ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on how the potential of mapping might relate to place. It takes a relational and situated approach to charting the changing status of mapping as a means of imagining and creating places. Maps have a status that has never been fixed, in ontic or epistemic terms. This chapter explores how changing ideas, technologies, forms, feelings, bodies and agencies coalesce in different contexts, affording different encounters with the world. It starts with the intellectual intersections of science, politics and practice and then explores modes of mapping impacting affordances that emerge when mapping place. The top-down interests of state, multinational and corporate players are contrasted with bottom-up counter-mappings, which increasingly celebrate a more emancipatory potential. Situated examples are evidenced in particular mapping moments. Attending to these different modes and moments demands a consideration of different methods of mapping place which together make a richly polyphonous, contested and mutable terrain.
