excavate facts and evidence that they apply to cultural policy. Examples of similarly oriented, data-driven projects abound worldwide. In Cuttack, India, administrators drew on cultural mapping methods to strategise its prospects as an attractive tourist destination (Shruti et al. 2019). Freitas (2016) explores two cultural mapping efforts in Portugal that created

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quantitative indicators for the cultural sector to make predictions about economic growth in certain areas. These policy-focused applications of cultural mapping are not always participatory and focused on community empowerment, distinguishing them from most of the cases in Duxbury et al.’s book. But even with these more bureaucratic cases we can add some nuance. For instance, the City of Los Angeles’ Neighbourhood Arts Profile is an open data web map that was made by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to understand the spread of the spaces they owned across the city’s neighbourhoods and guide programming in different sociodemographic areas. While not a community-based grassroots process, the designers took a participatory approach from within the Cultural Affairs department to determine what variables to put on the map and worked cautiously to get department buy-in, and the resulting map reflects a collective sense of the agency’s values (Currie and Hsu 2019). Just so, some of the projects mentioned in Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry are not participatory, even though they come out of artistic, rather than planning or policy-based, practices (Lowry et  al. 2015). Of course, the results of these artistic experiments are vastly different from the standard, data-intensive GIS maps used by cities—the goal of the former is aesthetic and often politically disruptive, not rationalised, bureaucratic and normative. However, the point of raising these differences is to illustrate the wide range of methodologies and aims that characterise the practices of cultural mapping. Whether the London map is an example of cultural mapping depends on your definition—and even a narrow conception of cultural mapping comes with a diversity of practices, tools and outcomes (Freitas 2016). Cultural mapping can also engage these different registers simultaneously, creating both humanistic, affective and intangible forms of knowledge about culture as well as more instrumental intelligence for cultural development and economic policy (Freitas 2016). What we find in the examples and literature on cultural mapping, are several continuums of approaches and aims, from the more participatory, diverse and grassroots, to the more administrative and top-down; from projects that are more about community and identity to projects that are more planning focused; and from projects that draw on conventional mapping practices and tools to those that are more aesthetic and multi-­ modal. The coordinators of any cultural mapping project should start by asking what approaches they want to take, to what ends. * * *

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So far this chapter has looked at how cultural mapping offers a way to create spatial knowledge about a community or place’s cultural aspects. But cultural mapping is also a methodology that lends itself to asking theoretical and reflexive questions more broadly about the construction of spatial knowledge—about how we think about and understand space and why we represent it in the ways that we do (Duxbury et al. 2015). In the next part of this chapter, we reflect on important epistemological questions about maps, territory, landscape and place that draw on geography and cartography and that have had a strong influence on our research. Here we venture outside of our disciplinary expertise (since we are not cartographers nor geographers). We have found these theoretical discussions useful, nonetheless, for helping us reflect more seriously on our own choices and approaches to cultural mapping.

Legacies: Thinking Critically About Spatial Knowledge Deconstructing Maps We start this section with another map, this time a depiction of Paris as it was surveyed in 1652 by a French cartographer, Jacques Gomboust (Gomboust 1652). The map is an ornate geometric drawing of the city, with many decorative flourishes. The map takes a birds-eye-view, which was novel and odd at that time—viewers would have expected an elevated profile view more in line with people’s street-view perspective. In the bottom corners of the map are baroque armorial crests containing profiles of 15 impressive buildings. This map makes an appearance in geographer and cartographer Brian Harley’s essay, ‘Deconstructing the Map’ (1989). In the piece, Harley argues that cartography as a field has traditionally regarded maps, such as Gomboust’s, as a neutral representation of the reality of geographic features. As a science and academic discipline, mapping is associated with gathering spatially referenced data then drafting this into a cartographic form, free of distortions of projection and scale. Maps, for this reason, offer a sense of impartial authority. But in the process of drawing a map, as Harley points out, the cartographer determines what is visible or erased from view. She categorises and positions objects within particular structures and frameworks, and chooses symbols, content and colours through

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acts of selection taken at each step of the mapping process. By showcasing 15 buildings within the crests, for instance, the Gomboust map creates a hierarchy of important spaces (castles, landed estates) that reflect social class and therefore inequality. Houses of farmers or minor church figures do not show up. Maps are very effective tools of power in this way: in their scientific authoritativeness, they seem to naturalise these social and economic relations. As Harley describes it, quoting Clifford Geertz, maps are “mechanisms for defining social relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening social values” (Geertz 1983, 99  in Harley 1989, 7). Drawing on Foucault and Derrida, Harley set out to deconstruct maps, to excavate the choices made in their construction and the structures of political and economic power behind their creation. He asked how mapping establishes boundaries and projects ethnocentricity by centralising a particular territory. Harley called for cartographers and geographers to treat maps as texts that could be subject to cultural analyses, which would reveal their ellipses, contradictions and particular cultural and historic perspectives. By subjecting maps to cultural analyses and cartographic semiotics, critical cartographers such as Harley saw the iconography of maps in complex relationships with the political, religious and cultural struggles during the time of their creation (Cosgrove 2008). Whether the multi-temporal planes of medieval Mappa Mundis, which showed biblical characters alongside contemporary figures, or the point, lines and polygons introduced in the early twentieth century, reflecting new Western epistemologies and coordinate systems, maps make certain types of knowledge claims that reflect the context of their creation (Crampton 2013). Maps are formalised abstractions, but as physical objects, their effects are also very real—they are the “silent arbiters of the world” (Harley 1989, 13). Pickles (2004) writes that a map “is not a representation of the world, but an inscription that does (or sometimes does not do) work in the world” (67). Sparke (2004) describes how maps exert power on the places they represent in a recursive movement, since, by making changes to landscape and territory, they will ultimately shape the next generation of maps. These scholars deconstruct historic maps to illuminate the power and knowledge structures behind their creation—the rhetorical role they play in making authoritative claims about the world, and their political and social force exerted in the world and on their viewers. From this perspective, maps shape, rather than reflect, the territories their creators set out to represent. It is no surprise that critical cartographers

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studied how the emergence of modern cartography took place alongside the rise of the nation state as a tool of state surveillance and control. According to Wood and Fels (2010), the vast majority of maps, as we know them, are inextricably bound up with government sovereignty and power, with the project of what Scott (1998) called ‘seeing subjects from a distance’. States historically have had the unparalleled means necessary to carry out largescale mapping projects, such as geological and cadastral surveys and aerial and satellite imaging. Crampton (2013) discusses how mid-nineteenth-century cartography in France, for instance, used maps to call for sweeping education reform by mapping the  educated versus uneducated male populations. Maps also offer a narrative of state coherence as a sovereign centre of power, representing it as a solid rather than precarious unity (Sparke 2004, 10). Along with museums and the census, maps are part of the colonial legacy, a form of religious and racist propaganda that, by representing the boundaries of empire, reify the colonial project (Harley 1992). Imperial maps are created by people at a remove, “emotionally, morally, and spatially” from the territories and peoples mapped, who have relatively little say in how and why they are mapped (Akerman 2017).1 The scientific, mechanistic approach to geography as something measurable and objective came under attack as well in the field of cultural geography. In a paper published in 1985, cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove provoked a critical reappraisal of the map. Cosgrove (1985) argued that the concept of ‘landscape’ emerged historically in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Europe as a particular visual ideology, a new way of seeing. The idea of ‘landscape’ corresponded with the rise of linear perspective in Italian Renaissance landscape painting, with  depictions of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface that create a realist illusion of linear perspective. Linear perspective seemed to overcome the partial and subjective nature of viewing and offered a way to organise and control space. The birds-eye-view also became popular around this time. Both techniques influenced land surveying, navigation and mapping. Like the concept of landscape, surveyors and cartographers used maps to give 1  In a clear example of map’s colonial ties into the more recent present, Sparke describes the 1987 British Columbian court case over the land rights of two Canadian First Nations, the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en. In court, the First Nations sang territorial songs and submitted Cartesian maps based on their oral history of their Houses, drawn up specifically for the hearings. The judge dismissed the suit, citing inaccuracies as the maps that didn’t match up with the precisely delineated abstract space of state surveyors and colonial property rights (a ruling later overturned by the Supreme Court).

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power over the land through the visual appropriation of space. Cosgrove links all of these approaches to the transition of feudal land into private property owned by commercial landowners and monasteries during the Tudor period in England. Maps are inextricably linked to modern state power, but they do not always to reinforce it—maps can also be a part of efforts to destabilise the state. Cartographic historians have also looked at how formerly colonised people took part in mapping their own territories, both before and after the formation of independent nation states. Maps are an important part of processes of independence, as former colonies used them to assert new identities and reclaim the names of spaces, or connect places to the past by adding cultural symbols (Craib 2017). Atlases published in the Arab world after 1952, for instance, replaced the toponym Persian Gulf with Arabian Gulf and the Arabic place name al-Quds for the Judaic-Christian name of Jerusalem; the maps “discursively create an Arab Homeland as unified supranational Arab territory,” which in turn informs the geopolitics of the area, including having effects on non-Arabs, such as the Kurds, who remain absent on these maps (Culcasi 2011, 425). These decolonial cartographic projects were not, however, monolithic nor simplistic. Sometimes governments used maps to reaffirm settled properties from the colonial era; at other times they were instrumental in major land reforms or territorial expansion (Craib 2017). As the authors of Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation show, there were often competing maps, each one putting forward its own narrative of identity and territorial legacy. There were uneven gains of decolonisation across social sectors and political groups within the new state, particularly for marginalised ethnic and linguistic populations. Often these cartographic practices would take the same forms and idioms as those carried out by the former power, such as cadastral or topographic surveying, and these practices, by some accounts, were conducted by the elite and privileged, either by former colonial power brokers or by intermediaries between indigenous people and new authorities (Akerman 2017). The landscape architect James Corner (1999) writes that “the function of maps is not to depict but to enable” (225). His statement offers a useful concept for people who want to carry out a cultural mapping project: that maps do not simply represent a geographic area, but act on the world. Maps simplify and select from complex reality. Normative Cartesian maps follow established procedures giving them the authoritative air of a scientific process that can in turn shape the places they depict. Maps generate

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categories and produce data in standardised form, making things measurable, comparable and subject to predictions and monitoring in ways that can determine the distribution of resources and power. Yet while much of the work that comes from critical cartography focuses on this role of the map, the map as a powerful text that can be decoded and analysed, other cartographic research has reacted to this focus on map representations by, in effect, moving beyond it. This work asks, instead, how we use maps, how they circulate, and how they can be part of contentious, subversive and politically progressive projects. The next section explores literature that looks at maps as objects that are part of daily or political practice, not as readable texts to decode for power and knowledge claims on the world. Maps and Practices The ‘Ecological Footprint per Capita 2019’ is on a website called World Mapper, an academic project started by geographer Danny Dorling that now operates as  a non-profit. The map distorts the standard Mercator projection of the globe, thinning some continents into shreds and distending others into bulbous shapes. Countries are coloured either light or dark red, orange or green. This is a map depicting the world’s overconsumption of natural resources: the land surface has been resized by its population (hence India and China take on a bulbous shape), and the colours denote the ecological footprint in global hectares per person (the US—the worst ecological offender—is the largest darkest red country). Dodge and Perkins (2015) mention World Mapper in their paper in a special issue of Cartographia dedicated to Harley’s ‘Deconstructing the map’ essay. In their piece, Dodge and Perkins use Dorling’s World Mapper along with other examples to consider that while Harley had a great deal to say about how to analyse maps, he had less to say about using maps in socially efficacious and ethical ways. Many of those he influenced, as a result, wrote less about contemporary participatory projects such as indigenous counter-mapping, even though these practices also offer a way of deconstructing traditional maps by inverting the practice itself—by privileging the knowledge of those traditionally marginalised. Harley’s primary research focus was on the past—on historic colonial and state maps. Also, since Harley’s essay, maps have come to infiltrate the everyday. Digital maps are now integral to our daily lives. They are basic mediators of our knowledge about space, often  offering a detached, interactive

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gods-­eye view of landscape (Zook and Graham 2007). In a 2012 manifesto, Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins discuss the explosion of daily mapping practices brought by computers and smartphones, arguing that maps are no longer the purveyance of specialists trained in cartography and geography but open to most people with a smart phone or computer; academic cartography programmes have started to shrink as mapping becomes more grassroots and participatory. Even more, rather than nation states, the maps we use the most are controlled by private companies—Google most of all. Crampton calls this the ‘cartographic revolution’ and looks at how dominant groups of elites, both government and corporations such as Google and ESRI, now control the creation of the maps we use. Aside from Google Maps, one of the most successful contemporary mapping software is OpenStreetMaps, an open source, freely editable web-based map of geographic information crowdsourced from millions of users around the world (Dodge et al. 2012). Open source tools have ‘undisciplined’ cartography, in the words of Crampton and Krygier (2006, 142), while growing amounts of spatial data and a range of off-the-shelf GIS software have made using and designing maps more democratised than ever before. GIS maps can be designed to capture qualitative information and show overlapping epistemologies. Scholars in the digital humanities have embraced how GIS platforms can capture experiential and embodied knowledge by overlaying standard mapping coordinate systems with multimedia stories and memories. Digital maps can also use visual layers to reflect the different knowledge systems people use to understand places. Thick mapping, for instance, a term used by the Hypercities project based at the University of California, Los Angeles, describes maps that use layers of digital materials to contain contrasting representations and worldviews. The Hypercities mapping software allows collaborative authoring of maps through multimedia so that users can create different layers of meaning on a map. Thick maps show “the contingency of looking, the groundedness of any perspective, and the embodied relationally inherent to any locative investigation” (Presner et al. 2014, 47). This approach undermines claims that maps represent an external reality, rather than subjective worldviews and particular norms of visualisation. It follows from this more recent scholarship to look at maps not just as texts to be read for power relations, but as processes and practices and material objects that come with many meanings and functions. Dodge and Kitchin (2012) conceive of maps as a set of transitory elements that result from a specific context and time and are shaped in part by the viewer’s own subjectivity. They argue that a map is only the sum of this process,

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manifesting differently with each viewing. For this reason, maps should be understood in the context both of their production and their subsequent use. Cultural geographer Tania Rossetto focuses on the practices and materialities of mapping, rather than the politics and semiotics of maps (2019). She looks at how maps introduce possibilities and potentials, how they activate the imagination and incite us to action. Though Harley’s proposal was radical at the time, he encouraged a purely discursive method of reading. The current state of mapping, Rossetto argues, calls for different strategies, such as ethnographies of everyday mapping practices, social and collaborative uses of maps, and research about actions and processes, memories and affect, thick descriptions of doings, smells, memories, photographs and diaries of map’s everydayness. This new way of looking at maps draws as well on what some cultural geographers call non-representational geography, a term for attending to people’s actions around maps. Nigel Thrift proposed the concept within the field of geography to provoke researchers to describe and act, rather than diagnose and represent, to pay attention to how our actions shape our experiences of space, which is always embodied and subjective (Thrift and French 2002, Cadman 2009). As Hayden Lorimer (2005) puts it, “life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions” (84). Rather than looking at a map to uncover its meanings, as if these are lying there for discovery, you can focus on sensory and emotional behaviours around maps, the practices and physical encounters with maps that are difficult to capture discursively. This approach also asks researchers to be more attuned to roles played by everyone involved in the mapping project and to consider their own positionality in the research. Studying a landscape or a map as a text was limiting, in a way, because it did not require any social interaction with the people making or using a map. A more immersive, experiential, ethnographic approach requires the researcher to consider her role vis a vis those engaged in acts of mapping. Maps, as the non-representational literature foregrounded, and as counter-mapping shows, can be highly political, subversive and artistic. Cosgrove discusses artists who have used cartography as cultural acts of expression, from arte povera and surrealist maps of the world to Sol de Witt’s work and land art (2008). Situationists experienced urban space through what they called psychogeography and détournement, or

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strolling and digressing from a plotted path. The Situationists’ maps capture their authors’ immersive wandering through urban environments. The results are playful, anti-mimetic, abstract and undermine conventional cartographic forms of representation. Guy Debord’s map, The Naked City, for instance, expresses the authors’ psychological relations to the city, the flows he experienced walking through space (Craib 2017). Wood (2006) argues that, by rejecting conventional mapping practices, art maps unmask the supposed objectivity and authority of the conventional map. These maps expose contingencies—of national borders, of place names, of mapping conventions, such as the Mercator projection. Cosgrove (2008) describes  the “performative role of maps as objects” that artists use to intervene in daily life (165). GIS offers artists and provocateurs a powerful medium for politicising spatial knowledge, from the Spatial Information Design Lab’s Million Dollar Blocks project—a map that foregrounds the costs of incarceration in the US—to the Just Data Lab’s anti-eviction map, a geographical database capturing the struggles of the unhoused. The Brazilian magazine Super-interesante produced ‘the company-state map’ to show equivalences between multinational companies’ annual sales and a country’s gross national product of a country. Their map shows, for instance, that “sales for Nike are equivalent to the gross national product of Niger” (Jacobs 2009, 190). Similarly, the countercartographies collective in Argentina have developed mapping practices that draw on positivist conventions in the service of contestation and progressive political change— the maps aren’t “yoked to the social reproduction of the status quo” (Wood 2006, 11). These groups use the power of maps to intervene, to gesture towards alternate worlds and futures. * * * We can take from cultural geography, critical cartography, and the realm of artist and political maps a view of the political nature of space and place and the performative role that representation plays as maps shape, not merely reflect, geography and space. We bring to our own projects a consideration for these critiques of scientific mapping, of the map as an object of power. We also see the map as more than a representation—it is a material object that people interact with and use in their daily lives and as part of political or artistic practice.

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In the next section, we ask five questions about cultural mapping methods based on what we have learned from the literature and legacies just discussed.

