Creating maps that challenge dominant power structures
Port cities are hubs of economic development but are located at the delicate intersection of sea and land. Whilst vital for economic development they operate in fragile ecosystems making the shift to renewable energy an important but complex task.
The Port City Territories in Action (PACT) Action unites an interdisciplinary group of researchers and stakeholders to address the challenges of energy transition in port cities. This network is founded on principles of knowledge co-production and collaborative planning to build sustainable, inclusive futures for these transport hubs.
PACT is exploring the port city territory as a distinct space by utilising different techniques to understand its significance for various stakeholders. To engage people with the project, they launched a Counter-Mapping Challenge to encourage anyone living, working, or simply spending time in port areas to reflect on how they use and/or see this space.
Counter-mapping or counter-cartography aims to shake up the normative way of mapping and representing our world. PACT wanted to encourage people to consider key topics and look inquisitively at their surroundings: How do you move through the port city territory? Is it easy? Prohibited? Is it a space you want to explore? Or rather avoid? How would you recreate it if you could? What perspective do you choose? Analytical? Historical? Vacation time curiosity?
We catch up with Eliane Schmid from the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at University of Luxembourg (and co-leader of the PACT Working Group on theoretical knowledge), and Wenjun Feng, a PhD student at the Delft University of Technology, to learn more about the project:
Where did the idea for a the counter-cartography project come from?
PACT aims to be an inclusive and multi-faceted COST Action that tries to listen to many different voices beyond academia and industry. We would like to be in touch with people frequenting port city territories for all kinds of reasons and learn what they need from an energy transition that could improve their standard of living in these unique but also challenging spaces. The counter-mapping project was but one early attempt at hearing some voices and seeing different perspectives in regards to the port city territories.
While standard mapping techniques, including the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), as seen in the work of Carola Hein, Reinout Rutte, Vincent Baptist, Yvonne van Mil, and others, can be a powerful way to relate path dependencies in port city development, there are also numerous alternative ways to map this space and learn about peoples’ views on them.
In the August Counter-Mapping Challenge, we wanted explore such different ways of rendering space. We began informing ourselves about other ways of representing space that would allow for more nuance and different perspectives. This is why we decided to launch a call to encourage people studying port city territories to think about alternative ways of mapping. Counter-mapping is one such approach that allows the inclusion of diverse viewpoints. We wanted to learn how others rendered their spatial perceptions of port city territories and create a platform where contributors, as well as a broader audience, could study different mappings as well as reach out to one another.
Inspiration for map creation: New Directions in Radical Cartography, Phil Cohen & Mike Duggan, eds. (2021); Ceci n’est pas un Atlas: la cartographie comme outil de luttes, Nepthys Zwer, et al. (2023); This Is Not an Atlas; and Living Maps Network.
What has been the response to the call?
We are very pleased to have published 7 counter-maps, despite August being a month when most people go on holiday. We are especially happy that we received contributions from people from 3 different continents and focusing on very different topics – illustrating how powerful the counter-mapping approach is to understanding people’s perception of space.
Discover all the counter-map contributions here: https://www.pact-costaction.eu/multimedia
We are pleased to have created a platform for exchange of perspectives on port city territories research and invite people to think spatially about port city territories. While this call closed on August 31, PACT have just launched a similar initiative linked to the port soundscape so discover the collective Sonic Map of Port Cities now live on Spotify and upload your port city sound here.
What are the main challenges facing port cities territories?
The main focus of PACT is to find ways to ensure a sustainable energy transition that includes a multitude of stakeholders beyond the economic sector. Port city territories worldwide are tasked with tackling the many changes the environmental crisis is triggering at an increasing speed. This is why we need to study these spaces from a holistic perspective, including the voices of local inhabitants, people working at the port and on the ships, the various industries involved and the port and the city administrations, all the while considering animals and nature that are often forgotten when people implement changes to their own benefit.
How can public engagement and science communication projects like this improve knowledge of your field?
Through various ways of interacting with a topic, people with different foci and visual preferences can be engaged. While some people might retain information best by reading, others might find listening a better medium for them, while others again prefer to take a visual approach. Counter-mapping allows people to express themselves in the manner that suits them best: some maps are very colorful, others have a lot of text, while some even include a soundscape. What this challenge has shown, and this will surely be valuable for our future projects, is the importance of being open to many different ways of communicating in order to address many different audiences.
Most of the contributors of this challenge were PhDs and young researchers, especially in the field of Architecture and Urban Planning (although one submission was by a young creative and yoga teacher). But counter-mapping could be used as a communication tool to involve more stakeholders in port cities. From their perspectives and views, greater variety of topics and schemes may be explored.
Further information
PACT has already hosted a mapping workshop using GIS in its first year, and plans to repeat and develop different mapping events in the coming months so watch this space.
Follow PACT on social media: Bluesky and LinkedIn.