I was thinking about organising my literature review into “things I see myself in relationship with, hoping to deepen and breathe with” and “things I want to push against, turning and twisting into different directions”
My Reading Review for things I am interested in:
Ursula K Leguin
This research is founded on the urban ecology of arts collectives, specifically investigating the spatial influence, cultural urban development through time and the participation ‘oppositional placemaking’, where local actors actively shape spaces in and for their neighbourhoods. By mapping these influences, the research hopes to test the notion of a shared ecology, how do local actors participate, reject, or are even missing from participating in collectively built spaces.
Felsing, Ulrike, and Max Frischknecht. ‘Critical Map Visualizations’. In Shifts in Mapping, edited by Christine Schranz. Transcript Verlag, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839460412-008.
Critical Cartography
Critical cartography questions the how maps are typically made. As a colonial object formulated over plotting lines over land to be parceled and sold, to make sense with geometry, rather than the contours and materiality of our shared lands. Critical cartography challenges the representation conventions of objectivist cartography. To do so, instead of allocating relationships based on systems, “semantic allocations are created in maps” (p100). Denis Woods discusses how maps reveal certain truths and leans on systems of power. In essence, they are political. Another way to consider maps, is the notion of maps as ongoing projects, rather than a fixed condition it seems to delineate until the next update. It is a “knowledge practice(s)” (p101) that leans into the “frame of reference.” Much like architecture, it is an on-going process of constructing the social structures, discourses and transformations around us. When examining the arguments around critical cartography, it is clear that cartography can be seen as a tool, rather than systems of documentation and knowledge. To do this, Felsing and Frishknecht offer a few examples of firms such as Spatial Agency Platform, Waend, Map office as a collaborative mapping platform.
Maps are visual material, pictorially adding material to the form. THis includes content such as actors, artifacts and signs. It can be read as stylistic devices that classifies temporal and spatial data. Critique - paradigms of graphic visualization are not studied, but can be thought through the signs, symbols
Western conventions are