Five Questions for Cultural Mapping Projects Participation A fundamental question to ask of any cultural mapping project is,  how participatory will the project be? As the different approaches we have looked at show, cultural mapping can range from broadly participatory, with an entire community invited to take part, to much more top-down and administrative, with no grassroots involvement. Many standard definitions of cultural mapping view participation as integral to the process, especially as the method originated with indigenous counter-mapping, but this is not always the case, as we’ve seen. Even when a cultural mapping project is participatory, the stages and levels of involvement of participants will vary. The literature on cultural mapping generally describes it as a participatory method inviting communities to take part in building collective knowledge about the cultural richness of a place. On the more participatory end, participants might work with the researcher from the beginning on deciding the overall aims of the project and designing the methods that will be used, and they could also take part in the analysis and write-up of the research results. More commonly, participants will only take part in the data collection phase of the project, such as mapping assets at a community event. Participation can be extractive and also inauthentic. Cobarrubias and Pickles (2008) criticise participatory approaches that treat participants as consultants but do not involve them more in determining the direction of the research. One precaution that researchers adopting participatory methods should take into account is preventing participants from entering into extractive relations through the research, by treating them simply as a font of knowledge for the researchers who then gain from the project through publications and other academic accolades, while no benefits flow to the research subjects who took part. Academic projects also have problems of sustainability—they tend to languish or disappear once the academic researcher moves on from the community they worked with (Crampton 2009). Researchers can take the definition of ‘the community’ for granted, assuming that in a particular geographic area or neighbourhood people all

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share the same values or identities (Parker 2006). And researchers may not be aware of how the political agenda of participants might skew the research, or they might allow only a small sample of participants to stand in for an entire, heterogenous neighbourhood. The research could legitimise the role of participants even as there may be remaining question around who makes up the community (Ibid, 475). Research on this issue has found, for instance, that women’s voices are often excluded from indigenous maps (Edmunds et al. 1995). Choices around participatory approaches are useful to keep in mind when designing a cultural mapping project. At what stages will participants be engaged and how involved will they be in the initial design of the project? Can they take part in analysis and write-up of results, and how best can they use the results? How may they benefit? Even the most successful participatory projects will face challenges over power imbalances and the recognition given to the people involved. Cultural mapping projects are often funded and developed by researchers or project leaders from outside the communities they engage with, and this dynamic will shape the results and the beneficiaries of the project. Even with much reflection, cultural mapping projects still risk foregrounding the preconceived solutions of project designers or inappropriately posing academic or administrative solutions to local problems as authentic engagement. What these concerns highlight is that even for projects that are highly participatory, the leaders of cultural mapping projects should critically and carefully reflect on their epistemic and social power relations vis-a-vis participants and ask how benefits will flow from the project’s various outputs. Data Types What kind of information do you want the project to create? Cultural maps can accommodate subjective experiences, social values and multiple interpretations, just as they can capture quantitative data to produce cultural metrics. Jeanotte (2015) presents one way to understand these different data types, in terms of resource mapping versus identity mapping: resource mapping, on the one hand, captures information on tangible and physical resources; identity mapping, on the other hand, captures intangible, affective stories and histories. The methods of cultural mapping will determine the kinds of data generated, whether qualitative or quantitative. In a prior paper, we present a quadrant of four different data types that cultural mapping can produce (Currie and Miranda-Correa 2021) (see Fig.  2.1). In the first quadrant are processes that capture tangible,

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Fig. 2.1  Matrix of cultural mapping practices

quantitative information, such as geographic coordinates, socioeconomic statistics or property values. In the second quadrant is tangible, qualitative information, such as concrete descriptions of a space’s physical qualities. In the third quadrant is intangible, qualitative information: handmade drawings, conversations about values, oral histories and the like. And in the fourth quadrant is intangible, quantitative data, such as a person’s ranking of their  favourite places, a subjective account. The relation between intangible information and quantification is least direct, and it requires reducing a person’s subjective perceptions into codifiable data. Some information will be more amenable to this reduction than others. Narratives, feelings and memories connected to a certain place, for instance, will be degraded through the quantification process, since converting them into numerical values will reduce the richness, specificity and complexity of this information. The methods chosen will bear in part on the kinds of data collected and knowledge claims the project can make, as well as the applications it can be put to. For example, projects that focus on capturing intangible, qualitative data may have more aesthetically oriented outputs that explore identity and the affective and ephemeral qualities of space; they may challenge our understanding of conventional maps through poetic renderings of place and space that veer from Cartesian norms and avoid positivist claims (Cosgrove 2008; Wood 2006). Cultural mapping projects that focus on capturing intangible information can more subjectively explore the links tying a community together. More tangible, quantitative methods, in turn, are useful for making more data-driven, positivist forms of evidence amenable to public policy planning. Some projects may capture all types of

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data; intangible outputs can also be very useful for policymaking, just as quantitative, tangible outputs can be part of aesthetic and political objects. Each project will therefore need to ask which of these data types best suit the project’s aims. Map Surfaces How will participants interact with the map as a tangible object? The various forms that a cultural mapping project will draw on can range broadly. Tania Rossetto (2019) has highlighted this aspect of maps in her writing about the tactile, haptic, and surficial qualities of everyday cartographic experiences. Cultural mapping projects could use paper or digital maps to solicit information—for instance, they can work with large paper maps or Google My Maps, which allows people to create their own data layers, to prompt people’s memories about a place. Cultural mapping projects will also need to decide what forms its final outputs will take, whether hand-­ drawn cartographies, 3D renderings of landscape or hyper-linked web maps. Projects can also result in reports, academic papers, photographs, multimedia, gallery or museum exhibits, comic books, project websites, databases, digital archives or live dance performance. Projects will consequently need to consider the affordances of different cartographic forms. Rebecca Solnit writes about the distinctiveness of maps as a physical form of communication: “Maps are always invitations in ways that texts and pictures are not; you can enter it, alter it, add to it, plan with it” (Solnit et al. 2010). However, the form maps take will shape how easily a person can read, alter and add to a map. Paper-based graphic maps, for instance, tend to use symbols economically, making it easy for the viewer to process patterns and relationships quickly and holistically, while a web-based map can show multiple dimensions and datasets at once, allowing users to isolate or overlay different layers (Stewart 2010). Digital maps, if they are interactive, can give users more agency in determining the information display on the map. Projects can use different types of maps at different stages throughout the project: drawing or looking at print maps can catalyse memories and stories about a place, information that can then be added to a digital map. What starts out as a paper map could become an online one—the project may produce many maps in different forms this way. As mentioned, the material form of the map will also shape the output: a web map can reach

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broad audiences beyond the location of the project, but it also can create barriers for people with internet connectivity issues. On a more practical level, the materials used will also be impacted by a project’s budget. GIS software, for instance, can be expensive to customise. Printing costs, costs of a designer to make a map or a final report, software licenses, costs of exhibition—all of these will shape and constrain the material forms the project takes. Aims and Outcomes What are the project’s final aims? In a survey of 64 cultural mapping projects across Canada, Jeanotte (2015) found that municipalities had different goals in mind: cultural planning, economic development, marketing and tourism, identity and sense of place, or cultural access and equity. Chiesi and Costa (2015) break down the types of cultural mapping outcomes into two broader categories: those that are identity-based versus those that are knowledge-based. Projects that focus on identity tend to produce intangible, highly creative results about a community’s self-­ understanding of their resources and possibilities; their goal is to empower communities to build a stronger sense of collective identity by bringing people together to tell stories and collect memories. The Living on Chulia Street map falls here. Knowledge-based projects, on the other hand, generate information that can feed into some change-oriented process, such as a planning project or a cultural policy. Typically these projects will be more scientific and positivist, with more systematic methods. Chiesi and Costa also say that identity-based projects are usually more grassroots or artist-run, while knowledge-based projects generally work with technical experts, planners or academic researchers. The London Cultural Infrastructure Map would fall in this latter category.2 Of course, the differences between these various categories are best treated as fluid and not mutually exclusive—some projects could produce both types of outcomes; each type could draw on several approaches towards data collection. Also, while some maps may draw on a more positivist perspective, they may use this form in order to advance the knowledge cultures of oppressed and

2  This distinction is echoed in the Creative City Toolkit, which finds that people undertake cultural mapping either to increase their understanding of a place (identity-based) or to discover more about an area of concern to achieve a specific goal (knowledge-based).

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marginalised groups rather than traditional power structures, as we have seen with some counter-mapping projects. Looking at the non-representational framework, we can ask how we might use maps not simply to locate things but to capture memories, stories and relationships (Crang and Thrift 2000). We can use maps to understand what people do in space and their spatial practices. A nonrepresentational focus opens up possibilities for asking about people’s spatial practices, or how they tell stories with maps and use them to prompt new ideas about space. Maps might encourage new ways of moving around in the world, rather than reinforcing someone else’s spatial perceptions and understandings of boundaries (Perkins 2009). We can ask how maps prompt motion, action and political change. Quite often the most important outcome of the project is not only the resulting map, but the process itself. Jeanotte (2015) found that most cultural mapping initiatives fail to feed into planning initiatives or ongoing governance processes. Instead, she describes that “those with the most success seemed to be the communities that developed maps primarily to instil residents’ pride and sense of identity, rather than to attract investment or tourism” (Ibid, 113). In the Ukraine, McAusland and Kostka (2015) describe seven cultural mapping projects that resulted in online maps and databases, but the authors report that a most direct outcome is “the reframing of relationships within organizations and communities” (148). Throughout Cultural Mapping for Cultural Inquiry, few of the projects could point to a particular planning policy their project impacted. We also found that many of the links to the maps discussed in the book were now broken. Instead of concrete policy change, what many of the projects benefitted from was the gathering together of community members and the ties and sense of identity created by the events, by the process itself. Limitations Finally, coordinators of a cultural mapping project should be aware of its inevitable limitations—about its ellipses, the places and voices left out, the design choices that foreclose others. As shown already, cultural mapping projects are often straightforward about the power of maps to bring about some kind of effect or change. What this literature from critical cartography shows us, however, is that it is important to reflect critically on how

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the methods we use will bound and shape what is being mapped and to consider carefully what and who a map leaves out, that it presents a selective view of reality from a particular perspective, that it reflects a particular point in time. Asks Wood (2006), reflecting on our tendency to take maps as reflections of the world, “In what ways do even critical voices become caught up in a giddy, spectacularized techno-rush that promises ever more powerful techniques of visualization?” (11). Anyone using a cultural map for policymaking or decision-making of any sort should account for the choices made during the map’s construction, the partial knowledge claims the map can make and contingent and subjective practices that gave rise to it. Longley and Duxbury question the difference between the process of cultural mapping and any research output, since outcomes should be considered in relation to the context and the decisions around mapping processes that produced them (2016).

Conclusion This chapter builds on a body of secondary literature on counter-mapping, cultural mapping, critical cartography, cultural geography and non-­ representational geography to highlight general themes and points of comparisons and contrasts. There is much we have left out and much that we may over-generalise. The constellation of literature adding context to definitions of cultural mapping is not coherent nor well-defined but an extensive set of sources spanning different disciplines and practices. How we define cultural mapping is also quite capacious—we present how others have used the term across different contexts and applications. From this literature we derive useful lessons that raise questions about our own work—we have  put forward some of these questions here. In the next chapter, we apply these questions to our own cultural mapping events carried out in Edinburgh.

References Akerman, James R. 2017. Decolonizing the Map, Cartography from Colony to Nation. The University of Chicago Press Books. Cadman, L. 2009. Non-Representational Theory/Non-Representational Geographies. In International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, ed. Rob Kitchen and Nigel Thrift. Elsevier Ltd.

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Chiesi, Leonardo, and Paolo Costa. 2015. One Strategy, Many Purposes: A Classification for Cultural Mapping Projects. In Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Nancy Duxbury, W.F.  Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan. New York: Routledge. Cobarrubias, Sebastián, and John Pickles. 2008. Spacing Movements: The Turn to Cartographies and Mapping Practices in Contemporary Social Movements. Routledge. Corner, James. 1999. The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. In Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove, 213–252. London. Cosgrove, Denis. 1985. Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10 (1): 45–62. https:// doi.org/10.2307/622249. ———. 2008. Cultural Cartography: Maps and Mapping in Cultural Geography. Annales de géographie 117 (660–661): 159–178. Craib, Raymond. 2017. Cartography and Decolonisation. In Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, ed. James R.  Akerman, 1–44. University of Chicago Press. Crampton, Jeremy W. 2009. Cartography: Performative, Participatory, Political. Progress in Human Geography 33 (6): 840–848. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0309132508105000. Crampton, Jeremy. 2013. Mappings. In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. Nuala C.  Johnson, Richard H.  Schein, and Jamie Winders, 423–436. Wiley-Blackwell. Crampton, Jeremy W., and John Krygier. 2006. An Introduction to Critical Cartography. CME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4 (1): 11–33. Crang, Mike, and Nigel Thrift. 2000. Thinking Space. London: Routledge. Crawhall, Nigel. 2007. The Role of Participatory Cultural Mapping in Promoting Intercultural Dialogue: We Are Not Hyenas; A Reflection Paper. http://www. iapad.org/wp-­content/uploads/2015/07/nigel.crawhall.190753e.pdf. Culcasi, Karen. 2011. Cartographies of Supranationalism: Creating and Silencing Territories in the Arab Homeland. Political Geography 30 (8): 417–428. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.08.003. Currie, Morgan, and Umi Hsu. 2019. Performative Data: Cultures of Government Data Practice. Journal of Cultural Analytics. https://doi.org/10.22148/ 16.045. Currie, Morgan, and Melisa Miranda-Correa. 2021. Tangibles, Intangibles and Other Tensions in the Culture and Communities Mapping Project. Cultural Trends: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2021.1910491. Dodge, Martin, and C.R. Perkins. 2015. Reflecting on J.B. Harley’s Influence and What He Missed in ‘Deconstructing the Map’. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 50 (1): 37–40.

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Lorimer, H. 2005. Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More Than Representational’. Progress in Human Geography 29: 83–94. Lowry, Glen, M. Simon Levin, and Henry Tsang. 2015. Maraya as Visual Research: Mapping Urban Displacement and Narrating Artistic Inquiry. In Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Nancy Duxbury, W.F.  Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan. New York: Routledge. McAusland, Linda Knudsen, and Olha Kotska. 2015. Understanding the Full Impact of Cultural Mapping in Ukraine. In In Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan. New York: Routledge. Parker, Brenda. 2006. Constructing Community Through Maps? Power and Praxis in Community Mapping. The Professional Geographer 58 (4): 470–484. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­9272.2006.00583.x. Perkins, C. 2009. Performative and Embodied Mapping. Pickles, John. 2004. A History of Spaces Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World. New York: Routledge. Pillai, Janet. 2015. Engaging Public, Professionals, and Policy-Makers in the Mapping Process. In Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Duxbury Nancy, W.F.  Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan, 191–214. New  York: Routledge. Presner, Todd Samuel, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano. 2014. HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities / Todd Presner, David Shepard, Yoh Kawano, MetaLABprojects. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rossetto, Tania. 2019. The Skin of the Map: Viewing Cartography Through Tactile Empathy. Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 37 (1): 83–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818786251. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed / James C. Scott, Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shruti, Mohanty, Mishra Sitikantha, and Mohanty Sasmita. 2019. Cultural Mapping  – A Developmental Tool for Enhancing the Destination’s Image. Case Study of Cuttack. Journal of Environmental Management & Tourism 10 (33): 39–52. https://doi.org/10.14505/jemt.v10.1(33).05. Solnit, Rebecca, Ben Pease, and Shizue Siegel. 2010. Infinite City a San Francisco Atlas / Rebecca Solnit; with Cartographers, Ben Pease, Shizue Siegel. Sparke, Mathew. 2004. A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (3): 463–495. Stewart, Sue. 2010. Cultural Mapping Toolkit. Vancouver, Canada: Legacies Now and Creative City Network of Canada.

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Thrift, Nigel, and Shaun French. 2002. The Automatic Production of Space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (3): 309–335. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1475-­5661.00057. Wood, Denis. 2006. Catalogue of Map Artists. Cartographic Perspectives 53: 61–68. https://doi.org/10.14714/CP53.366. Wood, D., and J. Fels. 2010. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York: Guilford. Zook, Matthew A., and Mark Graham. 2007. The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the Privatization of Cyberspace and DigiPlace. Geoforum 38 (6): 1322–1343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.05.004.

CHAPTER 3

Cultural Mapping in the City of Edinburgh

Abstract  In this chapter, we talk about the participatory processes of mapping that assisted us in collecting cultural data about Edinburgh, using this discussion to reflect critically on this process and the choices made during the mapping  project. We start with the early context and motivations of the project, then describe mapping activities we hosted in 2019, which produced a series of iterative maps—in digital and print forms—that built on seven participatory sessions. The chapter then examines the project through the five questions raised in the previous chapter about the project’s participants, data, map surfaces, use and limitations. We conclude with some of the epistemological and methodological lessons learned about processes of mapping through the Culture & Communities Mapping Project. We ask, in particular, about how our initial assumptions about culture—how to define and delimit it—shaped the resulting map, as well as subsequent projects building on this one. Keywords  Cultural mapping • Participatory methods • Edinburgh

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Currie, M. Miranda Correa, The Culture and Communities Mapping Project, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88651-6_3

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Our  cultural map of Edinburgh started in 2018 with the question, what does culture in Edinburgh look like—not as told by the tony images of Old Town’s cobble stone streets and the dramatic cliffs of castle rock, but from the perspective of the different local communities who live here, many residing far outside the city centre? And what does this image tell us about the different ways communities access—or have difficulties accessing—cultural events and cultural spaces? While the first question focuses on the different cultural identities of Edinburgh’s diverse neighbourhoods, the second one asks about cultural equity and access across these geographies. We decided to investigate these concerns using cultural mapping as our guiding methodology, with a focus on places outside the well-­trafficked city core. We carried out a series of participatory mapping events to collect cultural data about Edinburgh over a six-month period in 2019. Throughout the project, the mapping process remained open-ended and iterative, one version of a cultural map capturing details that formed the basis for the next one as participants encountered it in different contexts while it travelled around the city. Such a process aligns in some ways with descriptions made by writer and cartography Rebecca Solnit of straightforward Cartesian topographical maps that acquired poetic layerings, published in one of her books: in one, the migration of birds, who know nothing of national borders, are illustrated on top of a post-WWII map of Europe; in another, drawings of childhood memories are overplayed on top of a banal highway atlas (Kelley 2012). From Solnit’s perspective, any seemingly fixed map can be the basis for new cartographic expressions, an invitation to create new map forms. While our map’s iterations were not so dissonant, the process did present a way to resist the apparent closure of a map as it is produced or encountered at any one moment in time. Duxbury et  al (2015) point out that these processes of mapping— whether creating a new map or building on an existing one—make a useful object of study. Through mapping, we can observe the choices made and the selections and framings that occur during a map’s production, and ask what such observations reveal about how we produce spatial knowledge and epistemologies of place (Ibid.). Just as Duxbury et al. recommend, we analyse our mapping process throughout this chapter, thinking over the choices we made as our cultural map of Edinburgh took shape and grew and how these decisions influenced the design of a digital version of the map once it was ready for public display. While describing this process, we offer a critical reflection on our choices along the way, drawing on the theoretical and pragmatic considerations about cultural mapping presented in Chap. 2.

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Beginnings The question of how to define a ‘cultural space’ drove our research during the first two months of the project, before the mapping events took place. To delimit what we meant by a cultural space, the unit that we would be mapping,  we took inspiration from the project “Making Cultural Infrastructure” by the London-based group Theatrum Mundi, which was driven by the question, “What are the infrastructural conditions for culture, and can they be designed into the city?” (Bingham-Hall and Kaasa 2017). Taking an architectural perspective, the authors explore the importance of non-traditional, flexible and affordable spaces for cultural production—library rooms for rehearsals or unused church space for painting and writing—not only the more visible spaces for cultural display and consumption. Drawing on Theatrum Mundi’s report, we defined a cultural space as one involving the entire chain of production of an expressive act. We also wanted to highlight what Deborah Jackson (2014) calls artist-run initiatives—spaces that take a horizontal, rather than top-down, institutional approach to cultural production. Students graduating from Edinburgh College of Arts, for instance, do not always get the opportunity to present their work in commercial galleries or through artist residencies, just as traditional art institutions do not have the capacity to support all artists equally. Grassroots initiatives are as a result necessary to a city’s healthy cultural ecosystem. Our team was interested in tracing those grassroots infrastructures and their relevance, building on Jackson’s research. The Edinburgh Living Lab (ELL), based at the University of Edinburgh, was the original home for the project.1 ELL was among the Living Labs that had sprung up in Europe since the mid-2000s and taken the approach of testing designs or policy ideas in real-life contexts, involving citizens and public administrators in creating these approaches. Though it was more research-oriented than many third-sector living labs, Edinburgh Living Lab’s orientation was similar: it paired University researchers with local stakeholders—a somewhat Deweyian notion of a public that converges around an issue of concern—to co-design new services or technologies that address some local issue, such as trialling low-emissions taxis for better air quality or making high streets safer for pedestrians. We decided 1  ELL has since been absorbed into the University’s Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), while the Culture & Communities Mapping Project now has a website and identity distinct from EFI.

