Making the invisible city visible: the potentials of mapping to uncover the intangible heritage

Keywords: intangible heritage, mapping, narrative cartography, story-telling
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Cities are filled with cultural assets beyond the built environment. These assets can take the form of memories, stories, songs, myths, beliefs, superstitions, performances, or different types of social practices. While these intangible elements are seen as the 'soul' of cities, they cannot be easily counted, quantified, and represented spatially. Due to this lack of visibility, intangible assets have been often neglected in formal urban planning and decision-making processes in which the emphasis is on measurable and quantifiable criteria of urban heritage. Many urban development projects in recent decades have led to the transformation of neighborhoods, the displacement of their residents, and the disappearance of their intangible heritage. This was the case in the Parc-Extension (Parc-Ex) neighborhood of Montreal. Parc-Ex has been characterized for decades as a low-income immigrant neighborhood with a strong community network. It is now experiencing a quick gentrification process that has been accelerated by the construction of the new MIL campus of the Université de Montréal in 2019. This massive academic project is deeply affecting the urban structure of the neighborhood and its social fabric, forcing more vulnerable residents to leave the area, and bringing with them a large part of the intangible heritage of this neighborhood. Throughout this paper, I will discuss the potential of a cartographic representation for valorizing the depth of intangible assets of places. I will explain the importance and necessity of a more individually oriented representation of the unstructured and mundane stories coming from residents for reconceptualizing places.