Duxbury,

  N.   (Forthcoming   in   2016).   To   be   published   in   Spanish   as   “La   cartografía   cultural   –   hacia   las   políticas   y   la  
planificación  culturales  más  participativos  y  pluralistas?.”  In  M.  Rebón  and  M.  Ortiz  (Eds.),   Indicadores  Culturales  
2015.   Buenos   Aires:   Instituto   de   Políticas   Culturales   “Patricio   Loizaga,”   Universidad   Nacional   Tres   de   Febrero  
(UNTREF).  

Cultural mapping – towards more participative and pluralist cultural policies

and planning?

Dr. Nancy Duxbury1

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal

Introduction
The term cultural mapping refers to both an emerging interdisciplinary field of
research, encompassing an array of approaches used in diverse contexts as a tool and
method of inquiry, organization, and presentation; and an insight-generating praxis, as
a participatory planning and development tool embedded in “communal engagement
and the creation of spaces to incorporate multivocal stories” (Duxbury and Saper,
2015, n.p.). The evolution of cultural mapping intertwines academic and artistic
research with policy, planning, and advocacy contexts. Its current methodological
contours have been informed by five main cultural mapping trajectories: community
empowerment and counter-mapping, cultural policy, municipal governance, mapping
as artistic practice, and academic inquiry (see Box 1). This article provides an
overview of this emerging field, identifies some of the objectives and issues with
which researchers are currently engaging, and offers questions and suggestions to
guide efforts to build closer connections with the realms of cultural policy and
planning.

At its core, cultural mapping is defined as “a process of collecting, recording,

analyzing and synthesizing information in order to describe the cultural resources,
networks, links and patterns of usage of a given community or group” (Stewart, 2007:
8). Janet Pillai (2013) refers to cultural mapping as providing “an integrated picture of
the cultural character, significance, and workings of a place” in order to help
communities recognize, celebrate, and support cultural diversity for economic, social
and regional development (p. 1). Cristina Ortega Nuere and Fernando Bayón (2015)
observe a dual role for cultural mapping: as a witness, providing an account of what is
there, checking and recording existing practices and infrastructure, and as a tool to
detect the gaps and to highlight and share the décalage (mismatch) between citizens’
wishes and the institutional planning. Overall, the emerging field emphasizes the
importance of linking academic and artistic inquiry with practice-based knowledge
and systems, encouraging multidirectional knowledge flows and links to addressing
social and other ‘real life’ issues.

1
Email: [email protected]
 Duxbury    

Box 1. Five main trajectories informing cultural mapping practice

Community empowerment/counter-mapping – This trajectory includes cultural mapping in Indigenous

communities and territories as well as broader community development and collective action traditions
concerning counter cartographies or ‘alternative maps’; citizen cartographies and people’s atlases; and
mapping for change. These counter-mapping traditions generally seek to incorporate alternative
knowledges and alternative senses of space and place into mapping processes. The goal of these types
of cultural maps is not only to oppose dominant perspectives but, potentially, to build bridges to them
as well (Crawhall, 2007). These foundations have propelled practices of cultural mapping in contexts
of uneven power relations and in the service of articulating marginalized voices and perspectives in
society.

Cultural policy – Influenced by these community-empowerment traditions, in a report for UNESCO,

Tony Bennett and Colin Mercer (1997) identified cultural mapping as a key vector for improving
international cooperation in cultural policy research. Cultural mapping, with its incorporation of both
qualitative and quantitative mapping of cultural resources, values, and uses, was seen as a catalyst and
vehicle for bringing together the academic, community, industry, and government sectors. Since that
time, two avenues of work have developed from this: 1) growing attention to defining and mapping the
presence and development of cultural and creative sectors (see Redaelli, 2015); and 2) more holistic
inquiries about local culture and place development.

Cultural mapping and municipal governance – As cultural planning has become more established in
local governments and as culture has become more integrated within broader strategic development and
planning initiatives, there has been growing pressure to identify, quantify, and geographically locate
cultural assets (such as facilities, organizations, public art, heritage, and so forth) so that they can be
considered in multi-sectoral decision-making and planning contexts. This activity has been propelled,
on one hand, by rising attention to place promotion in the context of tourism and the (often related)
attraction of investors and skilled workers. On the other hand, it also has included participative
initiatives regarding community development and the improvement of quality of life in particular
neighbourhoods or other target areas. Altogether, these considerations have given rise to a municipal
cultural mapping framework with three-fold purposes: to build a knowledge base, to mobilize
community collaboration, and to strategize or make decisions.