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to use ELL’s website for publicity and draw on its participatory, stakeholder-­ driven approach to research. Through ELL2 we met with the Council’s Culture and Events office to ask for existing public data we could use to start plotting the initial map. The Council staff were supportive—a cultural map of the city, they hoped, would help them pinpoint places that seemed underresourced in terms of cultural programming. We also received a small grant just shy of £3500 in Autumn 2018 from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh to host a series of cultural mapping workshops the following year. Melisa joined the project at that point as a PhD research assistant, bringing with her a particular set of expertise in GIS software and methods of community-based cultural mapping. From her perspective, rather than simply hearing from participants what they wanted the map to look like, we would ask participants at the workshops what should be included on the map and build a dataset of cultural spaces collaboratively with them. On 25 January 2019 we convened a room of researchers and staff from the Council, the non-profit Creative Scotland, Festivals Edinburgh (a consortium of Edinburgh’s major festivals), the Edinburgh International Science Festival, ELL and the Edinburgh Futures Institute (a new research centre at the University of Edinburgh) to introduce the project. We began with a slide show of other cultural maps that inspired our approach. We showed the Los Angeles Neighbourhood Arts Profile map, mentioned in Chap. 2—a useful reference because it allowed the City to see its cityowned cultural infrastructure in relation to sociodemographics, and  we displayed the London Cultural Infrastructure map, also  mentioned in Chap. 2, as an example of a comprehensive approach focused on planning and growth. We showed a print map by a local, grassroots arts organisation called Leith Creative. The Leith Creative map (Cunningham and Bremner 2015)—beautifully designed in blues and pinks to show major roads, cultural hubs, valued assets and festival locations in the Leith neighbourhood of Edinburgh—came about through research by Leith Creative staff who then used the map, along with interviews, an online survey and 2  Morgan first discussed the idea in the summer of 2018 with Catherine Magill, at the time the director of the Edinburgh Living Lab, which had ties to the Council’s Culture and Events office. Catherine set up a meeting with Lindsay Robertson, the Cultural Strategy Manager at the City of Edinburgh Council, who was very supportive of the project. Lindsay sourced Council datasets and, eventually, funds to pay for the online version of the map.

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workshops with Leith residents, to feed into a report on the cultural landscape of the area. We also mentioned two University-based projects—the LitLong project and Curious Edinburgh tour app, both mentioned in Chap. 1—to show examples of more physically embedded uses of online maps. Researcher Orian Brook also presented on research she developed at St. Andrews University to understand the sociodemographics of London’s ticket buying public, and Rachel Roe, from London’s Culture and Creative Industries unit, dialled in through Skype to introduce the newly launched London Cultural Infrastructure map. We finally presented a series of GIS maps Melisa had created of the city’s neighbourhoods based on our preliminary data gathering; the data captured on these maps constituted our original basemap later used at the workshops. We decided, with the convened group, that the results of the workshops would become a web-based map of cultural spaces showing geographic and demographic context layers. We would use a participatory process to create the map and, at the same time, ask participants to talk about the spaces they value, cultural equity issues and any barriers to culture they experience. Because our funds were limited, we decided to focus recruitment on the cultural sector itself—freelance artists and people from the creative industries, staff at cultural institutions—and consider this a preliminary research project that could be expanded to more diverse audiences in a later phase that we detail in Chap. 5.

The First Map Melisa designed the maps we brought to the January consultation meeting using QGIS, an open source GIS software. This first version of the map drew from available cartographic data and an initial dataset of 95 cultural spaces of City of Edinburgh Council data of the City’s community centres, libraries and schools along with data scraped  by Melisa from Google Maps on museums, major galleries, theatres and large music venues. The first map began with six categories: Museums, Libraries, Schools, Digital Outputs, Made Objects and Performance (see Fig. 3.1). The last three categories we drew from Theatrum Mundi’s “Making Cultural Infrastructure” report (Bingham-Hall and Kaasa 2017), which introduces these three as primary classes of cultural infrastructure supporting artists and cultural programming. Performance includes cultural acts that put the body at the centre of creation, including music, dance, theatre and circus. The Made Objects category focuses on the creation of objects such as

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Fig. 3.1  First version of the basemap for workshops

painting, sculptors, craft, jewellery, printmaking and wood. The Virtual Outputs category describes the creation of objects that have no fixed time or place, such as literature, journalism, illustration and film. With these three categories the project could encompass a wide spectrum of infrastructure critical to the culture industries, from trainings and rehearsal space to subsequent parts of the production chain. This map, dotted already with these first few spaces, would act as the base for our first cultural mapping event.

The Mapping Events We held seven events from February to July 2019. The events took two shapes: one, a three-hour workshop that entailed a mapping activity and discussion, and two, what we called the ‘itinerant map’, a map on a piece of foam core that we brought to events already taking place and that were  coordinated by other organisations. For each event we printed a large version of the QGIS basemap using printers at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Architecture.

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Fig. 3.2  Itinerant map with participants at TechCube

For our first event, we brought the itinerant map of 95 spaces to the national yearly event ‘What Can We Do to Make Great Physical Performance in Scotland?’, hosted in at a venue in the city centre called TechCube in February (see Fig. 3.2). Around 60 participants from across Scotland attended, and 15 or so people wandered over to our map, which was propped up on a windowsill, during the three hours we were given by the event’s organisers. We handed people instructions for interacting with the map using different coloured pins. Sometimes only one person pinned the map, other times up to five people gathered around it. Participants came from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling and Sutherland, and some mentioned significant spaces for performance outside the city as well. This first experience tested the map’s structure and readability. We found, for instance, that the scale of 7500 allowed people to see particular buildings, but it didn’t include many important places in the north of the city and towards south and east, so we expanded the map for the next activity. The itinerant map travelled again a month later, in March, to an event called Creative Circles organised by Edinburgh’s largest collective of freelancers, Creative Edinburgh. The meeting took place in the morning from

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8:00 to 10:00 am in the Leith neighbourhood at the event space and café Custom Lane, on the historic Leith shore waterway. This was a more intimate group, and most of the attendants—again around 15—participated in the map activity. This time people focused on identifying co-working spaces, art studios and spaces in the Leith neighbourhood. The third event, in April, was the first of the three workshops. It took place in a sunny, wood-panelled room at the Edinburgh Storytelling Centre in Old Town. We recruited people for this through different email lists, such as Creative Edinburgh’s and the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s, and also asked people at the first consultation meeting at the University to cascade the call. This is text from the digital flyer for the event: We invite Edinburgh’s cultural producers to take part in a community mapping exercise. Artists, designers, performers, and cultural makers broadly are welcome to participate. Using maps, posters and post-its, participants will clarify the value and significance of a diverse range of city venues. The outcome will be an online and co-created map that includes cultural assets, hubs and flexible spaces of the past and present. The map will ultimately help us better understand issues of gentrification, arts equity, and access to culture.

The workshop had 29 participants from different cultural sectors.3 The three-hour, more focused format allowed us to include structured rounds of group discussion that we could not facilitate through the itinerant map activity. This time we laid the printed maps on four tables; groups of five to eight people gathered around them and marked them with coloured stickers and pens following the same set of instructions that we used for the itinerant map (see Fig. 3.3). Each table had a facilitator who ran participants through the mapping activity, helping them with the map instructions and facilitating the discussion part in the latter half of the event, making sure people used post-it notes to capture their ideas. In May the itinerant map travelled again to the north of Edinburgh to an evening event of artist presentations held by Creative Informatics at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, housed in an impressive building of studios, exhibition and workshop spaces on the site of an old railway shed, 3  The workshop included representatives from Drake Music Scotland, Festivals Edinburgh, granton:Hub, Broomhouse Centre, Science Festival, Napier University, Creative Scotland, TRACS & the Storytelling Centre, Craft Scotland, City Art Centre, UoE’s Edinburgh College of Arts, Red Note Ensemble, Art Link Edinburgh, Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, Assembly rooms, and independent visual artists.

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Fig. 3.3  Categories suggestions and stickers placed on basemap during the Storytelling Centre workshop

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refurbished by the Edinburgh architect firm Sutherland Hussey Harris. We put the map in a small room where people could interact with it between talks. This time participants identified several missing spaces relevant to the digital sector. In June we held our second three-hour workshop at Out of the Blue Drill Hall, a multi-art space in Leith inside a roomy old army barracks that now houses studios, performance spaces and a café. This event attracted freelancers, including artists who work with children and elderly populations, and people affiliated with cultural institutions in Glasgow and St. Andrews. This event was more intimate, with eight attendees working at two tables. Our last workshop took place the same month at WHALE Arts, a cultural organisation in the neighbourhood of Wester Hailes, in the city’s southwest corner, far from the city centre. For this event we worked with WHALE to recruit volunteers and cultural producers involved in their cultural programming, though none were from the area where the workshop took place. This workshop also attracted eight participants. We took the last itinerant map in July to North Edinburgh Arts, a popular cultural centre in the northwest  neighbourhood of Muirhouse, for their Summer Open Day, targeted mostly at local families. The map was so large at this point—three metres long and with hundreds of new spaces incorporated since the prior events—that we could no longer use foam core—instead we pinned the map on a wall in one of the main ground floor rooms, nearby a café, where children around us drew castles and animals on the wall with coloured tape for an art activity. Outside, in the community garden, there was a face paint station and a DJ playing music. Even at this last event, people were able to point out more missing places, including a mosque, the Leith police box that functions as a cultural space, two circular economy initiatives  (the Edinburgh Remakery and the Edinburgh Took Library), women-only swimming pools and a new category we named ‘mobility’, comprised of scooters that can be rented by disable visitors or residents who want to explore the city.

The Mapping Instructions At each event, we ran participants through a set of instructions for interacting with the map (see Fig. 3.4). At the workshops, we added a round of discussion following the mapping activity and asked participants to

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1. Place yourself on the map. Use a black pin for home and a pin for the place where you spend most time rehearsing and/or working for your cultural sector. 2. Can you identify important places for performance/making/digital production missing on the map with yellow pin. 3. Which are the most significant and/or indispensable organisations/places/infrastructures for your cultural sector? Please locate them using a blue sticker? 4. Can you identify with a red pin where past cultural infrastructure no longer exists in the city? 5. Can you identify in orange places at risk? 6. Are the current examples of cultural spaces that work with deprived and/or unrepresented communities? If so, could you please locate them with a green sticker.

Fig. 3.4  Mapping instructions

record their answers to the questions on post-it notes that we later transcribed into a document of outcomes. We began all events by asking participants to look at the map’s legend and see if there were any other categories that should be added. Participants, in this way, helped us decide what categories to include and how to categorise spaces, following best practices in the cultural mapping literature (Rambaldi 2010; Crawhall 2007). We next asked participants to orient themselves on the map by putting a black sticker on their place of residence and a white sticker on the place they spend most time working. In a third step, we asked people to mark with yellow any spaces that were missing on the map. Using blue participants marked the places they considered particularly significant to their own work or sector, red to mark past spaces related to cultural production that no longer exist in the city, and orange to show places at risk, however they defined this. Finally, participants used green to mark organisations that work with deprived or underrepresented communities. We defined deprived areas as those that fall within the most deprived category assigned by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. At the three workshops we discussed what spaces participants considered community hubs. At the Storytelling Centre, some of the participants questioned the definition of a ‘hub’, so we provided one at the next workshops: “an accessible space for artists, performers and digital producers that engages with local communities.” We also asked participants to

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talk about whether they face challenges reaching deprived and underrepresented communities, and if so, how. The final question asked how participants might use an online cultural map of Edinburgh. People could write down as many ideas as they wanted to, and at the end of the discussion period, tables shared their thoughts with the entire group. As mentioned, the map grew after each activity as participants added categories and spaces. Once a participant identified a place to include, we would add it to a database along with the categories and subcategories we ascribed, a website URL and descriptive details. The database would then comprise the data on the map for the following event. The map initially presented landmarks and streets on a scale of 1:15.000, but the scale increased to approximately 1:10.000 to include more places. In the next section we describe the outcomes of the events—the final cultural map and major discussion themes—before applying our set of questions from the last chapter to the project.

Tangible and Intangible Outcomes The Cultural Space Dataset One of the main outcomes of the project is the collaboratively created cultural spaces of Edinburgh dataset. Participants added a total of 211 cultural spaces during workshops and itinerant mapping events, and we contributed another 453 assets based on the categories that participants suggested for the legend. We started with 95 assets at the beginning and wound up with 759 spaces total after the last event. Table 3.1 shows how the number of spaces in some of the original categories based on Council data—museums, libraries and schools—remained fixed, while other categories increased significantly over the course of the events, particularly for ‘made objects’, ‘digital outputs’ and ‘performance’. The map’s legend also grew from six categories to 14 and around 150 subcategories as participants suggested types of spaces that were not included in the original legend. Participants asked us to add categories for heritage and archaeological sites, youth centres, historic archives, cemeteries, open spaces, community gardens, movie theatres, kids play parks, street art and non-Council-owned community-based centres that address social and cultural inclusion. At the Out of the Blue workshop, one of the participants who offered art classes in care homes pointed out that these

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Table 3.1  Chart of categories used during the participatory process

Charity Community organisations Digital Historic Institutions Libraries Making Outdoor Performance Worship Schools Open spaces Mobility Total

May

June

July

August

14 68 28 37 50 38 57 3 79 70 98

17 74 30 37 50 38 69 3 97 80 98

19 85 75 40 54 38 85 3 105 82 98 75

542

593

759

19 85 75 40 54 38 86 3 105 83 99 82 5 774

spaces, along with hospitals, have cultural activity coordinators, so we added the category ‘care homes’. A disabled participant who took part at the North Edinburgh Arts event told us about wheelchair equipment rentals in two popular parts of town, the city centre and Portobello beach, so the map now includes a ‘mobility’ category. Participants also suggested we use the catch-all category ‘places of worship’, rather than ‘churches’, ‘synagogues’ and ‘mosques’. Participants suggested other types of data to offer context to the dataset of cultural spaces. A group at the Storytelling Centre workshop wanted the map to show cultural engagement with schools, so we added the Council’s dataset on the schools that are reached by Council-funded cultural organisations. People also wanted more data on accessibility to cultural spaces, so we now have a layer showing accessible toilets based on Euan’s Guide, a website of crowdsourced disabled access reviews. Several participants at the first two workshops noted the absence of festival venues, so we created a layer of temporal events scraped from official websites and the Fringe Festival’s Wikipedia list of venues. After the workshops were over, we continued gathering data between January and May 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, adding more spaces based on some of the category suggestions by participants. We added private schools and alternative education centres to the Schools category, and we conducted a deeper data scrape of worship places and

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community organisations. We also added three new categories, ‘Women’s organisations’, ‘BAME’ for black and ethnic minority spaces, and ‘Hub’, which shows spaces that received the highest number of value votes and hub votes from the events. We gathered more context layers as well. The Council’s Culture and Events office gave us a spreadsheet with information about which schools and community organisations their arts and festivals grant recipients conduct outreach to, so this became a layer called ‘community engagement’. The University of Edinburgh contacted us with a dataset of University-owned public sculptures that we added to a layer called ‘public sculpture’, and we added more geographic and transit context layers from existing datasets showing waterways, bike paths and bus stops. In response to the rise of activism around the Black Lives Matters movement, we added a historic dataset—the only one on the map at the time of this writing—showing cultural spaces affiliated with Edinburgh’s slave trading past. In a final analysis, we found, unsurprisingly, that most of the cultural spaces on the map are in the city centre, with adjacent Newington, where the University is located, a close second. The next largest cluster is in the fast-gentrifying neighbourhood of Leith, in the City’s far northeast, an area that scores high on the SIMD but has attracted creative freelancers and the digital industry sector, including video game companies and one of Scotland’s largest film stages, all fuelling the neighbourhood’s growth as an ethnically, economically and culturally diverse enclave—one with fast-rising rents, as mentioned in the introduction. The results also show, at a glance, some clusters outside both the City Centre and Leith, in two of the three biggest categories: a line of performance spaces trailing from the city centre out towards the City’s far southwest neighbourhoods of Broomhouse and Sighthill, and smattering of ‘made objects’ studio spaces in the far eastern part of the city, in the neighbourhoods of Craigmillar and Niddrie. Because we added the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation as a layer, you can also see, at a glance, the cultural spaces that serve some of the most deprived areas of town. Places of Value, Risk and Community By labelling spaces with qualitative dimensions—those participants found valuable, those they consider important to communities in deprived areas, and those they perceived as at risk—we could record the frequencies of these labels for each activity and ultimately frequencies for the whole

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cultural mapping process, creating quantitative data on intangible dimensions of culture. Participants pinned 80 significant spaces, with the types varying greatly across the seven events—perhaps unsurprising given that each attracted different audience types. The first itinerant map event at the performance event, for instance, helped us collect more data on theatres, circus and affordable rehearsal spaces outside the city centre. At Creative Circles, participants located co-working and hot desking spaces used by freelancers. And at Out of the Blue, where the discussion focused more at the conceptual level of what ‘valuable’ means to whom, participants focused on more inclusive, accessible and grassroots initiatives (Fig. 3.5). Participants also considered 23 places at risk, spaces that have a strong community presence but are struggling with funding schemes or pressures

Fig. 3.5  Map of valued spaces

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Fig. 3.6  Map of places at risk

from the development sector as private companies buy up spaces (see Fig. 3.6). The concept of ‘at-risk’ also raises the question of how the project will capture change over time as venues  open or shut—essential to think about as the Covid-19 pandemic threatens many performing arts and music venues at the time of writing. Future versions of the map may need to include a layer of spaces that existed in the first instance but have since closed doors. Finally, places that received up to three green pins total, signalling their high value to communities ranked high on the deprivation index, were Tollcross Community Centre and North Edinburgh Arts. At our three workshops participants named 15 spaces as community hubs. Most of these are multi-artform and versatile, with a café space. People talked of how the idea of a hub suggests year-round accessibility and a democratic ethos, not highly curated content. One of the most

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commonly selected venues was Summerhall, though some participants argued that as a for-profit enterprise, rather than a social service, it shouldn’t be on the list. Gentrification, Cultural Equity and the Map Finally, we collected qualitative data based on participants’ discussions at the events, with four main themes emerging: the definition of culture, gentrification in the city, the unevenness of cultural programming across Edinburgh and ideas for an online cultural map. First, several participants raised the point that the project should clarify its definition of culture, since this would determine what the map shows. Culture, participants largely agreed, should serve residents and local communities, not tourists, and be affordable and physically accessible. By this definition, some participants at the Storytelling Centre workshop thought the cultural dataset should be limited to spaces that are publicly accessible and free, cutting out commercial ventures such as art galleries. A participant at the WHALE Arts workshop raised the central issue of how culture relates to class. “Through the eyes of anthropology, rather than art history,” she said “these are human creative impulses that predate western European art history.” The participant suggested we include aesthetic working-class outlets such as nail salons and tattoo parlours, while another person at the same workshop wanted the map to include any place people go to entertain themselves—bingo halls, dockers clubs and pubs—that are not sites of cultural production in the strict sense of the term but still play an important role for some communities. “We spend so many resources as a society, including education, servicing [the] one percent,” this participant argued, concerned that the map would only feature spaces accessible to people with significant income. Participants also talked about the challenges facing the cultural sector, such as access to funding, real estate pressure and high rent, creating a situation in which only large, corporate companies can afford renting commercial space in the city centre, while small and grassroots initiatives have moved outside of that well-trafficked area. At the Creative Circles event, participants told us that George Street, a major commercial street in the centre, is particularly unaffordable. Festivals have also made it harder for artists to find rehearsal space, since festival-related companies—including the ones that keep their corporate offices in London—will purchase space they only use during the two months of festival season. Circus performers at the

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performance event told us that Pleasance 2, a major festival venue, was only open during the Fringe, while the rest of the year it was as storage space for installed circus infrastructure. Participants at the same event also pointed out that Edinburgh University has sold off important cultural spaces, such as the Old Forest Café and the Big Red Door, that were once widely used by the arts community but are now privately owned. There was a sense that corporate and tourist-focused interests are privatising space that the cultural sector would otherwise make use of, and affordability is an increasing obstacle. A third theme was a general concern that some geographic communities of Edinburgh are underrepresented at cultural events and festivals. Participants told us that they know people living in deprived neighbourhoods who are uninterested in prominent ‘high arts’ organisations and feel that cultural events happening outside their area are not relevant to them. There are financial barriers due to the costs of travelling to events, along with social barriers and feelings that ‘this is not for me’. One participant said she found it particularly challenging to reach native Scottish populations, whereas immigrants’ groups visit community centres more actively. At the WHALE Art workshop, the discussion turned to schemes to make culture more accessible to populations in deprived areas, and a participant pointed out that working in these areas as an artist is difficult— there’s less support to pay themselves this way and they would need a different set of skills, such as youth work training. Given these issues, participants saw community hubs as essential cultural infrastructure to facilitate artist-community interactions. WHALE Arts, for instance, pays art practitioners to offer workshops to its community in Wester Hailes (many of these cultural producers were at our WHALE workshop). Major cultural institutions, such as the festivals, can also work with these community hubs to reach more diverse audiences. While there was a sense that the city was not doing enough to serve these areas, participants mentioned groups that use incentives to attract citizens who might otherwise not attend events. The major festivals have programming opportunities with schools across the city, for instance, and the Fringe society hosts its ‘Fringe Day Out’ programme, a package of free tickets and transportation to a show chosen by a family or groups. The scheme lets people ‘create their own experience’, according to the representative of that initiative at the Storytelling Centre workshop. Other participants singled out Artlink, the Science Festival and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for their efforts in making activities more inclusive.

