The Culture and Communities Mapping Project

This book describes three years of work by Culture and Communities Mapping Project, a research project based in Edinburgh that experiments with maps to capture the voices of inhabitants and their distinctive perspectives on the city. Taking a self-reflexive approach, the book draws on a variety of critical theoretical lenses, iterative mapping procedures and visual methodologies, from online virtual tours to photo elicitation. The book argues that practices of cultural mapping consist of a research field in and of itself, and it situates this work in relation to other areas of research and practice, including critical cartography, cultural geography, critical GIS, activist mapping and artist maps. The book also offers a range of practical approaches towards using print and web-based maps to give visibility to spaces traditionally left out of city representations but that are important to the local communities that use them. In this book, maps serve as an object of study and also a means to facilitate research. Throughout, the authors reflect on how, through the processes of mapping, we create knowledge about space, place, community and culture.