Artistic approaches to cultural mapping – Mapping has long informed the work of artists, particularly
those involved in public works and socially engaged art practices. A wide variety of artists
internationally have demonstrated critical and creative interest in maps, mapping, relational aesthetics,
issues of urbanization, and social engagement – and have participated extensively in cultural mapping
initiatives. The role of artists and the arts as agents for enhancing community self-knowledge and
sustainable community development has emerged as a significant area of research interest and artistic
practice.

Academic inquiry – The so-called ‘spatial turn’ has influenced almost every area of academic work,
and the early postmodern preoccupation with space, place, and spatiality laid the groundwork for the
practice of contemporary cultural mapping. Currents of academic inquiry closely tied to mapping and
map production also informs current theoretical approaches and practices. We can observe a flip from
inquiry into ‘the cultural nature or embeddedness of maps’ to ‘maps as agents of cultural inquiry’,
propelled and influenced by a variety of academic discourses and critiques, including those about the
subjectivity of map-making, the use of maps to better understand human-environment relations, the
nature of space, place as a contested site of representation, and map-making as both symbolic and
social action.

Adapted from: Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and McLennan (2015)

2
 Duxbury    

Leading approaches to cultural mapping tend to acknowledge the shifting and

fragmented nature of many communities and aim to reflect and privilege pluralistic
local knowledges, perceptions of importance, and ways of understanding. The maps
emerging from this work do not propose to make physical spaces static, to connote
ownership, or to articulate and claim territory. Instead, they aim, in various ways, to
highlight the dynamic lives of places in their complexity, diversity, and richness.

As a practice that is taken up within planning systems as well as independently by

activist-residents and researchers (in support or in opposition to the official planning
systems), cultural mapping is infused with political dimensions. The roots of cultural
mapping includes counter-mapping traditions that give voice and articulate
perspectives that are counter to mainstream views and understandings (see Mesquita,
2013). Jack Jen Gieseking (2013) describes this as “putting mapping and maps in the
hands of people to allow for different points of views and ways of understanding and
increasing agency in understanding, rights, and use of spaces” (p. 723). In this way,
cultural mapping is viewed as a mechanism to foster democratic governance, citizen-
led interventions, and “democratic responsibility in city management” based on
processes that spearhead new modes of participatory interaction with citizens and use
new technologies (Ortega Nuere and Bayón, 2015, p. 9; see also Nummi and Tzoulas,
2015; Veronnezzi Pacheco and Carvalho, 2015).

Mapping can be used to define and structure, to interrogate and probe, to challenge,
and to imagine possibilities and alternatives. For example, the articles in a recent
special double issue of the journal Culture and Local Governance on “Cultural
Mapping in Planning and Development Contexts” 2 demonstrated how cultural
mapping projects are addressing a wide variety of objectives, for example:

• to recognize, articulate, and valorize the cultural aspects of a communities’

collective quality of life and well-being;
• to define the spaces and dynamics linked to environments of conviviality and
vibrancy or to those of unpleasantness, fear, or conflict;
• to identify locations of creative activity and inspiration;
• to explore the multilayered meaningfulness of shared urban spaces; and
• to interpret the tangible and intangible effects of the reorganization and
repurposing of urban space (Duxbury 2015).

As the aims and contexts of cultural mapping projects diversify, the limitations of
‘traditional’ cultural mapping approaches are becoming more apparent, fuelling both
conceptual and pragmatic questions and initiatives to address and refine them.
Danielle Deveau and Abby Goodrum (2015) outline a range of issues, including
oversimplified definitions derived from categorizations which do not adequately

2
The special issue is available (open access) here:
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl.

3
 Duxbury    

capture complex activities, events, and spaces; the applicability of ‘big city’
categories that may misrepresent ‘cultural vitality’ in smaller places; the invisibility of
some cultural activities; and the dilemma that some cultural activities are not
conducive to mapping, such as festivals or events that move locations, or ‘virtual’
work. Questions around what counts as culture come to the fore when cultural
mapping research interventions are undertaken in places not usually highlighted on
‘official’ cultural maps – such as suburban areas or marginal neighbourhoods.

For example, the limitations of a traditional ‘top-down’ cultural mapping approach

(focusing on tangible cultural assets) became evident during a pilot project to closely
map the cultural features of a marginal neighbourhood in a Canadian city that was not
labeled as containing cultural assets. The pilot project showed that cultural mapping
projects – “particularly those that are framed by a pre-defined template for
categorizing cultural resources with heavy emphasis on tangible cultural resources –
can grossly understate the level of cultural activity in a neighbourhood” (Dick, 2015,
pp. 86-87). The experience has forced the City’s cultural mapping team to rethink the
way culture is defined and categorized, and to place a greater emphasis on
“community-driven approaches to neighbourhood cultural mapping that recognize the
importance of intangible cultural resources” (p. 95).