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A final theme from the workshops focused on how we should design the online cultural map to display all the collected data. Participants thought the map could be helpful for networking and finding office or practice spaces if it could include a space’s contact information. Many people felt that the map should be interactive in online form, particularly out of a concern that the data would otherwise go stale. People suggested features such as user ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ buttons, reviews and photos and video uploads, and options to select particular layers or neighbourhoods to produce a report reflecting users’ interests. Some thought the map should synchronise to The List, an online guide to events in Edinburgh, to show weekly events. Others said the map should give greater visibility to free public spaces. At the Out of the Blue workshop, participants asked whether the map would be oriented around physical space or the unit of the organisations, which can exist across multiple spaces, a point that helped us clarify that this map focuses on the unit of a space, although it can show organisations at a specific location.

Reflecting on the Culture & Communities Mapping Project We can reflect, at this point, on the choices we made throughout the cultural mapping events, using the set of five questions we posed in Chap. 2 to consider the types of data we collected, the levels of participation by those involved, the map surfaces we used, the purpose of the project and some of its limitations. What Kind of Data Did We Collect? As we discussed in the second chapter, cultural mapping might capture tangible or intangible and quantitative or qualitative data. Our project captured tangible, quantitative data when we asked participants to locate cultural assets on the maps and intangible, quantitative data by asking how these spaces are valued and perceived. We also created qualitative, intangible data through the event discussions. In the introduction to their book, Duxbury et al. (2015) propose that intangible data is also qualitative, but we show this is not always the case— we captured intangible information on feelings and emotions about place and culture quantitatively when participants voted on how much they

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value certain cultural spaces. Codifying this subjective information made it easy to gather—we could simply count the spaces mentioned—but also stripped it of the stories participants told about these places and the explanations of why a place is valued or at risk or a community hub. The data we collected is also not representative—it does not reflect what the general public knows about or especially values. The cultural space dataset reflects data captured on a particular set of dates, known to our sample of around 115 participants from the cultural sector, many of whom came from the City’s more elite cultural institutions. The representativeness of the project is a weakness for a public map of culture in Edinburgh—an issue that we address through another round of research discussed in Chap. 4.4 How Participatory Was the Process? By the standards of some participatory methods, our project fell far short of a fully participatory piece of research. We did begin by presenting our research questions and ideas on the mapping process to a small room of stakeholders from major cultural institutions, but most of the people attending did not take part in the workshops, and their role was more that of advisors than participants. The event and workshop participants themselves had no say in the agenda: they did not shape the research questions or the workshop structure, nor did they help design the base map, and they had no final word in how the collected data would be used after events were over. The project was, in effect, a top-down research project that invited the cultural community to take part in data collection only— participants were intermediaries, but not full owners, in the process. We should also point out that participants did not directly benefit from the project and remained anonymous contributors per our University’s ethics procedures, though they could see the results of their contributions once the online map was published and use the map for their own 4  Once online, the map could help build a more inclusive and representative sample, but the ESRI GIS software has constrained the project’s dynamism to a degree—it lets users interact with it only indirectly, through an online ‘request for edits’ form. Because of a lack of funding, we have not designed a more participatory interface that could directly collect data on additions and spaces people value. With enough support, we could design a future web interface that lets us collect sentiment data such as user likes and reviews. The map’s pop-up boxes offer an opportunity to display qualitative data, such as stories, and future iterations of the map could make better use of this feature.

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purposes. On the other hand, we have benefitted directly through publications about the project (including this book), a form of academic credential that can lead to promotion and recognition. What Map Surfaces Did We Use? This answer is fairly straightforward—for the activities, we used printed maps with a recognisable base map (versus an entirely blank canvas inviting participants to draw the city themselves) to help participants orient themselves, along with pins, pens, stickers and post-its to interact with it. The print map, whether laid in front of people or glued to foam core and propped against a wall, invited social, tactile interaction—tracing a finger along the paper and asking for someone’s help finding a place, putting a sticker down and writing a note beside it, talking about the relevance of a category someone added to the legend by hand. The map was the prompt for people’s participation and discussion, and it also captured the data that we transcribed into our dataset, functioning as a large cartographic notepad. The advantage of using a print map adjusted to a standard geographic projection is that it gave consistency to mental ideas that “are not stored in some place in the mind or brain to be consulted, like an atlas” (Rambaldi 2010, 5). As stated previously (Currie and Miranda-Correa 2021), a print map allows the localisation of sites of intangible value. There were intriguing moments, for instance, when we as organisers became largely invisible while participants shared with each other their ideas and feelings, activated by the map in front of them, about the spaces they were looking at. What Are the Outcomes of the Project? One of the main results of the Culture & Communities Mapping Project— and a subject of the next chapter—is a public website that hosts an Esri ArcGIS map of the spaces identified in our workshops along with context layers and spaces added to fill out the categories people suggested. In total the map has grown to over 2000 spaces or assets as of this writing. The Council now promotes the map on its website, and we have used the map to ask questions about cultural differences across Edinburgh neighbourhoods and set up new studies on the cultural characteristics of areas of high deprivation according to SIMD (Fig. 3.7).

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Fig. 3.7  Screenshot of our website map: www.edinburghculturalmap.org

Just as other cultural mapping projects found, ours led to new, fruitful partnerships. We describe in the next chapter how, in the summer of 2020, we worked with the community organisation LeithLate to design a virtual walking tour of the Leith neighbourhood’s murals, which make up the majority of the cultural map’s ‘street art’ layer. Those same months, we conducted interviews with administrators of cultural hubs, many of whom we had met through the workshops, about their reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the communities they serve and on the city’s cultural life generally. We also began a second round of cultural mapping workshops with six organisations, including three we met through these 2019 events, to hear from residents about what they value in their area and ideas for their communities (the topic of Chap. 5). Limitations The Edinburgh Cultural Map is clearly not a stable one-to-one representation of Edinburgh’s cultural spaces. The map reflects our process of capturing participants’ contributions at a specific moment in time, shaped by our methods and choices we made, including the types of categories we

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ultimately put on the legend. Lack of cultural spaces in one area does not mean the absence of culture but rather to the absence of our reporting on culture, and  on our decisions about what types of cultural spaces to include. For instance, as mentioned above, the project was limited in its representativeness in terms of participants. For this reason, we did not incorporate information on what people valued on the online map, though we did create the Hub category to show eight spaces that received value and hub votes across all events. Also, we made some executive choices about the types of spaces to include. The map leaves out certain categories suggested by participants, such as nail salons and tattoo parlours, and only includes pubs that allow performance, such as open mics. In fact, if we reflect on our project now, after two more years of mapping work, we can see how, especially at first, we took a very traditional and narrow definition of culture-as-artistic-production from the outset.  The field of cultural geography offers a  much more expansive and all-encompassing definition of culture, defining it as the way we, as social groups, develop our social patterns and symbolic practices—through our places of work, our consumer habits, our beliefs and values, languages and laws and social and political institutions. Culture is how groups “handle the raw material of their social and material existence” (Clarke et al. 1976), and, as such, it is intricately linked to space. Writing in 1989, in his book Maps of Meaning, cultural geographer Peter Jackson argues that space shapes and constitutes culture and how we express it—culture is intimately tied to geography since it “is produced and reproduced through social practices that take place in geographically specific contexts” (1992, 23). It is in part because of its link to space that culture is political: our meanings and symbols are always negotiated and linked to political and economic power, which is in part determined by where we live (Jackson 1992). How we define culture and what we choose to show is therefore politically valanced and often a matter of class, as our participants pointed out at the WHALE Arts workshop. Especially at the beginning of the project, the map reflected a narrow interpretation of culture that emphasised the arts and creative practice. As the process continued, we enlarged this conception to include community gardens, care homes, women’s only swimming pools and outdoor spaces. But the map still does not feature more commercial, political or municipal spaces with no explicit relation to the creative fields, but that nonetheless constitute this broader understanding of the cultural sphere.

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Given the project’s limitations, we do not see the resulting map as offering any conclusive evidence about Edinburgh’s cultural landscape. The map also currently leaves out temporal dimensions, such as spaces that have closed, and it doesn’t display personal stories or feelings about spaces, or connections between spaces, to name a few other omissions. The map reflects our process of data collection, rather than a finished and stable geographic reality, and any application of the map should take its epistemological limitations into account.

Conclusion This chapter offers a case study of cultural mapping methods that we hope will be illustrative of the cultural mapping process for others. We describe the design of flexible research tools, such as the itinerant map, and the process of capturing intangible assets as quantitative data. We discuss the iterative development of the map as it grew from participant feedback over several months. We offer some initial analysis of what the map shows in terms of differences across neighbourhoods, such as where certain types of culture spaces cluster. We also reflect on processes of knowledge production—the in situ work of categorising, ranking and enclosing geographic space—and what this reveals about our own decisions and the project’s limitations. Thinking back, we find that the cultural dataset suffers from a lack of representativeness and from a narrow understanding of culture itself. The resulting online map is, as a result, a limited tool for feeding into policies. No map can capture the dynamic, ever-evolving cultural life of the city. Rather than an exhaustive exercise that sets out to include each and every cultural space of Edinburgh, the map presents a particular interpretation of the city’s culture, reflecting the researchers and participants of the 2019 mapping process. The mapping exercises raised questions that the map cannot easily elucidate and beg for further research: how might we trace the effects of gentrification on the cultural sector? How might we achieve a more equitable distribution of the City’s cultural resources? Because of its limitations, the map serves us best by prompting questions and inviting discussions. The map facilitated interactions with local communities and catalysed future research about people and places, instigating conversations, artistic projects and research around cultural equity in Edinburgh. The map is best used as still another iteration, not yet finished, the beginning of a line of inquiry, not an endpoint.

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References Bingham-Hall, John, and Adam Kaasa. 2017. Making Cultural Infrastructure Report. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85683/1/Bingham-­Hall_Kaasa_Making%20 cultural%20infrastructure.pdf. Clarke, J., T. Jefferson, S. Hall, and B. Roberts. 1976. Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview. In Resistance Through Rituals, ed. S. Hall and J. Henderson, 9–74. London: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Crawhall, Nigel. 2007. The Role of Participatory Cultural Mapping in Promoting Intercultural Dialogue: We Are Not Hyenas; A Reflection Paper. http://www. iapad.org/wp-­content/uploads/2015/07/nigel.crawhall.190753e.pdf. Cunningham, Morvern, and Duncan Bremner. 2015. Leith Creative. Understanding Laith’s Cultural Resources and Creative Industries. Currie, Morgan, and Melisa Miranda-Correa. 2021. Tangibles, Intangibles and Other Tensions in the Culture and Communities Mapping Project. Cultural Trends: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2021.1910491. Duxbury, Nancy, W.F.  Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan. 2015. Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, Routledge Advances in Research Methods. New York: Routledge. Jackson, Peter. 1992. Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography / Peter Jackson. London: Routledge. Jackson, Deborah. 2014. Shifting Focus of the Traditional Centres of Contemporary Art: Scotland’s Evolving Position from Periphery to Prominence. The University of Edinburgh. Kelley, Chavawn. 2012. Every City Should Have an Atlas: An Interview with Rebecca Solnit. Accessed 21 July. https://www.terrain.org/2012/interviews/ rebecca-­solnit/. Rambaldi, Giacomo. 2010. Participatory Three-Dimensional Modelling: Guiding Principles and Application. ACP-EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA).

CHAPTER 4

Neogeography, Software Sorted Geographies and Web Maps

Abstract  This chapter begins by examining the role of commercial online maps, with a particular focus on Google Maps, a dominant force determining how place is represented in the maps we encounter on our computers or phones. We analyse this dominance through the concept of software-sorted geographies—the algorithms and codes that determine what is made visible to users who search for places on web maps. At the same time, we have seen the rise of neogeography—online maps made by amateurs using at-hand tools and open, geolocated datasets that can create new geographic narratives. We position two web map projects we designed in 2020, the Edinburgh Cultural Map and the LeithLate Virtual Tours, in relation to these neogeographic pursuits and recount the choices we made around the maps’ functionality and interactivity. We also reflect on what we have learned from designing maps with very different aims—one that acts as a geo-referenced data repository for over 25 datasets and geographic shape files, the other that offers a virtual tour of a grassroots art initiative. Keywords  Web maps • Neogeography • Google Maps • Critical GIS • Edinburgh

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In 2004, a software programmer named Steve Coast cycled around Regent’s Park in London while carrying a GPS puck smaller than the size of his hand. The puck had an antennae that can receive signals from GPS satellites to generate route data. When he got home, Coast plugged the GPS puck into a Linux-powered laptop and uploaded the geographic data, the first he would use for a new crowd-sourced mapping project  he called OpenStreetMap (Fox 2012). Steve designed OpenStreetMap so that people could tinker with it and add more data with their own consumer grade GPS receivers. At first the map was simple—just lines over NASA Landsat information. Two years later, the project had a desktop editing version, allowing people to use it offline, and the map now appeared in full colour (Bennett 2010). The project grew into a Wikipedia of maps created by a global cadre of volunteer editors collaboratively adding places and geographic features. Prior to the internet and the World Wide Web, crowdsourced maps such as Coast’s would have been unthinkable. Before the 2000s, mapping was generally dominated by the state for military purposes or marking cadastre—property boundaries—and state-controlled infrastructure, or was the purview of independent commercial enterprises selling cheaper street maps with local adverts to tourists. Only technical experts, such as geographers, planners or landscapers, would use GIS, typically populating it with geographic data they generated themselves from field notes, drawings, GPS points and manipulated satellite images. In the last 15 years, that exclusiveness has largely disappeared, thanks to the ubiquity and general ease of using web mapping services. By the mid-2000s, people were calling these amateur cartographic pursuits neogeography—online maps made using at-hand tools and open, geolocated datasets that can create entirely new geographic narratives (Turner 2006; Goodchild 2009). While these alternative, grassroots maps flourished, commercial maps such as Google’s came into ascendence. Google remains a dominant force determining how place is represented when we navigate using our computers or phones. The company has also transformed the field of online cartography, delivering it from its very technical niche into the realm of everyday public use and reconfiguring users’ relations to space and place through its various services, such as Google Street View (originally a collaboration between Stanford University and Google) and Google Earth (purchased by Google from mapping software company Keyhole, Inc. in 2004). In this chapter, we analyse Google’s dominance  in GIS through the concept of software-sorted geographies—the algorithms and codes that

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determine what is made visible to users who search for places on web maps. We then discuss the concept of neogeography more in-depth to understand two web maps we designed ourselves. As non-cartographers working with off-the-shelf web software, we consider whether these two projects are neogeographic pursuits, reflecting on what we have learned from designing them with very different aims—one, a geo-referenced data repository for over 25 datasets and geographic shape files, the other a virtual tour of grassroots art initiatives. We draw methodologically from non-­ representational geography, particularly on auto-ethnographies of map-making, with a focus on the material role of digital maps as designed objects. Rather than offering a deconstructionist analysis—excavating the maps for their ideological foundations, as reviewed in Chap. 2 and applied, somewhat, in Chap. 3—we describe “the numerous practices that bring mapping into being” (Dodge and Perkins 2015, 39) and  the aesthetic choices and user experience decisions made about the maps’ functionality and interactivity.

Software Sorted Geographies and Imaginaries If Harley and Pickles largely focused on the history of maps as surveillance and colonising tools of the nation state, online maps parallel the rise of international markets and neoliberalism. The story of online maps begins as commercial companies in the mid-nineties began to provide order to the web, indexing the growing avalanche of digitalised and born-digital information. Web indexes sort information through ranking or clustering; a well-known example is Google Page Rank, the algorithm that defines the characteristics necessary for a web page to appear in the top ten results of a key word search. Google has monopolised the indexing function over the years while refining a business model based on harvesting fine-­ grained  data of its user  population to generate targeted advertisements (Zuboff 2019). The dominant online maps provided by Google, Apple and Yahoo are best understood as a part of this political economy, what scholars call platform or surveillance capitalism (Srnicek 2017; Zuboff 2019). Only recently have we begun to understand how integrally Google’s indexing connects to its profit margins and the implications this has for our privacy and online agency. Equally worrying, scholars such as Safiya Noble have raised alarms about how Google’s commercial ranking algorithms reproduce hierarchies of power and privilege. Having a commercial conglomerate organise and control the representations we see,

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Noble argues, has had disturbing consequences for how underrepresented and minority groups appear in search engine results or Google search autocomplete (Noble 2018). Google’s mapping services are no exception to this hegemonic logic. Google launched both Google Maps and Google Earth in 2005. Fifteen years later, by 2020, the service has attracted over one billion users monthly, and more than one million active apps and websites use its products (Russell 2019). As the world’s major map provider, Google inevitably shapes what and how we see. The representations on Google Earth and Google Maps are intimately tied to power relations, even if Google declares they maintain a neutral approach to their maps.1 While Google has resisted pressure from some governments, such as North Korea’s, to blur military buildings or other politically sensitive infrastructure (Lin 2013, 41), they have in other cases succumbed to geopolitics. In 2006, for instance, Google angered political Taiwanese groups when its newly released Google Earth product labelled Taiwan as a Chinese province instead of an independent nation state (Gluck 2015). Zook and Graham (2007) found evidence in 2007 of deliberately blurred infrastructure on its satellite images of petroleum terminals and bridges. More recently, as of 2014, Google Earth made Palestine territory non-existent under Israeli occupation (Quiquivix 2014). And with Google Maps, its ranking codes will determine a place’s visibility through the hierarchy of listings, whether of restaurants or medical centres—a ranking that subtly shapes our expectations of geographic space (Zook and Graham 2007). We find it helpful to understand Google Maps through the lens of what Stephen Graham (2005) terms software sorted geographies: the idea that the presence of software in our private and public spaces shapes the physical space and flows of the city. This phenomenon dates to the late twentieth century, when the microchip became a part of the infrastructures and transit systems that set the pace and pulse of the city, directing flows of objects and people. The computer systems behind traffic lights, for instance, shape, in coordinated rhythms, how cars, bikes and pedestrians cross streets and traverse the city. The invention of the elevator allowed cities to become denser and configure into new topologies, such as the megapolis. Every transportation system now uses a computer, even if a very small one, which in turn has shaped cities and countries, as highways and air traffic support the new velocity offered by cars (Thrift and French 1

 https://support.google.com/maps/thread/59731111?hl=en.

