Normas propias

The community map is not directly engaged with or talked about in project documentation regarding aims and research methods, neither are there many notes about the work it was expected to do in the minutes from project meetings. However, under the project’s research objectives listed in the “research task record” outlining the primary aims of the research at the beginning of the project, a suggestion of the map’s use can be found.

“This project is a study of the means through which a wide range of social and built environment factors influence each other in order to

66 In their own words, note the difference to multidisciplinary lies in the notion of integration as opposed to supplementation or diffracted reading (see Barad 2007).

67 See chapter 2

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describe how their form changes through time. The notion that suburban centres are simply an extension of the city is the orthodoxy in most treatments of the subject. Indeed the term suburb is trapped by its historical legacy […] We also need to understand the built landscape as a social place, to reveal meaning, values, symbols.”⁶⁸ [emphasis added]

My role on the project, as an anthropologist, was to supplement understandings of the built environment of the suburb with a collection of local testimonies in the oral history tradition, which would allow a greater understanding of how changes in the high street had been understood in the suburb as a “social place”. As the studentship description states:

“The ethnographic basis of the study will be provided by the systematic examination of local history sources (in both text, pictures and representative objects) and the assembly of an oral history archive in which the ‘remembered’ history of the suburb is recorded. It will also include work on an ‘auto-ethnographical’ project, in which local inhabitants will be asked to report and tag their local activities and networks on the project website. It is intended that the findings of the PhD research will help inform the research project’s overall aim of understanding processes of socio-economic adaptation in smaller settlements.”

The aim was that through an ethnographic “layering” augmenting large scale architectural analysis, the built environment could be seen as a social space with the web map contributing to the revealing its “meanings, values, symbols”. The map was a material point of revelation (see Keane 2003), a point of contact from academy to local, from expert to citizen and a point of visibility where previously there was invisibility.

This visibility places multiple stories, “meanings, values, symbols”, from different people from different places, into the same frame, aligning a bio-political body of the local with that of the city and nation. These “meanings, values, symbols” are also aligned within an overarching project of inclusion and participation within a singular democratic project. The map is a material means of producing an ideal speech situation (Habermass 1990:40) within a radical democratic project (following Mouffe 2005).

68 Cited in the ASP ‘Case for Support’. EPSRC reference number EP/I001212/

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The visibility of the “remembered” histories enable the map and the ASP to maintain a legitimate “ethical substance” by including the voice of the demos and making better⁶⁹ by releasing value through the correct management of materials. The map, would add a layer of articulation about social values that would place spaces in the material landscape within a matrix of positive and negative change, drawing attention to the material aspects of the landscape that had been mismanaged or had “unrealised potential”. The map was a tool of emancipatory visuality through which value could be unlocked.

However an assumption of a particular mode of value, expressed in a matrix of good and bad changes assumed the values held by the user was commensurate with that of the ASP.

The map was labelled “auto-ethnographic”, implying self-ethnography by the map users where they would be able to select what information was important to them to share on their own terms. In other words, they would be writing about themselves, as they liked, keeping “the subject (knower) and object (that which is being examined) in simultaneous view” (Schwandt 2007:16). Such writing would occur through a technology and frame which would provide a consistent mode of delivery for self-ethnography across a range of spatial locations. This “auto-ethnographic” ideal is couched in the language of radical, consensus-based, participatory democracy. As the website of Mapping for Change, the UCL Company that was responsible for the design and maintenance of the map, states;

“The concept behind community mapping is to move away from

‘top-down’ mapping that so often fails to reflect the needs of people”⁷⁰

The aims of the map are to realise a participatory democratic ideal and advance a solution of how to allow people to partake in academic knowledge production from “the bottom up” so that the academics can work around the “meanings, values, symbols” that are at play in the daily life of the people who live in suburbs.

The ability to write about oneself from one’s own position therefore allows one to advance one’s own “meanings, values, symbols” in relation to the built environment.

69 This term was used repeatedly in ASP meetings and is found in the theoretical literature behind the ASPs methodology. “better” here refers to Better in the sense of better urban design enabled by ASP research following a trajectory from Hilliar 1978. (see chapter 2)

70 http://www.mappingforchange.org.uk/services/community-maps/ accessed3/7/13

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The map, as a Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) stands as a facilitator of translatability.