JOURNAL: "Cultural mapping in planning and development contexts" - Special double issue of Culture and Local Governance (Vol. 5, No. 1-2, December 2015)

Cultural mapping in planning and development contexts

Guest Editors: Nancy Duxbury (Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal) and M. Sharon Jeannotte (Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa, Canada)

Internationally, cultural mapping is being used to investigate, “visualize” and facilitate the planning and management of the cultural dimensions of a community within planning processes. In this context, cultural mapping is a useful tool that can produce a multi-layered picture of the strengths, gaps, characteristics, and special features in the cultural and creative dimensions of communities. The process of mapping often reveals many unexpected resources, builds new cross-community connections, and can enhance a community’s awareness of its tangible and intangible cultural assets and sense of place.

As the articles in this issue demonstrate, however, cultural mapping projects are increasingly adopting a wider and deeper scope, serving as a tool to define and structure, to interrogate and probe, to challenge, and to imagine possibilities and alternatives. The articles explore the use of cultural mapping in situations ranging from historic core neighbourhood rehabilitation and renewal processes, to ethnographic research in an urban periphery area, to mitigating marginalization in aging suburbs, to more generalized cultural planning processes. Geographically, the articles investigate cases located in La Plata (Buenos Aires province), Argentina; São Paulo, Brazil; Ottawa and the Waterloo Region, Canada; Sipoo and Pori, Finland; Lisbon, Porto, and the Centro region, Portugal; and Bilbao, in the Basque Country, Spain. The papers selected for the issue originated from work presented at the international conference “Mapping Culture: Communities, Sites and Stories,” held in Coimbra, Portugal, in May 2014.

Authors: Soledad Balerdi, Fernando Bayón, Leonor Bettencourt, Claudia Pato Carvalho, Paula Castro, Danielle J. Deveau, Ben Dick, Nancy Duxbury, Abby Goodrum, Maunu Häyrynen, Cristina Ortega Nuere, Pilvi Nummi, Patrícia Romeiro, Jeroen Stevens, Tuija Tzoulas, and João Luís Veronnezzi Pacheco.