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2002). Electronic surveillance and, more recently, facial recognition systems now determine who walks into which buildings. Graham (2005) uses the concept of software sorted geographies specifically to understand how software code reproduces “social and geographic politics of inequality” (562). Graham was concerned at the time of writing with the new kinds of social stratification caused by software that privileged the wealthy—biometric IDs giving certain people bypass privileges at airports, electronic tags tracking offenders, telecom services that work better for people who pay more. Graham was also alarmed by the collection of consumer data for market segmentation—the codes of indexation systems such as search engines or the apps on our cell phones that collect granular data about our searching and consumption habits, in order to spur more consumption. With online GIS systems, people’s purchasing capacity generates geographic data associated with their zip codes or addresses, and companies use these analytics to offer products based on people’s location and consumption habits. Graham feared that, as consequence, online GIS would not only sort available user data but also generate consumption habits based on people’s location, increasing the gap of economic inequality. The wealthy, for instance, can respond to the consumerist prompts of websites or online ads in order to enhance their privileged lifestyle, separating them even more from public services that support more collective forms of citizenship and ossifying economic differences across neighbourhoods even further. Software affects the physical world as a consequence, through forms of algorithmic social sorting that shape our actions (Thrift and French 2002). Graham’s worry has played out in the US, in particular, through online apps that allow homebuyers to see crime statistics and the scores of public schools in the area, subtly affecting the desirability of a neighbourhood. For our purposes, we apply Graham’s term to another phenomenon that is sorted by the software of commercial online maps: the image of the city and its imaginaries.2 Kevin Lynch’s work in the 1960s discussed this imaginary in an earlier time—how, along with traditional way-finding devices of maps and street signs, our mentals maps of the city would be formed by the memories of past encounters and the mental heuristics that 2  We draw on John Thompson’s understanding of the social imaginary as “the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life.” Studies in the Theory of Ideology (1984) p. 6.

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we use to navigate. We also rely on reading the city through its most legible features, he said—tall buildings, green spaces, familiar streets (Lynch 1960). Lynch writes, In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. (1960, 5)

Now, with smartphone technologies, we no longer need that embodied, affective experience to locate ourselves mentally in space. When we search Google Maps, our minds might create a mental image of the area we’re looking for (even if we’ve never been there, in the case of iconic cities, such as Edinburgh), but we’ll also now associate that geographic place with the online map, perhaps accepting the map’s information unquestioningly as helpful information about the area (Zook and Graham 2007; Dodge and Kitchin 2001). Even if we have been somewhere before, our memory of it is now just one dimension of the encounter along with the visuals we see on our mobile map apps. If you live outside Edinburgh and want to make a visit to the city today, you can make the trip virtually by a simple search on Google Maps, which directs you to the city centre, the default area shown by this platform. The search will also show you images of the city, its iconic buildings and landscapes, such as the Castle, the National Museum of Scotland and the rock formation of Arthur’s Seat—all centrally located places, easily accessible to tourists. (Google’s images seem to be a mix of user-added photos and photos scraped from other sites. If you used Apple’s iOS map, you will only see images of the city from official websites such as Wikipedia, Yelp and bookings.com.) If you’re an inhabitant, you would likely use these platforms to guide you around unfamiliar areas of the city. The map will indicate the street to travel, following a distance-by-time algorithm, highlighting places and street names as reference as you go. Through these platforms, our imaginary of the city is no longer guided by our direct, embodied experience or by paper maps, with their fixed orientation of the world, but mediated by the online GIS map that helps us navigate the city as tourists or residents by locating our positionality in space. While Lynch wrote in 1960, “Every citizen has had a long associations with some parts of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and

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meanings,” (1) now our images are also based on what our smartphones offer us, such as Google Streetview, which gives us a glimpse of the streets from a pedestrian’s vantage before we ever visit them, and the ‘you are here’ dot, showing us what’s just in proximity. New imaginaries of the city become articulated this way through software technologies, prior to or alongside any physical encounter (Laurier et al. 2016). The powerful sorting capabilities of this software will shape our city imaginaries. If we want to walk somewhere, we will be told the particular route to take based on an algorithm that defaults to the criteria of efficiency—the quickest route with the least traffic—rather than some other priority, such as the streets that have the most tree shade (a criteria that is not—or not yet—captured by the app). Another powerful example of software sorting happens when we used maps to search for a type of service or business. In one sense, Google Maps has made the ability for small or obscure businesses or community services to appear on its map much easier than the printed maps of the past, now that companies can add their information directly and keep it up-to-date through a Google My Business Account. But the information on Google Maps, what it shows or doesn’t to a particular viewer, is still based on a ranking, not only determined by location and distance but also by factors of ‘prominence’, ‘distance’, and ‘relevance’.3 While the company claims that its search ranking algorithms are not influenced by commercial considerations (Zook and Graham 2007), a place’s visibility will still be partly determined by how well it is able to optimise its website in this way—that is, how legible it is as a prominent and relevant business according to Google business rankings in local search results (Lee 2016; Zhekov 2016). To appear more prominently in  local search returns, for instance, a business must have a high number of accurate citations, reviews and positive rankings of its company’s information. To rank highly on Google Maps, it therefore helps if a business or organisation has internet access, first of all, plus the capacity to build a website, along with an understanding of how to keep information up-to-date on the Google dashboards and a savviness for getting positive scores and listings on other websites. A business could also pay to access automated tools that update business details quickly on the local business 3  These criteria have changed over time as Google tweaks its indexing preferences. These latest are according to Google My Business Help Support, visited on 22 August 2021. https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en-GB#zippy=%2Crelevance%2C prominence%2Cdistance%2Cverify-your-locations.

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directories that Google draws from, giving a pay-to-play advantage in search engine results for companies that can afford these services (Zhekov 2016). Visibility on Google Maps requires technical skills, time and resources that some places will not have. A community garden, for instance, might not easily show up in Google Maps if it doesn’t maintain a website or social media page (since Facebook pages also show up in map results). The lack of search engine optimisation through keywords, title and subtitle tags, citations and other factors can hide places such as these, even if local communities consider them valuable (Lyngbø 2016). We experienced the different levels of visibility on a Google Map search first hand while creating the cultural map dataset. As described in the last chapter, participants at our 2019 mapping events would either pinpoint places missing on the map, marking them with stickers or pins, or suggest new categories, such as women-only swimming pools or community gardens; we would then go looking for as many of these places as we could find to add to the map. Every time we would add a new place, we would scrape addresses and geographic coordinates from Google Maps or Google Search and input this information into the cultural space dataset. There were times when places suggested by participants, such as community gardens, simply did not show up on Google Maps, raising questions about how its local indexing works. On another occasion, we searched Google Maps for care homes in Edinburgh and retrieved an extensive list of at least ten pages on the side panel. But the corresponding map of the area within Edinburgh’s city limits showed around 22 returns related to large care home corporations (see Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). The pandemic in the UK was raging at the time, and we wanted to make all care homes visible on the cultural map and highlight these as potential alternative venues for artists workshops, performances and other cultural exchanges. Our final list included 102 care homes after completing an exhaustive search by each neighbourhood. Though we can’t say that Google Maps hides this information, it does prioritise the visualisation of some places above others—in the process, it shapes the representation of this sector to its map users. A person may believe that the search result is complete and accurate, and their mind’s cognitive image may now associats the map results as a truthful depiction of that sector (Zook and Graham 2007; Dodge and Kitchin 2001). Ubiquitous mapping—the integral everydayness of consulting Google or iOs maps—has transformed the way we relate to the places around us (Gartner et al. 2007; Elwood 2009). But even faced with the corporate monopolisation of software-sorted geographies, users of online maps do

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Fig. 4.1  Google Map’s search for care homes

Fig. 4.2  Our care homes dataset

have some agency. Every time a person makes a query on one of these platforms, they ultimately create a new map manifestation (Gartner et al. 2007). Through their manipulations while searching using GIS software, people can tailor, to a degree, the maps as they want to see them. Not only do we create maps when searching for specific content on existing platforms, we can also display geographic data on interactive maps we design ourselves, using software such as OpenStreetMaps.

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In the next section we turn to look at the many new cartographic practices that have become widely accessible, if not mainstream, to users, offering alternative narratives to the dominant commercial online maps that are so ubiquitous today.

Neogeographies as Alternative Geographies As mentioned, until recently, only technical users of software such as geographers, planners or landscape designers were capable of manipulating georeferenced data. Web mapping services—OpenStreetMap, Google Earth, Google My Maps API, ArcGIS online, Mapbox, Mangomap, SimpleMappr, CartoDB and Click2Map, to name only a few—have ended that exclusiveness. Neogeography describes the practices of using new mapping tools requiring no prior technical knowledge—of “people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and combining elements of existing toolset” (Turner 2006, 3). The Oxford Dictionary of Geography defines neogeography as a new form of geographic knowledge characterised by online accessibility and the participatory nature of online map services (Mayhew 2015); other scholars have used the term more narrowly to refer to the practice of adding existing data onto a web mapping service (Lin 2013; Plantin 2014). Neogeography, however defined, sidesteps some of the questions posed in critical cartography about the power and authority of cartographers because it captures how amateur, grassroots mapping practices have inverted, to a degree, these traditional power relations. A related term, volunteered geographic information, or VGI (Elwood et al. 2012), looks at how citizens voluntarily collect and disseminate geographic knowledge online independent of any exogenous campaign or data-­ collection project that solicits and curates this information (Elwood 2008). People practising neogeography and VGI can have their own agenda, their own understanding of spatial reality, which they can use  to many ends—for entertainment or to correct out-of-date official sources or to apply alternative and local naming conventions or to communicate controversial viewpoints and minority perspectives. Offering an example of a more political project, Plantin (2014) documents the online maps created by a citizenship movement that collected radiation data in Fukushima, Japan, responding to the lack of official information on toxic levels. Lin (2013) writes about citizens in Wuhan city, China, who used a Google Maps mashup application to react to land privatisation by developers in a

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state-designated ecological area. Lin calls the project a “tactical act in response to the dominant corporate and state power” (2013, 37). Neogeography is made possible by one of the most significant changes from desktop GIS mapping technologies to web mapping services: the API, or application programming interface, which allows one piece of software to interact with another. In his book Mashup Cultures, Sonvilla-­ Wess (2010) explains that an API functions like an access code—it facilitates content and data sharing between applications; it allows platforms such as Google Search, for instance, to access our personal information, such as our email address, browser history and purchases, when we use this platform. An API key also  allows a person without any technical expertise to access data contained by map providers such as Google or OpenStreetMap and to visualise it on a website (Plantin 2014). (Precisely because of their ease of use, map creators should be cautious when using APIs to access spatial content, which is always partial. Even official sources of spatial data can be outdated, and the inherited boundaries and place names may be geopolitically contested. Also, when a base map uses a satellite image, it is important to know the year of its capture and to contextualise the production of the satellite imagery, since some parts of the world are not captured as regularly as big cities in the Northern Hemisphere and are prone to have out-of-date information.) In the next section, we consider two GIS maps we designed—the Edinburgh Cultural Map and the LeithLate Virtual Tours—and contextualise them in relation to the growing efforts of neogeography and VGI. Methodologically, the following sections are based on narrative self-­ accounts of the design processes and experiences of making these maps (Kitchin et al. 2012; Perkins 2013). We discuss the choices we made during the maps’ construction, our experiences working with some of the other people involved in the maps’ production, how we used the software to display the data in different ways and the constraints of the software. We compare how the maps’ functions and forms tie to the different purposes of these maps. We offer more detail about how a person might now use the maps, both released to the public in 2020.

The Edinburgh Cultural Map As described in the last chapter, our definition of a cultural space and what the cultural map of Edinburgh would or wouldn’t make visible went through a process of revision over the course of the seven cultural

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mapping events. We let participants largely determine  the definition of ‘cultural space,’ and as a result the dataset widened from an initial tally of Edinburgh’s more obvious high culture spaces of museums, galleries and theatres, to encompass grassroots and locally focused endeavours such as community gardens, non-Council owned community centres  and outdoor spaces. After the last event, we focused on building the dataset with more local, community-oriented spaces scattered throughout the city due to the broadened set of categories. This larger, more diverse dataset now needed a public home, as did the growing number of context layers we had gathered up to this point. With GIS, we could combine this growing repository. Published on our website, this interactive platform would also allow users to choose the categories and context layers they wanted to see by turning on and off the different layers of information. We had spent the past year working with an off-line, open-source desktop version of GIS software, QGIS, that we used to print versions of the map on paper. The web-based map we now set out to design posed a new set of challenges—it required different technical skills to make the map useable by the general public, not just ourselves, and it shifted our focus from a participatory series of events to interface design—from process to outcome. The new online map would, for the most part, encapsulate the cultural data collected from 2019—we now had to think of the map as the public-facing result of this earlier iterative series of map constructions. Whereas previously we used the map to solicit information, and the data we collected changed from month to month based on people’s input, with each new map reflecting the additions from the event before, now we would have something that acted and looked quite finished, even if we could continue to update and change the map by adding data by choice or upon request. At the end of our events of 2019, we received a grant from the City of Edinburgh Council to make the dataset of cultural spaces available as a map to the general public. We took inspiration from neogeography practices—the map would offer a different representation of Edinburgh—a different set of knowledge claims—than the dominant version people most often encounter on commercial maps. The map display required a dynamic interface to organise the over 1300 places we had collected, using a complex curation of categories and subcategories. We also required some coding skills to create basic search functions and tabs that could offer different routes to accessing the information.

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Since this was our first attempt designing an online map, we went for a traditional commercial map provider, the ESRI ArcGIS online service. ESRI is a for-profit GIS software company founded in 1969 that now has the largest share of the GIS market in the world. Its software requires a subscription, which we were able to access through a University account; this gave us access to the company’s closed API package, including the code necessary to create the map as an interactive application. In January 2020, we hired an Edinburgh-based company, ESRI UK, to write the website code for the map, per a brief we submitted asking that users be offered different ways of encountering information on the map, including a direct key word search for place names, a drop-down menu that would let a person select specific neighbourhoods or wards (based on official Council data), and two tabs, one filtering among different cultural spaces by categories, the other by several additional context layers. The design and editing of the map required, in effect, a traditional ArcGIS online map that uses different layers and styles provided by the software. One of our key requests was that people could load complementary layers and filter cultural spaces by categories they selected, allowing them to create their own maps based on their particular interests. We wanted to provide an interactive display that could put the cultural spaces collected in the context of other layers such as waterways, bike paths, bus stops, street art, public sculptures, slavery-associated cultural sites and the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. We decided to display the map on a WordPress website hosted on the University’s server. ESRI UK handed the map off to us at the end of February 2020, but we spent four more months refining the datasets and adding more places and context layers before its public launch on www.edinburghculturalmap.org in July 2020 (see Fig. 3.7). The Edinburgh Cultural Map is not a neogeography project in the strict sense. The map’s design needed technical GIS and web coding knowledge, which required a budget to hire the web programmers and pay for the expensive ESRI subscription. We also needed help from the University’s web team to design the HTML code that displays the map on the Wordpress site. And while we have the capacity to edit and update the datasets or add new data layers in our ArcGIS online account, to edit or manipulate the map itself it is necessary to have technical knowledge of GIS software, along with user permissions to gain access to the back-end account. The project is not an example of Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), since we as project leaders, created the conditions that determined how the data was collected and the map took shape.

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The cultural map, however, is customisable and processual in the sense that it can take different forms depending on how a person manipulates it. That customisation is key to one of the main difference between this application and the printed maps we made: the large amount of information that the application allows a user to select for simultaneous display, versus that possible on the print version. A printed map would only show a selection of places before losing legibility, and its size would likely need to extend to more than three metres long. While in the print format you could display this information as a print atlas, each atlas page would only show one category or layer. The participatory dimension of our online map lies in part in allowing users to create their own version of the map by selecting layers of interest and framing places that best tell their own narratives. Though, unlike software such as OpenStreetMaps that allow user-­ generated content, they cannot share or republish this  personalised version. The Edinburgh Cultural Map highlights the cultural richness of the city’s different neighbourhoods. When a user first looks at this map, they encounter hundreds of differently coloured dots for each of the cultural spaces and an invitation to manipulate these using category and subcategory check boxes, a search box and tabs. A first option for someone looking the map would be to search for a preferred space or to  select the neighbourhood where she lives. Then, to narrow down the types of spaces on the map, the user could look through the different categories and subcategories and filter for the ones she’s most interested in. She can then click on the Layers tab and turn on complementary layers showing the SIMD, public sculptures, cultural buildings with accessible toilets, information on the cultural engagement expenditure of the City Council and so on. By activating the map’s dynamic, performative functionality with different filters and searches, a user would generate a version of the map particular to her interests. We launched the GIS platform in July 2020 with a public event hosted online by the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh (we were at this point in hard lockdown in Scotland). Two Edinburgh Council members introduced the map, and we invited two more guest speakers to offer more context for the project. University of Edinburgh researcher Orian Brook spoke about her experience with GIS while mapping the sociodemographics of cultural audiences in London, and Vikki

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Jones, a PhD student in the College of Art, described the research she had carried out with us that same summer on the role of Edinburgh’s cultural hubs during the pandemic (both Orian and Vikki also helped us coordinate the cultural mapping workshops in 2019, so they were very familiar with the project). We then ran a demo of the map’s general functions, showing our online audience how users could turn on and off the clickable categories and contexts layers, how they could conduct a key word search and how they could use the neighbourhood filter to zoom into a particular area of the city. Since its publication, the map has featured on the City of Edinburgh Council’s website, and the Council has used it to understand the spread across the city of community outreach activities carried out by its grant-­ funded organisations (since community outreach is a condition of these funds). Part of the data displayed on the map also figures into the next phase of research carried out in 2021, the printed maps used in the workshop activities we carried out that year, described in detail in the next chapter.

LeithLate Virtual Tours Discover the vibrant tapestry of Leith’s creative community! Explore Leith’s murals through beautiful high-res images with audio from our LeithLate Tour Guide, Cameron Foster, and audio from several original artists describing the inspiration and installation of the artwork. Each audio file has a transcript available to download. Learn about multiple Art Studios and see what it’s like to create there through self-guided tours of the artists in residence. Each video includes subtitles made by Matchbox Cineclub for accessibility. Enter the map by clicking on it anywhere or the button below and enjoy LeithLate Virtual Tours!

