Counter-Mapping Corners of the South: Lessons for Southern Theorisation

Abstract

Counter-mapping has been practiced globally as a method, tool, and practice of insurgency, organising, storytelling, and ultimately queering narratives around the ontology of mapping. The practice can be observed globally, often through participatory practices, collaboration, and co-production to amplify and assert citizen’s rights from the Mapa de Saberes (Map of Knowledge) in the Colombian Amazon to the People’s Land Map by Ndifuna Ukwazi in Cape Town. Recent developments in counter-mapping have embraced post-structural, intersectional and southern foundations in shifting and pulling power and knowledge structures, as witnessed through analogue and digital hybrid processes which merge available technologies to produce the map. The practice of counter-mapping has refreshed debates in the realm of critical cartography and urban studies alike, queering the ideological power-knowledge nexus and tabling important questions around who gets to map, and for what end(s)?; and importantly, weaving resistance and pluriversality into the governance and democratic practices of cities. The practice further lends itself to the Southern theory-building project, storying the complexities unfolding in southern urbanisms across the world and speaking to relations of authority and hegemony prevalent in the contexts engaging the practice (Connell, 2014).