MFA DT Thesis Blog

Spatial Justice

Oct 10, 2014

Notes on the Spatial Justice Workshop @ NACIS 2014

Spatial Justice: What is it?

  • power relationships
  • spatial relationships of inequality: food deserts, poverty, pollution, transit
  • costs accumulate over time
  • inequitable justice from political districts that are representative of only one type of groups
  • more voices on the map
  • how maps present “evidence” or a counter-narrative
  • ensuring the equitable use of and self determination of space: social, political; connected to grass roots
  • climate change, environmental justice, indigenous rights
  • geography, but also spatial configurations perpetuate inequalities, negative feedback loop; cartographers can intervene

Community: What is it?

  • exclusion
  • inclusion
  • common interests
  • like minded
  • connections
  • common goal, working towards
  • only geographic, online communities are networks
  • level of organization, representation, ability to speak as a unit
  • dynamic, fragmented
  • community vs. neighborhood; do they mean the same thing? share same values?

Presentations

When does a map matter? or sometimes maps are nice

Tim Stallman

  • north chapel hill, roberts road neighborhood
  • landfill located placed in area during 70’s
  • no sewer service, fight env justice, fighting for 30 years
  • 3 months of mapping, door to door survey
  • tim’s learning about skills and limitations as a cartographer:
    • speaking with people
    • open ended questions about race and ethnicity identities
    • good data takes time
  • map won’t fix the problem, community knows about problems
  • responding to racism and paternalism
  • made a topo map better that what the planners had, made them listen

Saving Open Space in CA

John Cloud
NOAA Central Library

  • 3d model of ranch to preserve from development
  • saved ranch, became sedgwick preserve
  • bringing humanism to maps
  • two communities: plants / fauna, and humans that defended it
  • walked all trails that were mapped

Stanford Spatial History Project: Rebooting History

Jake (?)

  • worked with Michael Levin, a “spatial documentarian”; incorporating ideas of space and narrative
  • East Palo Alto, CA (area btwn facebook and google)
  • during WW2 ship building one of few places african americans could buy property
  • lack of cohesion within community, large land owners resisted incorporation efforts
  • area lacked leverage to resist highway 101 building
  • impacts of highway construction bisected community
    • students had to be bused because their high school was closed
    • spend at least an extra hour getting to school than their peers

GIS Workshop course

Matthew of Kentucky Univ.

  • (see video)
  • working with community partners
  • help community organizations in Lexington to map needs
  • maps showing impacts of environmental hazards, etc.
  • emphasize process over product; focus on issues in the neighborhoods and use maps as a vehicle

Breakout Group Questions:

How/when/why can maps grow community power? When do they get in the way?

  • based on context of the situation & community needs

When Maps Get in the Way:

  • if the community already knows the issue and doesn’t need it mapped
  • if the issue changes and is more complex it can get in the away
  • if the map hasn’t evolved
  • people can think maps as truth
  • maps can often bludgeon a pluralistic issue, can contain a singular voice, problematic for a community organization representing mulitple voices

Static maps vs. interactive?

  • power of interactive decision making is in the parameters of interactivity
  • participatory gis scholars struggle with this ^ assuming community partners were knowledgable in this
  • do people have control in creating the interface
  • people being empowered is essential
  • interactive can become a barrier to someone who isn’t tech savy; UI burdened with heaps of data; needs to be purposeful for issues of community; in need of curation of community

  • medium dependent on audience; print for people who aren’t tech savy

  • maps have immediate power: in Lexington; graphic that binds group together; can be positive to concretize an activity; allow a collective to see themselves through a graphic
  • asking community groups what they need: website, social media campaign
  • map is only one piece of a larger puzzle: supplying non-profits with access to technology
  • finding a balance to technology with timing
  • let partners that it’s a sustainable opportunity, re-occuring
  • using PAR in the project
  • having questions formed in the community
  • students as technological facilitators allowing the questions to be guided by the community orgs

How can projects grow community or constituency capacity?

  • non-profits not having time to see what other are working on

How do you balance between building capacity and efficiency gains of just doing the work yourself?

