Situated mapping: visualizing urban inequality between the god trick and strategic positivism

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

Recovering the Gay Village: A Comparative Historical Geography of Urban Change and Planning in Toronto and Sydney

This chapter argues that the historical geographies of Toronto’s Church and Wellesley Street district and Sydney’s Oxford Street gay villages are important in understanding ongoing contemporary transformations in both locations. LGBT and queer communities as well as mainstream interests argue that these gay villages are in some form of “decline” for various social, political, and economic reasons. Given their similar histories and geographies, our analysis considers how these historical geographies have both enabled and constrained how the respective gay villages respond to these challenges, opening up and closing down particular possibilities for alternative (and relational) geographies. While there are a number of ways to consider these historical geographies, we focus on three factors for analysis: post-World War II planning policies, the emergence of “city of neighborhoods” discourses, and the positioning of gay villages within neoliberal processes of commodification and consumerism. We conclude that these distinctive historical geographies offer a cogent set of understandings by providing suggestive explanations for how Toronto’s and Sydney’s gendered and sexual landscapes are being reorganized in distinctive ways, and offer some wider implications for urban planning and policy.

Sensing Water: Uncovering Health and Well-Being in the Sea and Surf

This article considers how different recreational users engage with and utilize blue spaces as health-enabling. Informed by empirical and participatory fieldwork with surfing and sea swimming groups, we explore embodied and emotional experiences while researching directly within blue space. Given a focus on health and well-being, we identify different dimensions of how surfers and swimmers narrate those experiences while directly immersed in water during a sport/recreational activity. Such questions resonate with geographical thinking around phenomenology, active relational geographies, embodiment, emotion, and sport and leisure practice. We use a broad health promotion or enabling spaces approach to capture different emotional and embodied accounts of immersions in blue space, recognizing that this capture is emergent in and from place.

The relational geographies of the voluntary sector: Disentangling the ballast of strangers

We propose that voluntary sector geographies are best understood using a systematic relational approach, drawing upon neo-Marxist and symbiotic perspectives. We focus on relations between the voluntary sector and the (shadow) state, internal spaces of client interaction, and external urban spaces. Our relational approach advances alternative understandings of the voluntary sector: ones that are partly but not fully in the orbit of the shadow state; more mediator than conduit for neoliberal policies; partly punitive, yet firmly in relation with other ambivalent measures for clients; and both spatially uneven and fixed, but always unbounded in its practices.