Cultural mapping is an approach to recording and revealing an integrated picture of cultural character, significance and workings of a place. The second edition of Janet Pillai’s book contains everything you need to know about this process, and how to plan and begin your own projects. “This guide on Cultural Mapping provides an invaluable resource for everyone interested in having a deeper understanding of the unique character and identity of a historic place and its community. It provides the user with a clear methodology for unraveling the complex and significant elements that make up any human settlement. Step-by-step procedures outline the processes, tools and techniques for collecting and assessing the cultural assets and resources of a given community. “Several illustrated case applications of cultural mapping from Malaysia and Hong Kong have been included to help demonstrate the application of cultural mapping in tourism, conservation, revitalisation and education projects. “This is a remarkable resource which advocates that cultural mapping should be the basis for all urban planning studies to ensure that culturally sensitive and appropriate decisions are made in the planning, management and development of small and large historic sites and in place-making exercises. A must use for policy makers, planners, cultural advocates and leaders.” Ar. Laurence Loh Director of Arkitek LLA Sdn Bhd and Think City Sdn Bhd

Making space for imagination can shift research and community planning from a reflective stance to a "future forming" orientation and practice. Cultural mapping is an emerging discourse of collaborative, community-based inquiry and advocacy. This book looks at artistic approaches to cultural mapping, focusing on imaginative cartography. It emphasizes the importance of creative process that engages with the "felt sense" of community experiences, an element often missing from conventional mapping practices. International artistic contributions in this book reveal the creative research practices and languages of artists, a prerequisite to understanding the multi-modal interface of cultural mapping. The book examines how contemporary artistic approaches can challenge conventional asset mapping by animating and honouring the local, giving voice and definition to the vernacular, or recognizing the notion of place as inhabited by story and history. It explores the processes of seeing and listening and the importance of the aesthetic as a key component of community self-expression and self-representation. Innovative contributions in this book champion inclusion and experimentation, expose unacknowledged power relations, and catalyze identity formation, through multiple modes of artistic representation and performance. It will be a valuable resource for individuals involved with creative research methods, performance, and cultural mapping as well as social and urban planning.

This edited collection provides an introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary field of cultural mapping, offering a range of perspectives that are international in scope. Cultural mapping is a mode of inquiry and a methodological tool in urban planning, cultural sustainability, and community development that makes visible the ways local stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals constitute places as meaningful locations. The chapters address themes, processes, approaches, and research methodologies drawn from examples in Australia, Canada, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Italy, Malaysia, Malta, Palestine, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Ukraine. Contributors explore innovative ways to encourage urban and cultural planning, community development, artistic intervention, and public participation in cultural mapping—recognizing that public involvement and artistic practices introduce a range of challenges spanning various phases of the research process, from the gathering of data, to interpreting data, to presenting "findings" to a broad range of audiences. The book responds to the need for histories and case studies of cultural mapping that are globally distributed and that situate the practice locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.

This book describes three years of work by the Culture and Communities Mapping Project, a research project based in Edinburgh that uses maps as an object of study and also a means to facilitate research. Taking a self-reflexive approach, the book draws on a variety of iterative mapping procedures and visual methodologies, from online virtual tours to photo elicitation, to capture the voices of inhabitants and their distinctive perspectives on the city. The book argues that practices of cultural mapping consist of a research field in and of itself, and it situates this work in relation to other areas of research and practice, including critical cartography, cultural geography, critical GIS, activist mapping and artist maps. The book also offers a range of practical approaches towards using print and web-based maps to give visibility to spaces traditionally left out of city representations but that are important to the local communities that use them. Throughout, the authors reflect critically on how, through the processes of mapping, we create knowledge about space, place, community and culture.