In both research and policy/praxis contexts, the field is grappling with the limitations
of traditional cultural mapping approaches, including the conceptualization of culture
not only as a factor of economic dynamism, local identity promotion, and cultural
policy, but more deeply, revealing the multifaceted ways that culture is embedded in,
shaped, and produced out of relationships among people, place, and meaning. Within
this broader context, a focus of many research efforts and artistic interventions is how
to integrate intangible cultural assets and aspects within cultural mapping processes
and in resultant maps.

Bridging tangible and intangible cultural aspects

The current emphasis on both the tangible and intangible dimensions of culture
represents an important moment in the development of cultural mapping as a method
and field of interdisciplinary inquiry. Tangible cultural assets are most easily
quantified (for example, physical spaces, cultural organizations, public forms of
promotion and self-representation, public art, cultural industries, natural and cultural
heritage, architecture, people, artifacts, and other material resources) while intangible
cultural assets are more qualitative in nature (for example, values and norms, beliefs
and philosophies, language, community narratives, histories and memories,
relationships, rituals, traditions, identities, and shared sense of place). Together both
dimensions of culture help define communities (and help communities define
themselves) in terms of cultural identity, vitality, sense of place, and quality of life.

Work focusing on cultural intangibles aims to articulate the ways in which meanings
and values may be grounded in specific places and embodied experiences, and to

4
 Duxbury    

demonstrate how they are key to understanding a place and how it is meaningful to its
residents and visitors (Longley and Duxbury 2016). This research focuses on mapping
the intangibilities of a place, those elements that are not easily counted or quantified
(e.g., stories, histories, etc.), those aspects that provide a ‘sense of place’ and identity
to specific locales. As Ortega Nuere and Bayón (2015) highlight, cultural mapping is
“an unbeatable tactic to make the intangible visible and valuable” (p. 11) – cultural
mapping can register the invisible, what is not there, what is absent, lacking, and what
is proven and asserted. Cultural mapping can reveal the indirect and intangible effects
of processes on citizens, highlight “how urban transformation has very diverse effects
and meanings that are silenced” (Ortega Nuere and Bayón, 2015, p. 18), and suggest
“the blind points in awareness of ordinary life that mark urban transformations” (p.
20). Aligned with this perspective, Soledad Balerdi’s (2015) research, for example, is
set in the context of contemporary attempts to reverse historic patterns of
‘invisibilizing’ indigenous populations, drawing attention to “the historicity of the
processes of visibility and invisibility of the various social groups in national identity
formation” (p. 158).

Cultural mapping is a methodology that can also support an interpretation of space.

At both individual and collective levels, it is a means to locate yourself in the world
“physically, culturally, and psychologically” as well as politically (Veronnezzi
Pacheco and Carvalho, 2015, p. 119). Mapping processes provide ways to interact
creatively with urban reality, to uncover and articulate diverse perspectives, and to
generate unique meanings and value that can be shared (Ortega Nuere and Bayón,
2015; see also Saper and Duxbury, 2015).

This work aligns, in part, with UNESCO’s work on intangible cultural heritage and its
advocacy of cultural mapping. UNESCO’s views on cultural mapping have expanded
from an initial focus on creating inventories to incorporate individual and collective
interpretations of culture and how these cultural dimensions influence people’s
perceptions of places. Cultural mapping is now viewed as going “beyond strict
cartography to include not only land, but also other cultural resources and information
recorded by alternative techniques” (UNESCO – Bangkok Office, 2015: n.p.).

UNESCO has shown a particular interest in cultural mapping projects conducted by

indigenous communities to help revitalize and transmit cultural knowledge as well as
to build community cohesion and enable better management of cultural resources
(UNESCO, 2003; Crawhall, 2007). The process of auditing or inventorying intangible
cultural resources serves, in the immediate time frame, to create “tangible materials
that help represent, explain and manage what is otherwise invisible … [in order] to
help audit what is at risk and create media to help others learn and appreciate that
which was previously invisible” (Crawhall, 2001: n.p.). Such projects have critiqued
mainstream approaches to cultural resource management and contributed more
nuanced understandings of culture as it is embodied in real places and among
members of real communities, which, over time, has influenced the broader field.

