All your base [maps] are belong to us: rethinking cartographic starting points in urban planning and geographic information science
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Keywords: critical GIS, counter mapping, critical cartography
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Clancy Wilmott, University of California, Berkeley
Alexis E Wood, University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract
Base maps are a fundamental starting point for planners, architects, cartographers and GI scientists in urban planning, surveying and decision making. These raster or vector tiles are often downloaded, pre-populated with pre-mapped urban formations - including roads, building outlines, parklands, urban waterways, transport infrastructure and landscape topology, and linked with geodatabases that include land classifications, street addresses, points of interest, commercial sites, toponyms and other tools that make the urban form legible (c.f. Lynch, Image of the city). Focusing on the case study of collaborative counter-mapping and spatial production by an unhoused community in West Oakland, the Wood St Commons, this paper contends that these often axiomatic base maps, in fact shape the process of negotiations over urban space in ways that privilege the fixed, the formal and the settler, from the very start. By questioning the ideologies inherent in urban base maps, we argue that the impacts felt from using such base maps as a starting point resonante in myriad ways, such as the domination of the property over the communal, and the urban over the rural. Instead, we argue for more attention to the politics base maps from urban cartographers, planners, architects and spatial scientists alike, by starting with the geography, rather than the GIS.
All your base [maps] are belong to us: rethinking cartographic starting points in urban planning and geographic information science
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Paper Abstract