This is the third event in the programme FRONT LINES, BACK YARDS
– Monthly online events exploring the local frontlines of our multiple crises and drawing on the innovative forms of social and cultural mapping emerging from the backyards created during lockdown.
This event features contributions from three creative cartographers whose work addresses key issues of civic participation and urban democracy:
• Walking Territory: In and out of Lockdown
Andrew Howe will discuss the intensive process of mapping walks restricted to his local area of Shrewsbury during the Covid 19 lockdown. This led to making a series of artist books and linking up with other artists nearby in a collaborative project. The resulting maps and books are a selective visual record of embodied knowledge found through walking, which celebrate local distinctiveness of layered heritage and green spaces. They have helped to sustain community interest and raise money for a local environmental and food redistribution charity.
Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist and project manager based in Shrewsbury, working solo and in collaboration with other practitioners and community groups. He uses walking and mapping to explore how people interact with places, informed by experience of over 30 years in engineering and environmental consulting. His practice includes painting, collage, photography, printmaking, books, and digital media.
• The Deep Map App
Lucy Frears discusses a Reference tool she developed to enhance and enable creative mapmaking. What is the deep app reference tool? A guide? A motivational tool for anyone to start creating sound walks? An immersive socially distanced walking/wheelchair experience? All of these – it is aimed at anyone experimenting with using GPS through apps and MP3 walks (locative media); it moves through the necessary steps from conception to publishing. The hope is that more experimentation in the field is encouraged, that space for imagination and innovation is created and mistakes prevented. More hegemonic linear histories of place, for example, might be transformed into a layer within a stratigraphy of stories from different perspectives and frequently unheard voices. Developed in 2016 from insights during Lucy's practice and by reading about and experiencing the practice of others, especially the pioneering work of Mike Pearson, Michael Shanks and Clifford McLucas, the reference tool feels especially relevant now. Black Lives Matter has forced us all to take responsibility to notice and hear the messy, textured, polyvocal histories of place. It is locative media that enables this juxtaposition and overlapping of alternative perspectives of past, present and future.
Lucy is a Lecturer in the School of Film & Television at Falmouth University. Lucy’s practice-based research on Locative Media includes immersive sound, memories, phenomenology and intangible heritage. She has won awards for a book (3rd edition 2020) and app (2014) based on research around a community oral history project.
• Julie Plichon on Empathy Walks:
Empathy Walks is a project that propels alternative reflections and ways of "reading" cities by means of collective and interactive walking experiences that reveal different narratives and coexisting social layers. It was inspired by the work and discourse of different professionals engaging in people-centered urban planning, including, amongst others, geographer David Harvey, relating to his concept of "the right to the city"; journalist Jane Jacobs, who supported grassroot making of cities; architect and urban designer Jan Gehl who advocates for "cities for people" and the value of public spaces; sociologist Saskia Sassen, who values the multicultural contribution of different citizens to the diversity of city spaces.
Empathy Walks emerged in 2016 from a team of alumni from the MSc in Urban Design and City Planning from the Bartlett School of Planning. The main aim of the team’s experiment has been to support greater social inclusion and justice through the creation of new cartographies and opening up multicultural spaces (both physical, that is, common spaces of encounter, and subjective, that is, discussions and reflections). Empathy Walks promote walks led by people from underrepresented communities.
The presentation:
The presentation will clarify the methodology to organise the walks, its benefits and limitations. The speaker will then re-contextualise how the current crisis in impacting current mapping practice, which risks reinforcing lack of representativity - and how Empathy Walks can be a response to allow diverse voices to be heard, whilst considering on how 'empathy' can be promoted in a socially distance context.
Julie Plichon is an urban designer and a planner at Islington Council. She graduated in 2016 from the Bartlett School of Planning UCL. Her practice includes inclusive design, planning policy and transport planning. She currently works on the 'people-friendly streets' programme in Islington, delivering low traffic neighbourhoods and on planning policies to deliver inclusive environments.
Livingmaps Network is an independent not for profit organisation, we receive no core funding. Our main income comes from live events which we have been unable to organise this year. We are asking for donations of £3 – £5 from people who wish to attend our online events to help us cover our running costs. We greatly appreciate your support.
WHEN: December 16th 2020, 18:00 (GMT)