This quote describes the LeithLate Virtual Tour on the LeithLate website. LeithLate is a multi-arts charity based in the Leith neighbourhood, responsible for various public art projects, such as The Shutter Project— commissioned paintings on the shutters of closed store fronts—and The Mural Project—commissioned murals on the fronts and sides of buildings—and the annual LeithLate Festival, which curates music, performances and art trails throughout the neighbourhood. Creative producer

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Movern Cunningham founded the organisation in 2011, and it remains at a very grassroots level—for four years it was self-funded until becoming a charity in January 2020. Today, the organisation is partly run by a freelance producer, Erin Thompson, and is overseen by a voluntary board of trustees comprised of local residents and artists. While finishing the design of the Cultural Map of Edinburgh in 2020, we won two other University bids to support cultural organisations during the pandemic, particularly local charities and cultural organisations that had no immediate channels to receive financial aid. We knew from the cultural mapping events of 2019 that there was a significant number of artists working, often freelancing, in fragile economic situations, now made more precarious by Covid-19. The closure of major cultural centres, which artists depend on for study and exhibition spaces, required artists to consider alternative strategies to promote their work. With all this in mind, we approached LeithLate after hearing that the organisation had to cancel their popular mural tour, a curated walk in the neighbourhood led by tour guide Cameron Foster, who tells the colourful history of The Mural Project and stories behind each works of art. LeithLate agreed to partner with us, so we put forward the two application for the University funds, both successful, to create a virtual tour of the murals featuring an audio guide recorded by Cameron, and a second tour of a curated group of artists of their private art studios. The map, we hoped, would introduce new online audiences to the eight Leith neighbourhood street art murals and let Edinburgh residents take self-guided walking tours of these artworks. The grant paid LeithLate’s administrator, Erin Thompson, to coordinate the project, and it gave stipends to all the artists involved. Erin set up audio recordings of several of the mural artists to go along with Cameron’s audio narration of the mural tour, and she also commissioned 12 artists from seven Leith-area studio spaces to make the video recordings to introduce their studios and art practice. LeithLate also gave us their hi-­ resolution photos of the murals to feature on the site. The map combines an online tour of street murals with videos of artists giving tours of their studios and work. The combination of media—high-­ resolution photos, videos, audio and links—meant we had to think beyond the repository-based design of layers that turn on and off that characterised our first map—and move towards a map design that showcased high-­ quality audio-visual material and simulated a virtual tour through the streets of the Leith area. The map that came together exemplifies volunteered geographic information, since our team didn’t mediate or collect

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Fig. 4.3  Landing page of leithlatevirtualtours.co.uk

the data it hosts. Rather, LeithLate curated the map’s content, bringing to the  project their knowledge of the neighbourhood’s vibrant street art scene along with direct access to the local artists included on the tour. To make the project as non-extractive as possible, all funds, aside from those going to two web developers, went to LeithLate and the artists. LeithLate works with designers to create colourful posters and marketing assets for their past events, so they already had a defined style, and this set a high standard for the aesthetic look of the virtual tour (see Fig. 4.3). While working with the web developers, we had to coordinate the production of map and articulate it in a web application in a way that displayed their content—lush photos, multiple audio streams and video embeds—as a high-quality presentation, matching the LeithLate aesthetic, on both website and mobile formats. After a few attempts using the open source application Leaflet, we decided on MapBox, a commercially owned but free software that gave us more aesthetic control and provides an API for loading the map onto the Wordpress site. We would also require extra web coding to load the complementary media of photos, audio, links and video embeds. This project can be assessed as a neogeographic exercise since the map production did not require us to use specialist cartographic knowledge, although we did need web developers to code and manipulate the webmap provider. Unlike Google Maps and ArcGIS online, Mapbox gives users complete autonomy

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to edit the graphic style of the map, and its base map derives from OpenStreetMap, along with NASA and Digital Globe (a commercial satellite imagery provider), which means anyone can contribute to its open source base map (Franzen 2012). Nevertheless, Mapbox is commercial software, and, depending on the map users’ commercial affiliation, as well as the amount of traffic to the map, embedding their maps on a website can require payment. While data on Mapbox can be presented without any cartographic knowledge, the interface is similar in sophistication to ArcGIS, requiring more advanced software users to design its functions. MapBox does not allow the simplicity of use that you find, for instance, with the Google service My Maps, which lets people minimally edit the base map by adding customised markers for specific purposes. For LeithLate, nevertheless, Mapbox was an ideal tool to customise the map in line with their prior marketing designs and colour pallet. We used Github, a free platform for developers and subsidiary of Microsoft, to link to the coding necessary to integrate the map interface with other graphic media (see Figs. 4.4 and 4.5). Github users can create repositories that allow them to work collaboratively, and Github’s version control let our web developers work off each other’s edits easily, with one developer focused on a laptop view and the other on mobile viewing.

Fig. 4.4  Untitled mural pop-up box with sidebar including Cameron Foster’s audio recording

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Fig. 4.5  Edinburgh Pallete pop-up box with sidebar showing two artist’s studios

Using Github also made the coding for the website open source, which means we could draw on this work to create future maps with similar functionalities. When a person first visits the LeithLate  map, they’ll see the basemap toned in subtly light pink and grey of the Leith area. The map shows two types of icons: a bright green triangle marking each mural and an upside-­ down pink T marking the artist studios. A white bar at the top shows the LeithLate logo and contains the key for the two types of spaces, studios and murals. When a person clicks on one of the icons, the map is overlaid entirely by an image either of the mural, if they select a mural, or the outside of the studio building where the artist works, if they select a studio. Next to the image is a sidebar embedding links and the audio or video content—for the murals, this includes title, credits and dates and a short description, along with audio of Cameron’s narrations and narrations by the mural artists, a link to transcripts of these, and a link to the Google Street View of the mural, or where it used to be in the case of two murals on the map that no longer exists. The high-quality images allow users to experience the place while listening to the tour guide narration simultaneously. For the artist studio, the sidebar has the description of the studio and a link to its homepage along with the embedded videos of the artist studios. For this project, through merging web application development and

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mapping tools, the map offers a more interactive experience that combines visual and auditory media to simulate a physical tour of Leith’s artworks. At the end of the project, we turned over the Github and Mapbox accounts to LeithLate, allowing them the flexibility to add to the map in the future. LeithLate launched the map in August 2020, along with another community project, the Light-up Leith History Mural, a live video projection onto the historic Leith History Mural that animates the artwork to an ambient musical score. Local press covered the map, with one outlet, the Edinburgh Reporter, writing that its “first-hand and personal accounts create a beautiful archive for spaces explored and capture a moment in time” (Stephen 2020). Erin Thompson, LeithLate’s producer, told us in an email afterwards how the project now works as a fundamental record of the area’s street art: My favourite aspect is the function to keep hold of the murals no longer there. We can update the map as new murals are created and old ones are replaced—allowing us to have a living map of the artwork around us without losing those pieces that have been physically replaced. A picture in time with original artist commentary keeps the legacy of the murals alive.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced some of the major critiques of online commercial maps and draws on the concept of neogeography—the ability of everyday users to construct online maps—to understand our own web mapping projects. The Cultural Map of Edinburgh, while inspired by participatory approaches to cartography, falls short of a neogeographic project. Granted, it allows users to manipulate different layers and categories to create the map they want to see, but the main components of this map—its web design and the content on its base map—are not based on an emergent user-created system. They are not derived from software allowing collaborative edits and data collection by laypeople, and the spaces and categories on the map are fixed unless we, the map’s designers, change them. As University affiliates, we had the privilege of working with grant funds that gave us access to an expensive mapping software and allowed us to hire web developers who could customise the map per our needs. The LeithLate Virtual Tour, on the contrary, gets closer to the concept of neogeography since we created the map with a free online software, Mapbox. Nevertheless, we used an open source repository for the

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html, Github, and we relied on two web developers to construct the map’s bespoke interface of clickable icons and hi-res image overlays. That said, the project is an example of volunteered graphic information, since the information it displays came entirely from our LeithLate partners and local artists. This chapter has focused on our experiences designing online maps and working with computational map surfaces and the practice of GIS web mapping. In the next chapter, we turn our focus to how people use and interact with paper maps. We take an ethnographic approach for this next phase of our project, describing some of the outcomes of cultural mapping workshops—some online and some in-person—throughout the spring and summer of 2021, in three neighbourhoods based well outside Edinburgh’s centre.

References Bennett, Jonathan. 2010. OpenStreetMap. Olton: Packt Publishing. Chris Perkins. 2013. Plotting practices and politics: (im)mutable narratives in OpenStreetMap. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographies. 17 September 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12022 Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. 2001. Mapping Cyberspace. London: Routledge. Dodge, Martin, and C.R. Perkins. 2015. Reflecting on J.B. Harley’s Influence and What He Missed in ‘Deconstructing the Map’. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 50 (1): 37–40. Elwood, Sarah. 2008. Volunteered Geographic Information: Future Research Directions Motivated by Critical, Participatory, and Feminist GIS. GeoJournal 72 (3–4): 173–183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-­008-­9186-­0. ———. 2009. Geographic Information Science: Emerging Research on the Societal Implications of the Geospatial Web. Progress in Human Geography 34 (3): 349–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509340711. Elwood, Sarah, Michael F.  Goodchild, and Daniel Z.  Sui. 2012. Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102 (3): 571–590. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.595657. Fox, Killian. 2012. Openstreetmap: ‘It’s the Wikipedia of Maps’. A Map of the World that Anyone Can Edit. The Guardian. Accessed 28 July 2021. Published Electronically 18 February 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2012/feb/18/openstreetmap-­world-­map-­radicals. Franzen, Carl. 2012. MapBox Aims For Open Source, Digital Map Revolution. Accessed December 2020. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/idealab/ mapbox-­aims-­for-­open-­source-­digital-­map-­revolution.

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Gartner, Georg, David A. Bennett, and Takashi Morita. 2007. Towards Ubiquitous Cartography. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 34 (4): 247–257. https://doi.org/10.1559/152304007782382963. Gluck, Caroline. 2015. Taiwan Protests over Google Map. Accessed 21 July 2021. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-­pacific/4308678.stm. Goodchild, Michael. 2009. NeoGeography and the Nature of Geographic Expertise. Journal of Location Based Services 3 (2): 82–96. https://doi. org/10.1080/17489720902950374. Graham, Stephen D.N. 2005. Software-Sorted Geographies. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5): 562–580. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph568oa. Kitchin, Rob, Justin Gleeson, and Martin Dodge. 2012. Unfolding Mapping Practices: A New Epistemology for Cartography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographies, August 14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661. 2012.00540. Laurier, Eric, Barry Brown, and Moira McGregor. 2016. Mediated Pedestrian Mobility: Walking and the Map App. Mobilities 11 (1): 117–134. https://doi. org/10.1080/17450101.2015.1099900. Lee, Newton. 2016. Google It Total Information Awareness. 1st ed. New  York, NY: Springer. Lin, Wen. 2013. Situating Performative Neogeography: Tracing, Mapping, and Performing ‘Everyone’s East Lake’. Environment and Planning A 45 (1): 37–54. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45161. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Ed. Studies Joint Center for Urban. Cambridge, MA; London: Technology Press. Lyngbø, Trond. 2016. SEO in the Age of Digital Transformation: What Every Business Leader Must Know. In Google It: Total Information Awareness, ed. Newton Lee. New York: Springer. Mayhew, Susan. 2015. A Dictionary of Geography. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism / Safiya Umoja Noble. New York: New York University Press. Perkins, Chris. 2013. Plotting Practices and Politics: (Im)mutable Narratives in OpenStreetMap. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographies, September 17. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12022. Plantin, Jean-Christophe. 2014. Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography. John Wiley & Sons. Quiquivix, Linda. 2014. Art of War, Art of Resistance: Palestinian Counter-­ Cartography on Google Earth. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (3): 444–459. https://doi.org/10.1080/0004560 8.2014.892328. Russell, Ethan. 2019. 9 Things to Know About Google’s Maps Data: Beyond the Map. Accessed 21 July 2021. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ maps-­platform/9-­things-­know-­about-­googles-­maps-­data-­beyond-­map.

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Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan. 2010. Mashup Cultures. 1. Aufl. ed. Vienna: Springer Verlag. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. The Challenges of Platform Capitalism: Understanding the Logic of a New Business Model. Juncture 23 (4): 254–257. https://doi. org/10.1111/newe.12023. Stephen, Phyllis. 2020. LeithLate—Online and in Person. The Edinburgh Reporter: Culture. Published Electronically August 27 11:16 am. https:// theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2020/08/leithlate-­online-­and-­in-­person/. Thompson, J.B. 1984. Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Polity Press. Thrift, Nigel, and Shaun French. 2002. The Automatic Production of Space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (3): 309–335. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1475-­5661.00057. Turner, Andrew. 2006. Introduction to Neogeography. O’Reilly Media, Inc. Zhekov, Nyagoslav. 2016. Google Maps and Google Local Search. In Google It Total Information Awareness, ed. Newton Lee. New York: Springer. Zook, Matthew A., and Mark Graham. 2007. The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the Privatization of Cyberspace and DigiPlace. Geoforum 38 (6): 1322–1343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.05.004. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power / Shoshana Zuboff. London: Profile Books.

CHAPTER 5

Maps, Memories and Stories of Place

Abstract  In this chapter, we draw from a series of online and in-person cultural mapping workshops carried out during the spring of 2021, when our focus turned to one of the main objectives of the Edinburgh Culture & Communities Mapping Project from the start: to explore and elevate perspectives on place and culture of local communities who live outside the city centre. The workshops were in partnership with six community hubs who service outlying neighbourhoods of Edinburgh. Methodologically, we take inspiration from Tania Rossetto’s ethnographic approach of observing how people act when using maps. We describe the emotions and interactions between participants as they worked with printed maps and photographs to talk about their neighbourhoods and as they created meanings out of the memories and experiences recalled in the process. The main parts of this chapter are three reflective essays describing these practices of mapping and participants’ memories, conversations and emotions that emerged from encounters with maps. We reflect on the relevance of participants’ voices in a city that has renewed its opportunity to take its inhabitants into account, after almost two years of lockdown and tourism-related decline. Keywords  Cultural mapping • Ethnography • Photo elicitation • Edinburgh • Participatory methods

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Currie, M. Miranda Correa, The Culture and Communities Mapping Project, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88651-6_5

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Introduction In 2009, cultural geographer Tania Rossetto began researching how people use maps in public. At a popular outdoor spot in the city of Istanbul, she watched a couple using a handheld paper map while taking a moment of rest, pointing at it and discussing a site they wanted to visit at the famous Golden Horn. Another time she recorded how a man stood, absorbed by a map on a public advertisement for a sightseeing bus tour, imagining himself on this tour, perhaps—taking a virtual trip without actually going. Rossetto proposes that map-based  experiences  such as these involve several dynamics, depending on whether the act of mapping is an individual or social one, or whether it is used for way-finding versus imagining a particular site or a journey by dwelling in the idea of a place. Reflecting on these observations, she asks, “In what ways do cartographic objects emotionally and physically move us?” (2013, p. 18). In this chapter we take inspiration from Rossetto’s approach of observing how people act when they use maps. In a series of workshops we carried out during the spring of 2021, we watched how people use paper maps and photographs to prompt acts of storytelling. Our focus was borne out of one of the main objectives of the Edinburgh Culture & Communities Mapping Project from the start: to explore and elevate the perspectives on place and culture of local communities who live outside the city centre. To carry out this effort, we set up a series of online and in-person cultural mapping workshops, hosted at six community institutions who service the historic and peripheral neighbourhoods of Oxgangs, Wester Hailes, Granton, Muirhouse and Pilton, and Restalrig and Lochend, and we relied heavily on these partnerships to reach these very specific geographic communities. This ethnographic approach departs methodologically from our third chapter, with its focus on the steps of cultural mapping and the different types of outputs they led to. In 2019 we used cultural mapping to collect data on Edinburgh’s cultural spaces. We used maps to capture most of the outputs, and our final analysis looked at how the methods we used shaped our results. We did not concentrate on how participants interacted with the printed maps propped against a wall or laid out on a table before them, and we did not have a way to capture the many conversations that took place during the workshops beyond the map inscriptions, post-it notes and our own hand-written notes.

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For the second round of cultural mapping workshops, which we  call Mapping Cultural Dispersal, our attention was no longer on collecting quantitative information but on in situ experiences of using paper maps and photographs to provoke participants’ memories. We applied an interpretive, qualitative approach, observing the emotions and interactions between participants as they worked with print maps and photographs that they brought to the workshops to talk about their neighbourhoods. Here  we describe how they created meanings out of the memories and experiences recalled in the process. The core of this chapter are three reflective essays describing these practices of mapping and the memorable reflections participants told to us during the course of the workshops. As researchers, we became spectators of the interactions occurring between participants, the map surfaces and the photos that we asked participants to bring to the workshops. These detailed sections unpack the memories, conversations and emotions that emerged from these encounters. We reflect on the relevance of participants’ voices in a city that has the opportunity to renew its commitment to taking its inhabitants into account, after almost two years of lockdown and tourism-related decline.

Ethnographic Accounts of Mapping In her latest publication, Object Oriented Cartography (2019), Rossetto describes a series of studies of emergent cartography—how maps come into existence through their production and use—and her experiences of the maps she encounters in her everyday life, beyond her academic studies. She re-assesses map theory, from critical cartography to non-­ representational approaches, and reflects on the contradictions she felt between being an academic who had loved maps since childhood and the high-academic criticism she encounters against their use. As a geography student, she writes, “I was primarily expected to be suspicious of cartography, to criticise and denounce maps, to demystify and condemn their faults and ideological contents and to distance myself from them” (Rossetto 2019, p. 2). Taking inspiration from Dodge and Perkin’s invitation to “go beyond the map” (2015), that is, to treat mapping as a social and emergent activity, Rossetoo describes how she began to study embodied, material and experiential cartographic acts and mapping practices, rather than the outcomes of maps’ discourses on the world. Through her ethnographic practice, Rossetto considers how maps come to exist, the physical

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gestures made by her map-making subjects, and the very individualised, specific approaches people take to create a map, whether print-based or online. We draw on this approach in our own ethnographic accounts below. Throughout our observations, we consider print maps as what Veronica Della Dora (2009) calls ‘memory theatres’: “mnemonic devices enabling the user to acquire knowledge through visual spatialization and tactile engagement” (241). Like a theatre, where the audience sits apart from the action they observe, so conventional cartographic maps present a remote, birds-eye perspective of a geographic area that the user looks down upon (Della Dora 2009; Della Dora 2013). But, Della Dora argues, the process of engaging with a map is, at the same time, an intimate, mnemonic one. Maps inspire people’s recollection of events or experiences, which are imprinted as images upon their memory. Through looking, and through the tactile experiences of grazing a finger against a printed map, annotating them, folding them, shuffling them around and so on, people create and fix their memories of places. Della Dora makes the point that this memory-making is a physical process, a specific encounter between a person and a map. Through visual and tactile interaction, people transform their maps through use, becoming co-authors of these map encounters. As a result, Della Dora (2009) writes, the “history of cartography [is] a history of interactions and co-authorships between map-makers and mapusers” (240). As people make use of their maps, they make them their own, a distinctive object, sometimes transformed beyond the map’s originally intended purposes. Print maps are, as a result, processual in at least two ways: first, through the physical inscriptions we make on our maps—the foldings, drawings and annotations that change them—but also, secondly, because maps always emerge differently with each encounter that we have with them, resulting in a history of reactions and experiences through the maps’ use (Della Dora 2009). In our study, we focus on this double process: participants’ annotations on the maps as they use them to mark places and take notes, making the print maps their own, but also the mnemonic processes of the specific encounter with the map, as people use it to recount their experiences of their neighbourhoods. Our project utilised both maps and photographs together as mnemonic guides. Rossetto (2013) highlights the opportunity of combining maps and photos to create photo-essays that show “the rich and mutable life of cartographic artefacts” (310). In one study  she took photographs to

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document this richness in her travels—the couple pointing at a map or maps she found in public spaces such as bus stops. For our purposes, however, we take inspiration from another use of photographs, that of photo elicitation. Photo elicitation asks participants to photograph their places of choice, then uses the photos to activate conversations, stories, reflections and emotions, which then become the subject of ethnographic work (Boucher 2018; Rose 2016). Julia Bennett (2014) describes this method as a way to capture more phenomenological data about a person’s ‘sense of belonging’, an intangible concept that, from her perspective, can be more easily grasped through photo elicitation and photo diaries than by direct observation. Boucher (2018) argues that photo elicitation can be an empowering method since it helps participants play a more prominent role in the data production, troubling the hierarchical relations between academic researchers and research subjects. In our ethnographic descriptions below, we attend to how maps act as memory theatres. We offer descriptions of how the maps and participant photos together prompt people’s stories and perceptions about place and how the maps and the images interact with their voices and gestures. We observe the double processes of map-making, describing how people transform their maps and make them their own using stickers and annotations and markings, and also how the maps emerge differently for each person, as they told stories and experiences of their local area. Participants used the map as a canvas to create new cartographies based on their imaginaries of their neighbourhoods, sharing them with other participants through a multi-sensory experience of touch, sight and sound. This co-­authorship of shared imaginaries is one of the main outputs of the project, and it has led us to design six participatory maps for each of the six areas, showing the valued places participants marked during the events. Here, our focus is not on the production of these final maps nor the outcomes of the project but rather on the gestures and stories told during the mapping process.