5
 Duxbury    

For example, the Cultural Resources Audit Management (CRAM) approach

developed by the South African San Institute emphasizes that the knowledge base
may be fragmented with unequal access to cultural resources; values a community’s
intellectual capacity and its self-defining of significant resources; and prioritizes the
epistemology and cultural framework of non-dominant indigenous knowledge
systems in identifying and locating “what is of value to the community’s financial and
spiritual well-being” (Crawhall, 2001: n.p.). Within this approach, intangible cultural
heritage is defined broadly as

that which exists intellectually in the culture. It is not a physical or tangible

item. Intangible heritage includes songs, myths, beliefs, superstitions, oral
poetry, as well as various forms of traditional knowledge such as
ethnobotanical knowledge. For the southern Kalahari San, each tree and many
other physical sites are part of their intangible heritage as their history is
associated with these sites through stories, names and songs. … (Crawhall,
2001: n.p.)

In turn, cultural resources are defined as that with a current application, which the
community may draw upon: “Cultural resources include traditional indigenous
knowledge systems, but also song, dance, knowledge of community history and
experience, the ability to interpret events from a particular, culturally-informed
position, etc.” (Crawhall, 2001: n.p.).

In a 2003 report for UNESCO, Peter Poole pointed out that for Indigenous peoples
mapping has become a tool for recovering control of lost territory, negotiating access
rights to traditional resources, or defending recognized territories against
indiscriminate resource extraction. Known as tenure mapping, such maps are
“generated in the course of conversations within communities and travel over the
territory” and typically show local names, traditional resources, seasonal movements
and activities, and special places (p. 13). Poole views these tenure maps as cultural
maps. He argues that the only distinction between tenure and cultural maps is in the
way they are used: the purpose of tenure maps is to focus on cultural connections that
can be placed on a map to emphatically and precisely illustrate the historic and
cultural linkages between indigenous peoples and their ancestral territories, while
cultural mapping is focused on cultural vitalization.

Along these lines, initiatives to map intangible knowledges, spaces, cultures, and
practices not only aim to document and preserve this information but also to catalyze
and propel place-embedded cultural traditions and knowledges into the future. As the
Amazon Conservation Team’s manual on the Methodology of Collaborative Cultural
Mapping (2008) notes, “mapping, managing, and protecting” are the three
intrinsically connected processes required to safeguard the environment and
strengthen culture. Each of these processes takes form through community leadership,
collective discussion, and strategic collaboration, leading to a better foundation from

6
 Duxbury    

which to act: “When a community is able to systematically articulate and represent its
knowledge of its lands, it gains the necessary tools to establish laws, manage
productive systems, implement protection methodologies and improve its quality of
life” (p. 4).

From a Canadian perspective, M. Sharon Jeannotte (2016) links citizen-based

community story-telling initiatives, which aimed to uncover the intangible cultural
dimensions of their communities, to contemporary research investigating the inclusion
of cultural values and assets within an ‘ecosystem services’ framework (see Chan et
al. 2012). She suggests that local sustainable development tends to be more closely
tied to intangible cultural assets than tangible assets, and recommends that cultural
mapping is understood as a “first step in a longer journey toward cultural
sustainability” (p. 41).

Cultural mapping in cultural policy and planning

How can cultural mapping become a more integrated part of cultural policy and
planning, and embedded within broader policy and planning processes? This question
requires us to consider two ‘ideal types’ of cultural mapping projects. As examined by
Raquel Freitas in the article, “Cultural Mapping as a Development Tool” (2016), one
can distinguish between instrumental, utilitarian approaches in line with “cultural
industry intelligence,” and humanistic, integrated approaches in line with what has
been developing as the conceptual and applied field of cultural mapping. Freitas
highlights the challenges of incorporating the latter approach, characterized by
qualitative and intangible aspects, into “the more tangible and utilitarian needs of
public policy planning” (p. 10).

From a cultural policy or cultural planning perspective, most cultural mapping

projects still tend to take an ‘inventory approach’, developing an accounting of
tangible cultural assets, heritage resources, cultural venues, and arts and cultural
organizations, which provides information from which to identify relationships,
clusters, and gaps, and to plan and act from this knowledge base. These processes
prove to be valuable in a number of ways. The process of mapping tends to reveal
unexpected resources, builds new knowledge, articulates alternative perspectives, and
can foster cross-sectoral connections. These cultural mapping projects can serve as an
advocacy tool that can bring together cultural professionals, civil society, and
government (Essaadani, 2015); provide a collaborative space for users, planners,
managers, and researchers in the field of culture to work together (Attard, 2015); and
can point to themes and areas requiring additional policy attention (Kessab, 2015).