Lize Mogel:

  • DGIE to empower black residents to use power of mapping to address racial injustice
  • Where commuter run over black children on the pointes-downtown track
  • serious effects of unequal transportation planning
  • data collection helping political people get fatality data and community input
  • policy change is unlcear but powerful

Wikimapa example:

  • Rio de Janeiro slums
  • city asked Google to replace favela with word for hill before world cup
  • community based mapping with kids using GPS & cellphones: mapping streets and informal shops
  • ethical delemma: sell it to fund project or keep it in community
  • goolge and microsoft expose (map) the favelas themselves (Wall Street Journal article)

More Presentations

Google Maps Counter Cartography during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

Alan McConchie
“Detour Guide”

  • background: Vancouver trying to clean up the city before the olympics: ahistorical, cleanliness, nature, friendly first nations
  • counter mapping using google my maps and osm tiles
  • crowd sourced with local groups
  • mapping POI’s of political and historical significance
  • used google my maps so that the detour guide would show up as a guide for tourists through “google bombing” (ie: miserable failure & george bush)
  • hybrid process that existed in physical space as well: held events : mapiing parties, tabling, handwritten submissions: variety of input, not just digital
  • edit contributions for style and formatting but not content
  • 3-4 people did most of editing by having people to tell them what to add

Coal Ash

Jovian Sackett
southern env law center in NC

  • coal ash is what is left over and not burned, collected and stored; contains heavy metals and radioactive materials that can seep through mis-management
  • pollution of public waters and fisheries: subsistence fisherman tend to be disproportionately poor and of color
  • mapping coal power plants relationship to drinking water supplies
  • building databases that haven’t existed
  • incidents of residents with cancer and locations of coal power plants

More Questions

What is the value of representing community / spatial justice issues? Representation for whom? By whom?

  • maps can reveal things ways that other forms can’t; ie spatial relationships that can’t be seen on spread sheets
  • authoritativeness to maps that make them paid attention to
  • granting access gives you a sense of why this is important
  • honoring a community’s contribution
  • columbia (country) people who were self taught; did not want to give up their data
  • insider / outsider: access for data transmission
  • how can we work with people so that we don’t have duplication of efforts?
  • a lot of communities can make their own maps
  • not so much bringing tools but facilitating where information access and data can flow
  • people without education can use maps very well, most people can think spatially
  • some communities communicate that youre the map expert so that’s your role as an outsider
  • not necessarily a bad thing, but there are issues related to representation

the participants involved in research haven’t been historically listened to / acknowledged; so is it then my job to translate their language into one that white planners can understand?

  • what’s the longer term view / goal to shift the dynamic so that people have a voice?
  • community asking; “we need a policy document that can benefit us”, not just a research paper

  • discrimination is a huge problem; acknowledge their knowledge even if it isn’t “official”

  • where does this data reside? how is it being used? who owns it? how does it circulate?
  • open data movement: what is the end goal? eg: mapping vacant parcels in New Orleans;
  • needs a critical lens: communities need a reason for making their data open.
  • data can be used for a host of endeavors, not just one’s presence or resources. They can be extracted after being codified.

What questions around race/class & insider/outsider come up in this work, and how do you navigate these from your subject position?

…

What were some of the main points? What was new to you? Lessons Learned? Disagreed with?

  • tool used to build capacity vs. data resources; what about when people are self taught and know the tools?
  • does open data always positively impact a community? Or should they retain ownership?
  • map data being powerful, should it be open or not?

Is there a value of communities mapping themselves?

  • longevity in the project is important
  • higher education avoiding the “research safari” sending students to extract knowledge vs. creating a sustained relationship, not determined by the academic term.
  • hybrid approach: foil requests and tech skills with personal narratives to balance out and bring additional context that isn’t top down
  • people don’t have to use any technology, there are other ways to contribute to decision making
  • empowering people doesn’t mean having to teach technology, could just be leadership

Difference between you as the expert vs. the person you’re mapping for / on / with? How to bridge the gap between you and participant / subject.

  • should be a qualitative measure
  • in building a schedule it always takes more time for qualitative measurements to close the gap
  • gap is difficult in thinking about it: community helps decide the scope of the project and the outputs, rethink the idea of the expert, not just a service provider or on a research safari, not the only decider.
  • as a mapper you have the power to shape information; bringing the community into it in much more of a sustained way

  • everyone has something to contribute, knowledge to share

  • role as providing linkages between government; eg: creating first database of mining companies in Ecuador; letting community define your role: you have access, can you please get that for us? working within reality as long as you remain critical

thinking about process

  • best practice is developing a propmpt that works for people rather than asking people to jump into something unfamiliar