ABSTRACT
Making space for imagination can shift research and community planning from a reflective stance to a "future forming" orientation and practice. Cultural mapping is an emerging discourse of collaborative, community-based inquiry and advocacy.
This book looks at artistic approaches to cultural mapping, focusing on imaginative cartography. It emphasizes the importance of creative process that engages with the "felt sense" of community experiences, an element often missing from conventional mapping practices. International artistic contributions in this book reveal the creative research practices and languages of artists, a prerequisite to understanding the multi-modal interface of cultural mapping. The book examines how contemporary artistic approaches can challenge conventional asset mapping by animating and honouring the local, giving voice and definition to the vernacular, or recognizing the notion of place as inhabited by story and history. It explores the processes of seeing and listening and the importance of the aesthetic as a key component of community self-expression and self-representation.
Innovative contributions in this book champion inclusion and experimentation, expose unacknowledged power relations, and catalyze identity formation, through multiple modes of artistic representation and performance. It will be a valuable resource for individuals involved with creative research methods, performance, and cultural mapping as well as social and urban planning.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1|21 pages
An introduction to the art of cultural mapping
part I|40 pages
Contextual terrain
part II|61 pages
Self and place
part III|94 pages
Community and place
chapter 10|26 pages
Cultural practices and social change
chapter 11|17 pages
Mapping as a performative process
chapter 12|14 pages
Mapping the intangibilities of lost places through stories, images, and events
part IV|77 pages
Cultures of place
part V|16 pages
In closing: artists in conversation