For example, as a result of growing interest from governments and civil society in the
Maghreb region of northern Africa, a set of cultural maps were launched by
establishing inventories of cultural sector actors and assets in order to better target
specific needs of citizens and assist in the design of policy. The maps helped identify
regional cultural disparities and highlighted where enhanced protection and promotion

7
 Duxbury    

of the diversity of cultural expressions in the region was needed, relating to both
tangible and intangible cultural heritage (Kessab, 2015). Within Europe, a few
cultural mapping projects have aimed to forecast future locations of creative economy
‘hotspots’ based on mapping emerging creative entrepreneurial clusters, which
valuably complements traditional mapping of ‘tourist attracting’ cultural assets and
institutions such as historic museums and major art galleries (Sacco, 2015).

In many cities we can also observe neighbourhood-focused participative cultural

mapping projects exploring memories, cultural and other assets, issues, and
aspirations of residents. In these projects, cultural mapping forms a conversational
platform and meeting place, enabled through various face-to-face workshops as well
as crowdsourcing online platforms. The projects can facilitate direct involvement of
residents and other site users in informational gathering, discussions, and decisions
regarding the development of their locale. Cultural mapping can create opportunities
for dialogue between a community and local authorities, offering “diverse sources of
information [that] can overcome the limitations of expert opinions” (Bettencourt and
Castro, 2015, p. 28). It can provide information that does not represent a ‘final
answer’ or ‘end result’ but must be seen, instead, as “discussion openers” that open up
new perspectives on mapping results and local development (Nummi and Tzoulas,
2015, p. 172; see also Pillai, 2015).

As the nature of the knowledge collected through these types of cultural mapping
projects deepens, and as community-engagement becomes more central to the
creation of cultural maps, public questions and expectations about what will happen
with the insights and knowledge created and how they will be used are likely to
become more prominent. The situation highlights two issues. First, a methodological
concern: how to incorporate qualitative, complex, community-based inquiry and
findings in policy and planning processes. Second, a more political concern: how to
ensure policy, planning, and political processes take up and consider the findings.

The first issue raises a series of questions: How can cultural policy engage with
ambiguity, emergent design, sensuality, intensity, and subjectivity? What cultural
values – what “embodied, ephemeral, transitory, tactile, and affective elements”
(Longley and Duxbury, 2016, p. 4) – go ‘beneath the radar’ of urban planning? Can
intangible cultural practices and knowledge be turned into indicators, making them
more tangible and more ‘standardizable’ elements that can be used for policy and
planning purposes? How does one address the danger that the process of ‘capturing’
the knowledge, the stories, the memories, might ‘fossilize’ the shared knowledge and
experiences?

While capturing and preserving such information is typically a significant part of the
goals of cultural mapping initiatives, so is keeping the information collected ‘vital’.
This points to the need for serious consideration of active uses, the dynamics that are
revealed, and layered possibilities of interpretation, reinterpretation, translation, reuse,

8
 Duxbury    

and renewal. From this perspective, cultural policy and planning processes need to
widen their scope to be able to incorporate, in different ways, the more intangible
aspects of place-specific cultural meanings, characterized by pluralism and diversity
with multiple layers of knowledge, experiences, storylines, and potentially conflictual
memories. Towards this end, researchers and practitioners might work towards
developing innovative ways of organizing, packaging, and communicating this
information so that it can be brought into planning and other collective processes. In
examining this issue further, the experiences of indigenous (and other) communities
using cultural mapping for cultural revitalization aims may prove insightful, with
particular attention to the multiple values and actions enabled through iterative
approaches to mapping, analysis, interpretation, planning, and collective action.

The second issue raised is the need to add a ‘formal’ political dimension to cultural
mapping initiatives that are intended to inform planning and policy. Cultural mapping
is not yet integrated and regularized within planning processes (Evans, 2015). If
culture is to be a more integrated part of urban and community planning and
development processes, cultural mapping projects must be integrated into more
regularized systems, with direct links between mapping and planning/decision-
making processes (Häyrynen, 2015; see also Allegretti et al., 2014). Participatory
projects raise expectations in the local community about future development, and if
participation has no concrete effect, “a disillusionment concerning participation and
collaborative planning may follow…, undermining rather than serving the goal of
active citizenship and ultimately failing to mitigate marginalization” (Häyrynen,
2015, p. 113). Advancing on this front requires further work on how to integrate the
tools of cultural mapping and of bottom-up thinking into top-down administratively
driven planning systems, supported by comparative research on pilot cultural mapping
initiatives that are informing local planning (e.g., Nummi and Tzoulas, 2015). Insights
from experiences in other domain areas using mapping techniques for community
engagement, planning, and decision-making would also be valuable (e.g., Robinson et
al., 2016). Complementing this, more discussions and communications with
politicians, planners, and other policy decision-makers on the benefits of participative
cultural mapping approaches would be valuable.

