Normas electorales

The community map has its origins in the wider field of Geo-engineering and the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Digital Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). The ASP incorporated GIS not only as a way of representing data but as a way of increasing participation and sharing information, thereby contributing to the democratisation of knowledge in line with its policy facing research. I will therefore provide a short contextual background on the emergence of GIS to provide ethnographic context for the ASP.

PPGIS have been widely discussed and adapted in development and planning discourses, mainly due to their promise of facilitating a wider participatory framework.

According to Conquest (2013) such advances arrived with the progress of technologies and the move in planning and development discourses to “put the last first”. Following the work of Robert Chambers (see 1992, 1997) an emphasis and recognition of local and “indigenous” knowledges⁷¹ came about in the field of natural resource management, re-orientating policy from top-down to bottom-up. By the 1990s participation had become the “new orthodoxy” (Henkel & Stirrat 2001:168), however for some, the idea of participation as a means and as an end had been conflated (Parfitt 2004) and by the late 2000s a more critical review of ICTs was emerging. This literature engaged with the ways in which participatory techniques are themselves products of, and permeated by, power relations (Kapoor 2002). This permeation was largely ignored by previous literature due to a “misunderstanding of power” (see Cooke & Kothari 2001) that according to Hildyard et al (2001) reduced local opposition to things such as planning and development and created an appearance of greater democracy. In the UK context, GIS has been seen as a way to foster the wide-scale participation of those who “would typically not attend conventional consultation exercises held by the Council” (Cinderby 2010:241), allowing the inclusion of “hard to reach groups”.

The so-called “tyranny of participation” (see Cooke and Kothari 2001:1-15) contributed to the development field’s role as an “anti-politics machine” (see Ferguson 1994:557).

71 See Agrawal & Gibson 1999; Brosius et al. 1998

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This “anti-politics machine” is what Mouffe refers to in her description of the gap between an ideal and actual radical democracy, where a technocratic move towards a commensuration of values eliminates alternative ideological states and subsumes them into the coherent whole collective. In this position;

The cosmopolitan project is therefore bound to deny the hegemonic dimension of politics. In fact several cosmopolitan theorists explicitly state that their aim is to envisage a politics ‘beyond hegemony’. Such an approach overlooks the fact that since power relations are constitutive of the social, every order is by necessity a hegemonic order.

(Ibid:108)

A community map, through the visual image that aligns particular aspects of the material form and social value of the built environment, can act to “perform territory”;⁷² in that it has an “ontological authority” but further has a potency of “ontological genesis”

(Roberts 2012:14). This making visible and invisible can work to advance and simultaneously delimit the various possibilities of ethical substance in the sense that maps can be understood as “arguments about existence” (Wood:2010:34)

…all maps, like all other historically constructed images, do not provide a transparent window on the world. Rather they are signs that present a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparence [sic]

concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification (Mitchell 1986:80 cited in O’Mahony 2014:50).

The question of who participates in mapping projects has shifted to how people participate in such projects. New technologies (particularly Web 2.0) are seen to have the capacity to engage with alternative forms of knowledge production⁷³, whereby design processes are also brought into the process of visualising knowledge.

Recognising that there is no “one size fits all”, each iteration of a PPGIS technology is tailored to the project it is meant to engage with.

The extension of the how question has meant the emergence of a GIS field which re-frames citizenship as plural and has resulted in an enlivening of the perceived participatory potential of ICTs. This aims to enable a multi-scaled approach, allowing local agency to be built upon through design at all stages. This “scaling up” is seen to

72 Perkins 2004, Dodge, Kitchen & Perkins 2009.

73 Hackley and Singleton 2008; Leach et al. 2008; Kleine & Unwin 2009; Tacchi 2012; Hackly et al 2008

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bring about broader levels of radical political change and social justice (see Hickey &

Mohan 2004). However, scaling up would also see a proliferation of GIS platforms, reposition GIS as a culturally specific mapping technology and re-introduce the problem of making commensurate “ideal speech situations”.

Within each PPGIS project, commensality is demanded whereby values need to be understood by, and translatable for, each participant in the interface. Without this translatability there is a loss of legibility and as such a loss of the inherent potential to articulate the demos. The notion of equal knowledge production (see Haklay 2013) assumes an aim to show and know the same “worlds”’ values and order the same materials - that is, to have the same ethical commitments and desire to extend social values. For Seethinger’s to take part, with their unintelligible story, would cause fracture in the demos, bringing to light misunderstandings and different ethics and positions concerning place, into which much effort for translation and reworking would be needed. This effort was ultimately not invested in - instead the Seethinger’s made their own platform. They turned away and did something else (see chapters 3 & 4).

The performance of territory - that is the ways in which the landscape was articulated in its matrix of good and bad changes - worked radically differently for the Seethinger’s compared to the envisioned articulations of the ASP, so much so that it could not work through the same aesthetic and epistemic alignments demanded by the ASP’s community map. As Unwin (2009) notes, the flow of knowledge is often a one-way flow, where information is gained to fit a gap in an already pre-determined epistemic grid, which emerges from a grounded and fixed ontological position. This is a result of the problem being understood as the ability to get knowledge rather than what knowledge, in itself, might mean.

The incommensurability for the ASP arises when the information posted threatens the ability of the map to articulate good and bad changes in the landscape in a coherent way.

The Seething story, as “fact”, threatens the legitimacy of other facts and as such makes

“untapped potential” difficult to locate in the socio-economic matric that the ASP wishes to foreground. That is, the story added visualised value in a mode that is local, producing a local familiarity and fun. However, the ASP’s commitment was to the participatory and inclusive aspect of the democratic potential of the map at the scale of national policy.

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It is the necessity of translatability across the demos in the ASP map, which necessitates a scaling up. Following from Strathern's notion of a “partial connection” (1991), this involved the loss of information in the form of the productive capacity of the information added. I argue that in this case the ASP mapping tool was of no interest to the Villagers as the loss involved in scaling up and making the map commensurate to all entailed a loss of value of the socially productive aspects of their story (see chapter 3).

The map was part of a different social project, with a different ethical commitment to the local.

Seethingers do explicitly wish to expand their project and are looking for similar communities to spread their ideas⁷⁴, however this scaling up must occur without loss and the mechanisms through which value is spread must remain coherent. The PPGIS could not provide this, however I will argue that the map did not fail but rather was put to work whilst remaining silent, via the ASPs ethical commitment to participatory knowledge production, and through its future potential.