ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at maps, participatory mapmaking, and the application of creative practices to mapping processes as tools to identify community assets and build community engagement and cohesion. Cultural planning practitioners and scholars, including Baeker, Mercer, and Stevenson, described cultural asset mapping as a widely accepted foundational step in cultural planning. Most city planners today have at their disposal sophisticated mapping tools along with databases representing social and economic phenomena that can be displayed in informative and sometimes dynamic graphic layers over representations of geographic places. Layers may represent household incomes, property values, automobile traffic flows, footfalls on sidewalks at different times of day, climate patterns, and walking-shed. Approaches to mapping by city planners and cultural planners differ in that the former typically base their maps on the jurisdictional, natural, and built elements of physical space. Community maps, produced collaboratively by residents, highlight local knowledge and resources.