In closing this section, I would also like to highlight a temporal issue. Cultural
mapping largely continues to be viewed and implemented as ‘one-time’ projects. In a
societal context where data to understand longitudinal changes and citizen-based
monitoring is valued, it would seem that monitoring cultural changes and continuities
over time would be a necessary dimension to informing cultural policy and planning.
And if we view culture as encompassing an intrinsically dynamic, multi-layered, and
complex array of resources, infrastructures, actions, relationships, expressions,
knowledges, memories, and potentialities in our cities and regions, a multi-
dimensional and dynamic approach to understanding its shapes and changes seems
essential. In short, cultural mapping projects would gain value through continuity over
time. Such a practice should be linked to the integration of cultural mapping within

9
 Duxbury    

long-term research programmes as well as within policymaking and planning

processes, both of which are still very rare.

In closing: Evolving methodologies

With the adoption of cultural mapping as an emerging methodology within a variety
of research areas, reflecting the spatial turn of many disciplines in recent years,
methodological approaches to cultural mapping are expanding. Researchers are
intersplicing theories and methodologies from multiple disciplines to investigate and
articulate the cultures and meanings of specific places to the people who live there.
Interest in ‘making the intangible visible’ is heightening the importance of “drawing
on cultural research traditions that are primarily qualitative in nature and, in some
cases, drawing on ethnographic and artistic traditions of inquiry” (Duxbury, Garrett-
Petts and MacLennan, 2015, p. 18). Kimberly Powell’s (2010) student mapping
projects in Panama City, for example, argue for the unique contribution of mapping as
a visual, qualitative method of inquiry, “particularly in the ways that contemporary
aesthetics of mapping can be used to evoke the lived experience of social, cultural,
and political issues related to place” (p. 539). Diverse artistic and ‘deep mapping’
approaches are creating a “complex spectrum that in turn reveals unexpected
articulations” and thus provide and inspire new perspectives on particular places
(Johnson, 2015, n.p.).

The breadth of this experimentation serves as a rich ground for advancing research
methodologies and theories. New methodological approaches are being invented,
many innovating “new ‘mash-ups’ of approaches to research, analysis, documentation,
interpretation, and communication to multiple publics” (Longley and Duxbury, 2016,
p. 6; see also Radović 2016). Such experimental methods of inquiry are leading the
emerging field to rethink the relationship between culture and mapping “away from
the literal and geographic, towards inquiries into alternative representations of human-
place relations and the ideas we use to mark and navigate” (Duxbury and Saper, 2015,
n.p.). However, the wide range of approaches also brings challenges in embracing an
understanding of the ‘whole’ of the field, which may seem a bit too multifaceted, with
interpretations of mapping and representation going far beyond literal geographic
representations of physical contexts (see, e.g., Saper and Duxbury, 2015).

Going ‘back to basics’, cultural mapping can provide a clear organizing structure to
hold together hybrid modes of information, and thus holds great potential as a
bridging methodology for interdisciplinary projects. The map itself can embed spatial
and chronological information, description, narrative, sound, moving and still images,
quantitative and qualitative data through a visual interface that carries affective and
stylistic qualities as well as ‘basic’ information (Longley and Duxbury, 2016). The
processes through which many cultural maps are created are community-engaged and
participative and are sensitive to multiple ways of knowing, experiencing, and
articulating the pluralist cultural meanings of specific places. They aim, in various

10
 Duxbury    

ways, to highlight the dynamic lives of places in their complexity, diversity, and
richness.

Yet most cultural mapping projects tend to pay more attention to the processes of
creating and developing the cultural maps, rather than the uses and audiences for the
maps that may follow. There are some signs that this may now be shifting, with some
projects highlighting the importance of giving greater consideration to the audiences
and use-contexts of the knowledge developed and articulated through cultural
mapping products, and to the ways in which these uses might be built into the overall
creation/development processes (see, e.g., Eräranta et al., 2016). This is a bridge that
needs to be strengthened. While acknowledging the importance of a wide scope for
experimentation and ‘pure’ research, the evolution of cultural mapping as a field will
also benefit from continuing to intertwine academic and artistic research with policy,
planning, and advocacy contexts.

