1 - Popular cartography: Rethinking Mapping as Collaborative Knowledge production strategies

Presentation Abstract
International activists, architects, and urbanists have driven the growing 'counter-mapping' movement and its offshoots, appropriating mapping techniques to support marginal or indigenous communities' fight for land-centric rights. However, this talk focusses on the growing challenge of capturing more invisible, mobile, and makeshift inhabitation of youth across uneven urban spaces. It foregrounds the methodological question of how the heuristic research practices of mapping and ethnography operate together to co-produce such situated knowledge of/with the marginal youth, in and beyond the fieldwork. By critically reflecting on collaborative map-making and storytelling with young adults in Dharavi (Mumbai), it argues for mapping as an open-ended collaboration in which mappers’ various ‘finding’ and ‘founding’ acts to support the production of situated knowledge of an ever-shifting urban margin. The continuous efforts to make such knowledge visible is through re-reading, re-writing, and re-drawing acts. The method prompted by this experience is proposed as ‘popular cartography’. It aims to transcend mappers’ backgrounds, technical skills, and disciplinary biases, and offers a collaborative medium for expressing often overlooked, opaque or difficult-to-describe lived experiences.