Mapping as a Performative Method in Architecture and Planning Implications and Challenges of Which Realities We Re-present?

Abstract

Mapping has long been affiliated with the planning and design of our buildings, cities and landscapes, and has emerged as a favoured means of documentation amongst architects during the last decades. As a representation and investigation of places, mapping as a method is closely related to how we view and understand places, and how these might be connected and entangled. With the emergence of places as both something physical and as a social construct, the potential performative effect of mapping as a method becomes an important question for all architects and planners. In this essay, the author argues for the need for a “critical mapping turn” where the modern planner and architect (and architects who plans) critically re-assess and re-evaluate our own methods and practice. The goal is to uncover potential biases and inherited assumptions, and ask ourselves which or whose realities we do or chose to re-present.

Keywords: mapping, place theory, performative methods