As Graeme Evans (2015) and others have observed, cultural mapping is not yet
integrated and regularized within planning processes, and cultural mapping projects
largely exist on the margins of these processes as one-time special initiatives. Efforts
to address this situation should explore find ways to better integrate these participative
knowledge-development and articulation processes – with their complex, layered,
quantitative and qualitative findings, and community-based insights and
interpretations – within policy and planning processes and linked to political decision-
making processes. In turn, integrating participative cultural mapping approaches
meaningfully into cultural and community planning and policy processes will enable
citizens to collaboratively co-construct maps that can serve as the scaffolding for local
knowledge-development and a deeper understanding of place, and the foundations for
collective planning and action.

References

Allegretti, Giovanni, Duxbury, Nancy, Serapioni, Mauro, and Silva Pereira, Merielly, Basic principles
of community-based monitoring, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Barcelona,
2014, available on www.uclg.org/en/media/news/basic-principles-community-based-
monitoring.
Amazon Conservation Team, Methodology of collaborative cultural mapping, Equipe de Conservação
da Amazônia Edições, Brasília, 2008, available on
http://www.equipe.org.br/publicacoes_dentro.php?tipoid=1.
Attard, Maria, “Cultural mapping: Tools to engage”, presentation at Mapping Culture: Debating Places
and Spaces conference, Valletta, Malta, October 22, 2015.
Balerdi, Soledad, “Identifications, cultures, and ‘groupness’: Reflecting on culture from ethnographic
research in Argentina”, in Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp151-160, 2015, available
on https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1469.
Bettencourt, Leonor, and Castro, Paula, “Diversity in the maps of a Lisbon neighbourhood: Community
and ‘official’ discourses about the renewed Mouraria”, in Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-
2), pp23-44, 2015, available on https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-
cgl/article/view/1456.

11
 Duxbury    

Bennett, Tony, and Mercer, Colin, Improving research and international cooperation for cultural
policy, a report prepared for UNESCO Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for
Development, 1997, available at http://www.ericarts.org/web/files/86/en/bennet-mercer.pdf.
Chan, Kai M. A., Guerry, Anne D., Balvanera, Patricia, Klain, Sarah, Satterfield, Terre, Basurto,
Xavier, et al., “Where are cultural and social in ecosystem services? A framework for
constructive engagement”, in Bioscience, 62 (8), pp744-756, 2012.
Crawhall, Nigel, Written in the sand: Auditing and managing cultural resources with displaced
indigenous people, South African San Institute (SASI), Cape Town, 2001, available on
www.san.org.za and www.sanculture.org.za/body.htm.
Crawhall, Nigel, The role of participatory cultural mapping in promoting intercultural dialogue – ‘We
are not hyenas’, UNESCO, Paris, 2007.
Deveau, Danielle J., and Goodrum, Abby, “Mapping culture in the Waterloo Region: Exploring
dispersed cultural communities and clustered cultural scenes in a medium-sized city region”,
in Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp61-82, 2015, available on
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1458.
Dick, Ben, “Neighbourhood cultural mapping: Lessons learned from a pilot project in Bayshore”, in
Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp83-99, 2015, available on
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1466.
Duxbury, Nancy, “Positioning cultural mapping in local planning and development contexts: An
introduction”, in Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp1-7, 2015, available on
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1437.
Duxbury, Nancy, and Saper, Craig, “Introduction: Mapping culture multimodally”, in Hyperrhiz, no.
12, 2015, available on http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz12/introduction/introduction.html.
Duxbury, Nancy, Garrett-Petts, W. F., and MacLennan, David, “Cultural mapping as cultural inquiry:
Introduction to an emerging field of practice”, in Nancy Duxbury, W. F. Garrett-Petts, and
David MacLennan (Eds.), Cultural mapping as cultural inquiry, Routledge, New York, 2015.
Eräranta, Kirsi, Leino, Tomi, Seppälä, Tuuli, Viña, Sandra, and Timonen, Eija, “Mapping the Pig Tale
Journey: A multidisciplinary design framework for cultural mapping in an old abattoir”, in
City, Culture and Society, 7 (1), pp25-33, 2016.
Essaadani, Aadel, “Knowing what exists to help decide: The context of the implementation of the
‘Etats généraux de la culture au Maroc’”, keynote presentation at Mapping Culture: Debating
Places and Spaces conference, Valletta, Malta, October 22, 2015.
Evans, Graeme, “Cultural mapping and planning for sustainable communities”, in Nancy Duxbury, W.
F. Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan (Eds.), Cultural mapping as cultural inquiry,
Routledge, New York, 2015.
Freitas, Raquel, “Cultural mapping as a development tool”, in City, Culture and Society, 7 (1), pp9-16,
2016.
Gieseking, Jack Jen, “Where do we go from here: The mental sketch mapping method and its analytical
components”, in Qualitative Inquiry, 19 (9), pp712-724, 2013.
Häyrynen, Maunu, “Cultural planning in the Eastern Pori suburbs: Applicability of the approach?”, in
Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp101-116, 2015, available on
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1465.
Jeannotte, M. Sharon, “Story-telling about place: Engaging citizens in cultural mapping”, in City,
Culture and Society, 7 (1), pp35-41, 2016.
Johnson, Petra, “Composing the ordinary, part 1: Beginnings”, in Hyperrhiz, Summer 12, 2015,
available on http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz12/conversing-with-maps/1-johnson-composition-of-
the-ordinary.html.
Kessab, Ammar, “Cultural mapping in the Maghreb region: Statement and uses”, presentation at
Mapping Culture: Debating Places and Spaces conference, Valletta, Malta, October 22, 2015.
Longley, Alys, and Duxbury, Nancy, “Introduction: Mapping cultural intangibles”, in City, Culture and
Society, 7 (1), pp1-7, 2016.

