Editing worlds

Participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics

Bibliographic Data

ID8962067
AuthorsJoe Gerlach (0000-0003-4763-816X, University of Oxford School of Geography and the Environment Oxford OX1 3QY, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume40
Issue2
Pages273-286
Publication date2015-01-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12075
OpenAlexW2035763597
LanguageEN
Citations received31
References cited75

Cartography and geopolitics have a troubled relationship. While maps have been complicit in the worst excesses of colonial venturing and Cold War politicking, they have also been deployed as inscriptions of recalcitrance and resistance. Yet regardless of the ends to which they have been deployed, mapping and cartography are creative, aesthetic performances and sometimes outwardly experimental and artistic. To what extent then, might contemporary forms of cartographic practice be producing spaces that are simultaneously creative and geopolitical? This article employs the wiki‐based OpenStreetMap as a fieldwork intervention in exploring how online, virtual, crowd‐sourced cartographies can be conjured as ‘ethico‐aesthetic projects’ (Guattari 1995) that valorise creative processes in negotiating emergent problems, politics, events and spaces. It shows how OpenStreetMap is at once a technology, a set of performances and a series of communities that allows users to create and alter maps, thereby generating capacities to edit worlds. The article explores how these capacities inflect geographical imaginations while being generative of a minor geopolitics. ‘Minor’ in this context alludes not to scale or tenor, but instead refers to the non‐representational registers of cartography so as to spotlight the unspoken, anticipatory geopolitics of mapping

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Citizen journalism · Context (archaeology · Deleuze and Guattari · Geopolitics · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Visual arts · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Geographic Information Systems Studies · History · Law · Web Data Mining and Analysis

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