Building Community Partnerships For this round of workshops we partnered with local community organisations who helped us develop cultural mapping methods suitable to the local context and ensured community buy-in. At first we approached three community arts organisations in the northwest area of the city that we already had ties with. North Edinburgh Arts had hosted our itinerant map in 2019; WHALE Arts had hosted one of the 2019 cultural mapping

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workshops, and staff from granton:hub had attended our cultural mapping workshop at the Storytelling Centre. We had ties to the fourth organisation, the Ripple Project, in the northeast neighbourhoods of Lochend and Restalrig, through a University of Edinburgh course we consulted on called Organising for Social Change, taught by Winston Kwon, which paired student researchers with local community organisations—The Ripple was the partner for Winston’s 2021 course. We were missing, however, more contacts in the Eastern part of the city. We reached out to two more organisations who agreed to support the project, Oxgangs Neighbourhood Centre and Goodtrees Community Centre, both important to communities in the southern area of the city. While NEA, WHALE and granton:hub are arts centres, and the other three are community organisations, all of the hubs anchor their communities through social activities and food support, and all are outside the centre in areas that fall within the highest decile of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. Paul Knox, in 1984, describes the contrast between the central areas and the peripheral areas of Edinburgh as a “prosaic process of urban development” with an economically polarised social topography (1984, p. 328). In his study  he refers in particular to deprived areas in Stenhouse and Saughton, Granton and Muirhouse (where granton:hub and NEA are, respectively), Restalrig (where the Ripple is), Craigmillar and the southeast corner of the city (where Goodtrees sits). The distribution of deprived areas in Edinburgh remains in place after almost 40 years, with the only significant difference the addition of Wester Hailes (home of WHALE ARTS), which did not show on Knox’s analysis as the area was still in development at that time. A 2019 report submitted to the Edinburgh Poverty Commission by Professor Susan McVie declared that between 2004 and 2016, low-income residents have been moving from the city centre to peripheral housing areas located in the deprived sectors mentioned, a phenomenon she calls “the decentralisation of poverty”. These areas struggle with higher crime and incarceration rates and less access to local services and amenities than other neighbourhoods. Also, despite being an affluent city, with average incomes that are 27% higher than the average in Scotland, Edinburgh still ranks fourth among cities with the highest levels of child poverty (six percent of the total after Glasgow City, North Lanarkshire and Fife), which concentrates in these decentralised areas (McVie 2019). Our project set out to understand how residents of these communities value their surrounding neighbourhood and their sense of belonging and

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attachment to their local area. To support the research, we received an Impact Acceleration Grant from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. This gave us funds to pay our community partners £1000 each for their time helping us facilitate the project, including hosting the workshops and recruiting participants during a difficult phase of lockdown, and £50 apiece for participants taking part in the workshops. The funding also supported the production of physical maps of the workshop results—we could frame these and give them to the community partners to hang in their public spaces for participants to see. The funding was crucial—even though we would be sharing the final maps, we wanted to give everyone involved immediate compensation for their time spent at the workshops. We were concerned that some people living in these areas were already subject to research fatigue, as several of these cultural organisations collaborated on other University projects, and we wanted to avoid an extractive experience that offered no concrete material return to participants. We conducted preliminary interviews with staff of the partner organisations, asking them about the history of their services and their role within the community, and for their feedback about the approach we proposed to use for the workshops. Several staff told us that potential participants were especially excited about taking photographs for the project and that this should be a central component of the workshops. To help recruit participants, we sent our partners a digital postcard and project text they could share on email lists and social media. The call read: What are your dreams for your community? The Culture & Communities Mapping Project is holding workshops in May asking you about the places you value across the city and your neighbourhood, in addition to ideas for future arts and culture events in your area. You’ll be asked to take photographs of places that you normally visit or feel comfortable with. You’ll use maps to think about arts and culture events and opportunities that you would like to see in your neighbourhood. These workshops are open to everyone.

Research Design: Mapping During Covid We needed to adapt our research design both in the face of the pandemic and to suit the more local focus. To begin with, we could no longer have workshop with four or five participants gathering around a table, hovering over a large, two metre map, orienting themselves with other people close by. Instead, we designed A3 maps for each participant and put them in

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individual packets with the materials needed for the activity: a postcard describing the project, instructions for the mapping activity, a pencil, multi-coloured stickers, an information sheet and consent form and maps both of the city of Edinburgh (see Fig. 5.1) and of the local area. The base maps included the cultural places dataset created in 2019. We also had to plan for online activities, anticipating that a few participants would not yet feel comfortable gathering with other people even in socially distanced conditions. For people who were not able to attend in-person events, we would drop the packet of material off at their doorstep and schedule a workshop with them over Zoom. Another significant difference this time around, as mentioned, is that we asked participants to take photographs in advance of the mapping workshops. We understood the impact of maps interacting with audiovisual material through our work on the LeithLate map, so for our 2021 workshops, we built on this approach by inviting participants to bring their own photos of places they care about and discuss them while looking at a map. Several weeks in advance of a workshop, we sent instructions to participants for the photo activity:

Fig. 5.1  Extract of the Edinburgh city scale map. This section shows the three hubs discussed in this chapter, North Edinburgh Arts, granton:hub and The Ripple Project

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This part of the project asks you to reflect on your local neighbourhood. You can take your photos using a digital camera, smartphone or tablet if you have access to these, or we can provide a disposable camera for you. We would like you to collect photographs of 2–5 places in your neighbourhood where you feel you belong and where you’ve had positive experiences and meet with others in your community. When taking your photos, try to think about places and cultural spaces you might go to dream, to feel inspired, for fun, for exercise and to relieve stress.

After taking their photos, participants could send them to us over email or text, and we printed them to include in the participants’ packet. In three cases participants did not have a way to take photos so we ordered disposable cameras for them to use then mail back to us for printing. The mapping instructions for the workshops walked participants through a series of steps they could carry out on their own, then asked them to discuss their choices with us and the other participants, either at their table or on the Zoom call. We began by asking them to mark the boundaries of their neighbourhood on both the local and city-wide maps using a pencil—these demarcations would let us test the accuracy of the local map’s frame and adjust them based on residents’ perspectives on their area. We then asked participants to use the sheet of stickers to mark places on the map: blue stickers represented spaces they value, yellow for each place where a photograph was taken, red to mark places where they felt they did not belong, however they interpreted that phrase, and orange for places that they currently do not feel comfortable visiting but would like to (see Fig. 5.2). After drawing and marking on the map, we would guide participants in a round of discussion, first asking them to tell us about the photos they took, then to talk about each of the stickers they had put on the map. Most workshops broke into groups of three or four participants each, guided by a researcher, and took approximately an hour and a half. We made recordings of every group at every workshop, both online and in person—25 groups and 71 participants in total across the six sites. It is worth noting that our cultural mapping steps did not use the term ‘culture’. We did not ask people to name cultural spaces, as we did in the 2019 workshops—instead we asked them open-endedly about the places they value. We designed the workshops to allow people to decide what they wanted to discuss about their neighbourhood and why, with no a priori vision in mind. This approach responded to the limitation of the

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Fig. 5.2  Participants working on the A3 maps with stickers and pencil

more narrow definition of culture we had adopted two years before. For this round of cultural mapping, a cultural space was any place that people care about, defined on their own terms. The rest of this chapter offers ethnographic narratives of cultural mapping, drawing on the workshop recordings and participants’ final maps. For brevity’s sake, we present only a selection of participants’ accounts from three of our six communities: Granton, Pilton and Muirhouse and Restalrig and Lochend, all in the north part of the city. Unless noted otherwise, we use pseudonyms to hide participants’ identities.

Reflective Essays on Cultural Mapping granton:hub Our workshops in Granton took place on four different dates in May and June, two online and two in-person, and included 15 people who were diverse in terms of genders, ages and backgrounds, which allowed us to capture a wide range of opinions and perspectives. The areas of interest to

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Fig. 5.3  Basemap sent to participants of Granton area

the participants span across the most northern parts of the city, from the Leith neighbourhood in the east, to Cramond, a suburban village in the northwest corner. Here we recount an online workshop held in June and one of the tables at an in-person event held at granton:hub in May. Figure 5.3 shows the local basemap we gave participants and used during the workshops. *** At an online workshop held over Zoom, on 4 June, we meet with three women of different ages who describe how their experience of the neighbourhood expanded beyond the central core of Granton. According to their sense of the area, the Granton neighbourhood comprises the shoreline at the north, the disused railway network at the south, the major artery of Ferry Road, and the functional streets connecting Queensferry, in the far northwest, to Leith, in the east. This strategic position seems to enforce in Granton residents a strong opinion about the entire city and the differences between the neighbourhood and other areas.

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Life in Granton takes on the rhythms of the sea, and the three participants describe their sea-side walks and visits to the harbours and beaches. One woman, Georgia, has memories of a childhood spent by the Granton harbour, fishing and ‘pinching’ (or stealing) fish with other kids, walking down the dock and watching the trawlers, boats and yacht races (see Fig. 5.4). During her childhood, she tells us, both the Granton harbour and Newhaven harbour, at the east boundary of the Granton seashore, were filled with life as a bustling port—an account that matches other participants’ stories of the sea front. This woman’s memory is filled with emotions, and she recalls only sunny days by the shore. She speaks with nostalgia while remembering how Granton used to be and how the harbour has changed, while her attachment to the place where she still lives has not. Georgia tells us that the port: would be laden with trawlers unloading their fish (…) So one of the memories there was that you wouldn’t be alone. As kids we would go to the lorries, pinch the fish and took it up to Manti, so we got money because she had cats, so we were actually under the lorries pinching fish. (…) It used to be a very busy harbour, as well New Haven harbour (…) and that would be in like the 1960s, probably into nearly 70s, lots of trawlers coming into Granton.

While we listen, everyone holds their own map in their hands or has them nearby to look at, and they can see Georgia’s photographs, which we share from our screen. This performative act of a person sharing her memory activates for everyone a multi-sensory experience—looking at the map and the photos, feeling the map in our hands and listening to the stories all enhance our ability to experience this person’s memories. We imagine this part of the city 60 years ago, smelling of salt and fish.

Fig. 5.4  Georgia’s photographic sequence of Granton harbour

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Fig. 5.5  Georgia’s co-authored map of Granton

The image above is of Georgia’s map (Fig. 5.5), annotated with notes about her stories of harbours and memories of the seashore. The image shows numbers written on the yellow stickers to locate the sites of her photos and her legend with each place name. In the image you can also see Georgia’s line drawn to show the part she considers Granton and what she firmly writes is ‘not Granton’. Following the shoreline, beyond the harbours, lie Granton Beach and Royston Beach. Gina Fierlafijn Reddie,1 an artist and curator who volunteers at granton:hub, is keen to share recent memories created by the pandemic. She reflects on how the pandemic is changing the way we process memory as it transforms many places, including the beaches, that are normally quiet but now attract people clamouring to get out of their houses during the Covid-19 lockdowns. She notices how these changing behaviours sometimes take the shape of creative interventions, such as a rock sculpture she photographs on the beach, but that it also means new eyesores, since there is now more rubbish scattered around (see Fig. 5.6). 1

 Gina requested we use her real name for this publication.

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Fig. 5.6  Gina Fierlafijn Reddie’s photo of Granton Beach

A younger participant, Ann, agrees that she is forming new memories of Granton under lockdown and that she now sees more people outside wild swimming (swimming in the sea) and running along the coast. These observations beg research questions about how the pandemic has activated new encounters with place once people could gather locally for outdoor activities after lockdown restrictions eased.

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Gina also talks about the Walled Garden, a space that has been mentioned by other participants at the Granton workshops.2 Gina explains the history of this site where, in her words “time has stopped there.” This place is a “little gem” and “such a hidden thing amongst all the sort of old industrial sites.” Nothing but rocks and pieces of walls remain from the original castle, which had been demolished because of industrial development in the area, where the grounds were used for a quarry. Gina clarifies that the site was later cultivated as a market garden for growing fruit and vegetables by a former owner, John Smith, until he retired. Now the site functions as an important local community garden that is often looking for volunteers. Gina’s descriptions of the Walled Garden show us how memories of the past have an intangible value. Though nothing physical remains of the castle, this place contains memories of day-to-day associations and use, of people passing by and weekly activities. Even knowing about the castle’s existence gives neighbours a sense of belonging and community, through a story unique to their local area (see Fig. 5.7). Next to the Walled Garden is the circular Victorian-era Gasholder stand, a listed building over 120 years old and out of use since 1987 (see Fig. 5.8). The stand once held a 250-foot gas tank, which was used as a navigation aid for ships on the river Forth. Today, only the skeletal support infrastructure remains, with delicate-looking vertical posts and horizontal tie-beams, visible to anyone looking north from a mile or so away. Gina explains how there used to be three structures on the site but two were demolished. The infrastructure reminds her of the industrial history of Granton, once a key part of town for economic development and employment. The Gasholder is now a landmark, listed on the Buildings at Risk register of Scotland. It stands tall between the seashore and the trails of the Fourth Quarter Park, both picturesque sights valued by participants. Gina shows us a photograph of granton:hub, located in a Victorian building that was, between 1898 and 1900, the offices of one of the world’s first electric car companies, the Madelvic Motor Carriage Company—which we agree is an astonishing part of Edinburgh history. Looking at her picture of the building, Gina tells us that granton:hub once arranged an art exhibit attended by one of the original factory labourers 2  And also at the 2019 cultural mapping events. At the 2019 NEA event, a woman became extremely upset because our two metre map included the Granton Walled Garden under the category of ‘landmark’, not as a ‘historic site’.

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Fig. 5.7  Gina Fierlafijn Reddie’s photo of Granton Walled Garden

who is now 95 years old. This event would be the first time he was invited into the building that once housed the offices of his former company. Looking at a tree in the photograph, one of the only ones remaining on the street, we reflect on how the street must have changed dramatically when the industrial infrastructure went into decline. Many of our participants speak of how Granton feels very connected to other parts of the city. Patricia tells us that her life exceeds the borders of the neighbourhood, that she “feels part of quite a cross section of the city.” Other participants describe the same feeling—that Granton is part of a larger urban area, perhaps because its residents have easy access to these places—the Leith neighourhood and the west coast of the city  and the neighbourhoods of Stockbridge and Inverleith just south, by a network of bike and walking trails. On a different day, the 17th of April, we hold an in-person workshop inside granton:hub. Peter, a man in his 50s who works with children and in theatre, tells us that, despite being a central part in the city, Granton

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Fig. 5.8  Gina Fierlafijn Reddie’s Gasholder photo

residents feel that the place has been neglected by the Council, particularly during Festival season. At the same table, Euan, a man of similar age, imagines a festival with no price barriers, where a person supported by Universal Credit (the UK’s social security payment) could sit next to a business owner and enjoy the same cultural moment. This table envisions a different, more inclusive city and discusses Edinburgh’s approach to tourism. If tourism is an inevitable part of the city’s economy, and if it continues to occur at its current (though pre-­ Covid) scale during the festivals, participants ask why it couldn’t be more evenly spread across the city. The participants discuss how Granton’s seashore has the potential to draw in tourists and attract Council investment to the area. Yet the city has transportation problems during festivals because of severe street congestion (EEN 2019). If venues were not so concentrated in the central area but spread across the diverse open spaces of the city, as these participants point out, that could solve pedestrian congestion, at the very least. Rather than diverting routes during festivals,

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participants argue, this kind of venue dispersal could draw on current bus routes and take tourists to alternate, peripheral destinations. North Edinburgh Arts North Edinburgh Arts is a traditional arts institution located in the middle of Muirhouse and Pilton, two historic working-class neighbourhoods known for their activism and housing struggles, just to the southwest of Granton. The area was farmland until 1920, when development and construction began that largely continued till the 1970s and was tied to the Wheatley Housing Act of 1924, which gave subsidies from the central government for new public housing (Wood 2011). Geographically, Pilton lies just to the south of Granton and to the east of Muirhouse (see Fig. 5.9). Pilton residents might visit Granton-based sites, such as the Walled Garden, or places in Muirhouse such as Lauriston Castle. Because of the pandemic, NEA could not host its usual spate of community events, and so we were not as successful at recruiting residents here as we had hoped, especially given the hub’s relevance to the area. We

Fig. 5.9  NEA basemap used during workshops

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recruited ten people total for two in-person events. In this account, we focus on two tables, one with five female participants who attended our first event, held on the 20th of May, and another of three female participants who attended the workshop on the 1st of June. * * * At the workshop on the 20th of May, all five women at the table know each other, and much of the time they are chatting with each other while we listen, graciously sharing intimate reflections about their feelings and memories. Many of them attend regular arts classes at NEA, and they discuss the important role the organisation plays in creating community spirit. One participant, Rose, shares her photos of two NEA-related initiatives, the Pantry, a members-based community food club, and the Shed, a maker-space at NEA that works with reused wood, furniture and tools, describing these as “my being-in-community places” that are “good for mental health.” When I picked mine [her photos], I was thinking of like a sense of community and especially how people [at the Pantry and NEA in general] looked after us and I mean, it’s fantastic. This is the Pantry […], so that’s my daughter there when we went through our little shop, so it’s three pounds fifty we paid, and we get lots of things.