12
 Duxbury    

Mesquita, André Luiz, “Mapas dissidentes: Proposições sobre um mundo em crise (1960-2010)”, tese
apresentada ao Programa de Pós- Graduação em História Social da Faculdade de Filosofia,
Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil, 2013.
Nummi, Pilvi, and Tzoulas, Tuija, “Engaging citizens in cultural planning with a web map survey”, in
Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp161-173, 2015, available on
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1470.
Ortega Nuere, Cristina, and Bayón, Fernando, “Cultural mapping and urban regeneration: Analyzing
emergent narratives about Bilbao”, in Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp9-22, 2015,
available on https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1455.
Pillai, Janet, Cultural mapping: A guide to understanding place, community and continuity, Strategic
Information and Research Development Centre, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, 2013.
Pillai, Janet, “Engaging public, professionals, and policy-makers in the mapping process”, in Nancy
Duxbury, W. F. Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan (Eds.), Cultural mapping as cultural
inquiry, Routledge, New York, 2015.
Poole, Peter, Cultural mapping and indigenous peoples, a report prepared for UNESCO, March 2003,
available on http://www.iapad.org/publications/ppgis/cultural_mapping.pdf.
Powell, Kimberly, “Making sense of place: Mapping as a multisensory research method”, in
Qualitative Inquiry, 16 (7), pp539-555, 2010.
Radović, Darko, “Measuring the non-measurable: On mapping subjectivities in urban research”, in
City, Culture and Society, 7 (1), pp17-24, 2016.
Redaelli, Eleonora, “Cultural mapping: Analyzing its meanings in policy documents”, in Nancy
Duxbury, W. F. Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan (Eds.), Cultural mapping as cultural
inquiry, Routledge, New York, 2015.
Robinson, Catherine J., Maclean, Kirsten, Hill, Ro, Bock, Ellie, and Rist, Phil, “Participatory mapping
to negotiate indigenous knowledge used to assess environmental risk”, in Sustainability Science,
11, pp.115-126, 2016. DOI 10.1007/s11625-015-0292-x
Sacco, Pier Luigi, “Cultural mapping and system-wide cultural districts: Results from Italian and
Swedish case studies”, presentation at Mapping Culture: Debating Places and Spaces
conference, Valletta, Malta, October 23, 2015.
Saper, Craig, and Duxbury, Nancy (guest eds.), Special issue: Mapping culture multimodally,
Hyperrhiz, no. 12, Summer 2015, available on http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz12/.
Stewart, Sue, Cultural mapping toolkit, Creative City Network of Canada and 2010 Legacies Now,
Vancouver, 2007, available on
http://www.creativecity.ca/database/files/library/cultural_mapping_toolkit.pdf.
UNESCO, Mapping of indigenous cultural resources, UNESCO, Paris, 2003, available on
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/culture-and-development/unesco-and-
indigenous-peoples-partnership-for-cultural-diversity/cultural-mapping/.
UNESCO – Bangkok Office, Tools for safeguarding culture: Cultural mapping, UNESCO, Bangkok,
2015, available on http://www.unescobkk.org/culture/tools-and-resources/tools-for-
safeguarding-culture/culturalmapping/.
Veronnezzi Pacheco, João Luís, and Carvalho, Claudia Pato, “Arteria – a regional cultural mapping
project in Portugal”, in Culture and Local Governance, 5 (1-2), pp117-136, 2015, available on
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/clg-cgl/article/view/1467.

13