The Pantry operates out of a storefront next to NEA, and it played a key role during the pandemic. Pantry members pay a weekly membership fee of £3.50 to receive good quality groceries and vegetables. During the lockdown, the Pantry delivered food parcels to local people living in the postcodes EH4 (2,5,4) and EH5 (1 and 2). Several of the other women are volunteers and members of the Pantry and have also taken photos from inside this place. Everyone in the group admires a remarkable view in a photo shared by Allison, showing a green swathe of treetops, fields and the sea from her balcony on the 12th floor (see Fig. 5.10). We locate the building on the map as part of a housing development called Muirhouse Grove. Quietly Allison mentions that this view is the only positive thing about living in that building, and, out of delicacy, no one presses her further about this feeling. The women also discuss how this area, as well as Granton, has a serious problem with youth and vandalism, and how there is a ‘silly’ war

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Fig. 5.10  Allison’s sea view photo from her balcony

between groups of youth from Pilton against Muirhouse youth. The fights, they tell us, are not serious, but they describe broken glass everywhere and young men driving stolen motorbikes in the golf course. One woman mentions that the main problem is the lack of programmes for teenagers to keep them engaged in different activities, a comment we also heard in the Granton workshops. During the NEA second workshop, another woman, Liza, mentions that there is a “lot of stigma attached to this area,” since it is one of the most deprived in Edinburgh, with high rates of drug abuse and antisocial behaviour, but she feels this does not represent her reality. She has met only “lovely” people in her neighbourhood, “down to Earth people, you know, just wanted to get on with life just like anybody else.” Despite the stigma, residents look at the area positively, accepting that though it has social challenges, they like to highlight its positive aspects, such as the incredible sea views from one of the towers in Muirhouse.

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Fig. 5.11  Lucy’s photo of the Botanic Gardens’s tree

Lucy, a 68-year-old woman, tells us a striking story about a photo of the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens (see Fig. 5.11). The image is of a somewhat random tree, not one of the garden’s most photogenic, but one, she tells us, that was on the site of a place her mother took her and her sibling to one day in response to a rumour that the world was going to end. Her mother wanted her and her children to die in a beautiful place. Lucy tells us, my first [photo] is actually the botanic garden. And, well, every one of the pictures has actually got a story behind it, because I remember when we were very small or young anyway, it came over the radio that the world was

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going to end at four o’clock in the afternoon. So mama dressed us and put us all in the tram and walked up to the Botanic garden so we could die somewhere beautiful. And that memory has never ever, I mean I’m 68 now and […] that memory has never left me.

Lucy’s story captures the affective relationships people feel towards the City’s well-loved cultural spaces. There is a surprising contrast between Lucy’s photo of the garden and the professional photos and frames we normally see of the Botanic Gardens on websites such as Visit Scotland’s, showing the garden’s central neoclassical building and “views of the capital’s skyline, featuring Edinburgh Castle” and the fact that “is located just a mile from the city centre” (Visit-Scotland n.d.). Lucy’s photo entirely ignores this tourist-centric perspective, instead sharing with us the view of a seemingly ordinary tree that reminds her of her childhood and her mother. Her attachment to this place is bonded by personal memories and emotions. Participants from this area also mention parts of Granton and the historic gasholder. A woman, Joan, says that whenever she sees this infrastructure she knows she is “nearly home.” Her statement shows the sense of belonging associated with the area’s local landmarks—the objects that emerge on the horizon as people walk from one place to another. Documenting these stories is an essential way to make other stakeholders, such as the Council, aware of the value of local infrastructure for people living in the area. The Ripple Project The Ripple is a community organisation located in Lochend and Restalrig, neighbourhoods just to the southeast of Leith (see Fig. 5.12). The organisation is key to the social life of the area, with a café that provides affordable food and communal spaces for people to volunteer and gather and take classes, such as youth ballet. Our workshop happened on one day, the 25th of March, with morning and afternoon sessions. As with the Granton workshops, we met with people from different ages and backgrounds who gave us a relatively diverse view of the area and people’s perception of it. * * *

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Fig. 5.12  Restalrig basemap, with The Ripple project in the middle

One of the morning tables has two participants, an older Scottish man, Peter, and a young Italian-Scottish man, Robert, who exchange their knowledge of the neighbourhood. Peter mentions that the local historic Craigentinny Golf Course opened after having a dispute with the original, official royal golf society. He also tells us that Restalrig Village is a historic site associated with an obscure medieval Hungarian Knight named Dalvester Rig. Whether or not this is true or an urban myth, a Council conservation appraisal establishes that the original village in this area dates to the twelfth century as part of a medieval estate owned by the De Lestalrics, from which the name Restalrig derives. St Margaret Church was the nucleus of this village; it was established in 1165, then ruined in 1560 during the reformation and rebuilt in 1836. The church still functions as a place of worship today (Edinburgh-Council 2018). A historic map from 1853 included in the Council’s appraisal document shows that the village was constructed around the church and outlying estates, such as the Restalrig and Craigentinny houses. The latter is now a community centre much appreciated by locals because of its historic building and community garden. The map also shows the Lochend house with a dovecot, a house

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Fig. 5.13  Robert’s sister’s photo of the dovecot (photo credit: Victoria Lowe)

for doves or pigeons (see Fig. 5.13). This dovecot is still around in what is today Lochend Park, and several participants mention its historical importance and the different uses it has played over the years, such as burning bodies during the plague and for gun powder storage—acting as a palimpsest of time.

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As with Granton, open spaces and parks such as Lochend create a sense of the neighbourhood’s boundaries, cohesion and belonging. Participants tell us they took photos of places that give them a sense of home and simplicity. For Peter, he values a bench where people can run into each other and talk. This is the place where I live. [...] just along the road there… in Restalrig Gardens and this is the place where I feel secure, happiest if you know, I mean, yeah and there’s wee benches that we’ve got… People sit there and you got a chat with people if you know what I mean, it’s like wait, you feel the community there.

This sense of openness does not apply, however, to the private golf course or the garden allotments in Craigentinny. Peter says, “[the allotments] are a privilege … and the community should be more involved.” No one knows how to get access to the allotments—it seems only a few people can use them, and they do not rotate among residents. Both men discuss that they feel unsafe walking the streets at night, despite the presence of CCTV cameras. They realise that it is mostly a mental feeling given that crime rates are quite low in this residential area. Nevertheless, none of the shops stay open after 9 o’clock and there are few buses or cars or people passing by after hours, giving the place a hostile ambiance that it does not have during the day. The street lighting, which is too strong and mostly on the sidewalks, makes them feel uncomfortable and exposed. The two men attribute these feelings in part to the history of that place, since youth gangs were violent there in the past. Says Peter: The place is well kept, good light and that, but there is a sense of hostility because we used to have a lot of problems here with the gangs of kids. Oh, violence was pretty bad at one point, so I think that still plays on everybody’s mind and knowing that when it’s quiet, that’s when everybody is thinking something’s going to happen. There are other places in Edinburgh you feel safer [...] I mean the only shop we’ve got after 10 o’clock is The Garage. Yeah, and if you’re coming along here at midnight, it can be a not scary experience but yeah […] I still feel there’s a danger element so it’s there is…don’t feel 100% safe.

Restalrig and Lochend seem a somewhat forgotten part of the city. You can enter the area by the busy London Road, but then the streets become quieter, with fewer shops and pedestrians. One of the only buses servicing

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the area, the 25, comes only occasionally. The area is surrounded by Council-owned spaces, and two of its major landmarks, the Craigentinny Golf Course and Meadowbank Sport Centre, do not attract local people. When we ask participants about the places they feel like they do not belong, they mentioned these two centres, saying the golf course only attracts people who have the financial resource to pay for golf practice while the sports centre is only relevant to people practising sports. These buildings are islands in their neighbourhood, structuring the residents’ space but not frequently used by them, creating a sense of exclusion in their own community. In the afternoon session, a table composed of a young girl and a woman and man both in their 50s also discuss belonging in the area. We are somewhat surprised to find that a popular cultural space in Leith, one that employs recovering addicts to work at its café and that participants at our 2019 workshops identified as a cultural hub, is not particularly valued by Restalrig residents, who consider it an upper-class space. The high-school-­ age girl, Joan, describes this space as “between junkies and upper-class … I feel like I don’t belong.” I don’t want to go to, because I feel like maybe it’s too full of junkies and in some parts feel a bit too upper class, and then I feel like I don’t belong. So say it’s kind of a weird mix, […] you don’t belong because why would you want to belong with a bunch of spots like that?

John describes the same institution as a “middle class space”—not a place he values or visits often, despite its proximity to The Ripple. We realise that the cultural map of Edinburgh should have another category indicating the difference between community organisations such as The Ripple, which is so central to its local residents, and others that service a broader range of audiences and cultural producers spanning the city.

Conclusion Methodologically this chapter contributes to literature on ethnographic approaches to mapping, showing how cultural mapping itself can use maps as memory theatres that allow us to capture intangible feelings about space and place. Adding photo-elicitation to this process activates a multi-­ sensory collective experience of a person’s stories—looking, touching and listening all at once that enhance a person’s empathic ability to experience others’ memories and emotions.

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This project also has insights to make about creating a more culturally equitable landscape in Edinburgh. There is a tendency in policy discourse to pathologise deprivation as a problem endemic to communities, rather than seeing it as a complex structural problem that results from the unequal distribution of resources across a city (Matthews 2010). Despite this stigma, which is often further confounded policies describing everyone from these geographic areas as homogenous, we found that residents of the neighbourhoods we worked with in 2021 have a strong sense of local community, and that they experience culture on their own terms. From our 2019 cultural mapping workshops, we understood that definitions of culture are not universal, that they are instead politically valenced and tied to class. The people we spoke to during the 2021 workshops did not mention museums or galleries but instead, and this can be due in part to the pandemic, green public spaces, the seashore, parks, local landmarks, places where they usually go for walks or pass by on their commute to work, waterways and outdoor places that held memories for them of their youth or of local lore. People are seeking respite and community through outdoor activities, daily walks or potential festival venues at their doorsteps. The participants at our workshops clearly see an opportunity in their open spaces—many of them Council-owned—to host events and activities, and they envision the involvement of their local communities in these projects. The city is economically fragmented and unequally developed, but Edinburgh’s public spaces are distributed quite thoroughly throughout the city, even in areas whose residents report feeling left behind. These spaces are present in residents’ memories, stories and their sense of belonging. The only way forward for a more inclusive city is to consider these voices and make these spaces an opportunity for a more inclusive cultural vision of the city.

References Bennett, J. 2014. Using Diaries and Photo Elicitation in Phenomenological Research: Studying Everyday Practices of Belonging in Place / Julia Bennett. London: SAGE Publications. Boucher, J.M.L. 2018. Participant Empowerment Through Photo-elicitation in Ethnographic Education Research New Perspectives and Approaches. 1st ed. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Dodge, M., and C.R.  Perkins. 2015. Reflecting on J.B.  Harley’s Influence and What He Missed in “Deconstructing the Map”. Cartographica: The

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International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 50 (1): 37–40. Dora, V.d. 2009. Performative Atlases: Memory, Materiality, and (Co-)Authorship. Cartographica 44 (4): 240–255. https://doi.org/10.3138/carto.44.4.240. ———. 2013. Mapping “Melancholy-Pleasing Remains”: The Morea as a Renaissance Memory Theater. In Viewing the Morea, ed. S.E.J. Gerstel. Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Edinburgh-Council. 2018. Restalrig Conservation Area Character Appraisal. https://www.gov.scot/publications/city-­e dinburgh-­c ouncil-­p lanning-­ authority-­core-­documents/. EEN. 2019. ‘We better get used to it’ – Edinburgh Reacts as Bus Bosses Admit Meeting Festival Schedules was ‘Impossible’. Edinburgh Evening News. https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/traffic-­a nd-­t ravel/ we-­better-­get-­used-­it-­edinburgh-­r eacts-­bus-­bosses-­admit-­meeting-­festival-­ schedules-­was-­impossible-­542043. Knox, P.L. 1984. City Profile – Edinburgh. Cities 1 (4): 328. Matthews, P. 2010. Mind the Gap? The Persistence of Pathological Discourses in Urban Regeneration Policy. Housing, Theory and Society 27 (3): 221–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036090903326452. McVie, S. 2019. ESRC Understanding Inequalities Project: Evidence Submission to the Edinburgh Poverty Commission—June 2019. www.understanding-­ inequalities.ac.uk. Rose, G. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. 4th ed. London: SAGE. Rossetto, T. 2013. Mapscapes on the Urban Surface: Notes in the Form of a Photo Essay (Istanbul, 2010). Cartographica 48 (4): 309–324. https://doi. org/10.3138/carto.48.4.1967. ———. 2019. Object-oriented Cartography. Maps as Things. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Visit-Scotland. n.d. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. https://www.visitscotland. com/info/see-­do/royal-­botanic-­garden-­edinburgh-­p246181. Wood, Alex. 2011. The Stories that Need to Be Told. Accessed 2 August 2021. https://scottishcommunityalliance.org.uk/2011/09/21/the-­stories-­that-­ need-­to-­be-­told/.

Index1

A Airbnb, 5 API, 76, 77, 79, 83 Arte povera, 28 Atlas, 25, 42, 61, 80 B Barcelona, 4, 5 Bartie, Angela, 3 Bennett, Julia, 18, 68, 95 Boucher, Michael, 95 Brook, Orian, 45, 80 C Cartesian map, 24n1, 25 Cartographia, 26 Castells, Manuel, 4 Cherita Lebuh Chulia: Living on Chulia Street 1945–1970, 19 Chiesi, Leonardo, 34

City centre, 2, 4–6, 10, 11, 42, 47, 50, 53–55, 57, 72, 92, 96, 112 City of Edinburgh Council, 44n2, 45, 78, 81 Corner, James, 25 Cosgrove, Denis, 23–25, 28, 29, 32 Costa, Paolo, 34 Counter-mapping, 18, 28, 30, 35, 36 Covid-19, 6, 53, 56, 62, 82, 103 Crampton, Jeremy, 24, 27, 30 Crawhall, Nigel, 18, 51 Creative City Cultural Mapping Toolkit, 20 Creative Edinburgh, 47, 48 Critical cartography, 9, 17, 26, 29, 35, 36, 76, 93 Cultural dispersal, 93 Cultural geography, 9, 17, 24, 29, 36, 63 Cultural Infrastructure Map of London, 20

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Currie, M. Miranda Correa, The Culture and Communities Mapping Project, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88651-6

119

120 

INDEX

Cultural map of Edinburgh, 9, 42, 52, 77, 80, 82, 86, 116 Cultural mapping, 2, 9–11, 16–36, 42–64, 77–78, 81, 82, 87, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99–117, 105n2 Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, 18, 19, 21 Cultural policy, 3, 9, 17, 18, 20, 34 Cunningham, Morvern, 3, 44, 82 Curious Edinburgh, 7, 45 D Debord, Guy, 29 Deconstructing the Map, 22, 26 Della Dora, Veronica, 94 DesireLines, 6 Deterritorialisation, 5 Dodge, Martin, 26, 27, 69, 72, 74, 77, 93 Dorling, Danny, 26 Duxbury, Nancy, 18, 19, 21, 22, 36, 42, 59 E Edinburgh, 2–8, 10, 11, 36, 42–64, 72, 74, 77–87, 92, 96, 98, 105, 107, 110, 115–117 Edinburgh Cultural Map, 80 Edinburgh International Festival, 3, 48n3 Edinburgh Living Lab (ELL), 43, 43n1, 44, 44n2 Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 48 Edinburgh Storytelling Centre, 48 Edinburgh World Heritage (EWH), 7, 8 ESRI, 27, 60n4, 79 ESRI ArcGIS, 61, 79 Ethnographic, 9, 9n4, 11, 28, 87, 92–95, 100, 116

F Fels, John, 24 Feng, Kuah Li, 19 Festivals, 2–11, 44, 53, 54, 57, 58, 107, 117 Fringe Festival, 53 G Gasholder, 105, 107, 112 Geertz, Clifford, 23 Gentrification, 5, 6, 20, 48, 57–59, 64 GIS, 7, 10, 16, 21, 27, 29, 34, 44, 45, 60n4, 68, 71, 72, 75, 77–80, 87 Github, 84–87 Glasgow, 8, 47, 50 Global city, 4, 6 Gomboust, Jacques, 22, 23 Goodtrees Community Centre, 96 Google Earth, 68, 70, 76 Google Maps, 10, 27, 45, 70, 72–76, 83 Google My Business Account, 73 Google Street view, 68, 73, 85 Graham, Stephen, 71 Granton:hub, 48n3, 96, 98, 100–108 Granton, neighbourhood of, 7, 92, 101, 106, 108, 115 H Harley, Brian, 22–24, 26, 28, 69 Hokshun, Henry, 17 Hypercities, 27 I Indigenous-mapping, 9 Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development, 18 Inuit Land Use and Ecological Mapping Project, 17 Italian Renaissance, 24

 INDEX 

J Jackson, Deborah, 43 Jackson, Peter, 63 Jeanotte, M. Sharon, 31, 34, 35 K Kitchin, Rob, 27, 72, 74, 77 Knox, Paul, 6, 96 Krygier, John, 27 L Landscape, 9, 22–25, 27, 28, 33, 45, 64, 72, 76, 117 LeithLate, 10, 62, 81–87, 98 LeithLate Virtual Tour, 9, 10, 77, 81–86 Leith, neighbourhood of, 5, 44, 48, 62, 81, 82, 101, 106 Linear perspective, 24 LitLong Edinburgh, 7 Lochend, 92, 96, 100, 112, 113, 115 London, 4, 20, 21, 45, 57, 68, 80 Lorimer, Hayden, 28 Los Angeles, City of, 21 Lynch, Kevin, 71, 72 M Mappa Mundis, 23 Mapping Edinburgh’s Social History (MESH), 7 McVie, Susan, 96 Memory theatres, 94, 95, 116 Million Dollar Blocks, 29 Muirhouse, 50, 92, 96, 100, 108, 110 N National Records Scotland, 8 Neighbourhood Arts Profile, 21, 44

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Neogeography, 10, 67–87 Noble, Safiya, 69, 70 Non-representational geography, 36, 69 North Edinburgh Arts (NEA), 50, 53, 56, 95, 96, 98, 105n2, 108–112 O OpenStreetMap, 27, 68, 76, 77, 80, 84 Out of the Blue Drill Hall, 50 Oxgangs Neighbourhood Centre, 96 P Paolozzi, Eduardo, 7 Participatory methods, 11, 30, 60 Perkins, Chris, 26, 27, 35, 69, 77, 93 Photo-elicitation, 11, 95, 116 Pickles, John, 4, 23, 30, 69 Pilton, 92, 100, 108, 110 Q Quiroga, John, 8 R Reddie, Gina Fierlafijn, 103, 104, 106, 107 Restalrig, 92, 96, 100, 112, 113, 115, 116 Ripple Project, The, 96, 98, 112–116 Rosetto, Tania, 11 Rye, Hanna, 7 S Scotland Urban Maps initiative, 8 Scott, James, 24 Scott, Sir Walter, 7

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INDEX

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), 5, 51, 54, 61, 79, 80, 96 Search engine, 10, 70, 71, 74 Situationist, 28, 29 Software-sorted geographies, 68–87 Solnit, Rebecca, 16, 33, 42 Sonvilla-Wess, Stefan, 77 Sparke, Mathew, 23, 24, 24n1 Spatial Information Design Lab, 29 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 7 Storytelling, 11, 49, 92 Summerhall, 57 Summerson, Holly, 8 T Theatrum Mundi, 43, 45 Thrift, Nigel, 28, 35, 70, 71 Tourism, 3–6, 34, 35, 107

U UNESCO, 16, 18 UNESCO World Heritage Site, 4, 19 University of Edinburgh, 4, 7, 8, 11, 43, 44, 46, 54, 80, 96 V Volunteer geographic information (VGI), 76, 77, 79, 82 W Web map, 21, 33, 68–87 Welsh, Irvine, 5 Wester Hailes, 50, 58, 92, 96 WHALE Arts, 50, 57, 58, 63, 95, 96 Wightman, MSP Andy, 5 Witt, Sol de, 28 Wood, Denis, 29, 32 World Mapper, 26