Marianna PavlovskayaDepartment of Geography, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center
Key Messages
� Critical GIS opens a pragmatic plane of action by fusing progressive geographic imaginations withconcrete and tangible maps.
� GIS can produce new cartographies of spaces of possibility from which geographies of hope and carecan expand.
� Critical GIS scholarship can contribute to social transformation by, for example, creatingcartographies of solidarity economy and being part of critical pedagogy.
When Critical GIS emerged in the 1990s and gained momentum in the 2000s, its potential for enablingprogressive social change generated considerable excitement. By combining the powers of mapping,information technologies, and critical social theory, it promised new possibilities for acting upon the growingsocial contradictions of the neoliberal era. Critical GIS seemed to open a pragmatic plane of action by fusingprogressive geographic imaginations with concrete and tangible maps. As I reflect on the state of critical GISin the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, new configurations of class power, patriarchy, andracism are rapidly reshaping our social and geopolitical worlds and are precipitating environmentaldestruction. Yet, I attempt to develop the idea that GIS is a tool for social transformation because it canproduce new cartographies and spaces of possibility and build and expand geographies of hope and carethat change social imaginaries in favour of non-hierarchical class, gender, and race relations. In short,critical GIS scholarship both engages ongoing progressive politics and can create new possibilities forchange. In particular, I examine two interventions of critical GIS: creating cartographies of solidarity andteaching.
Keywords: Critical GIS, solidarity economy, teaching, diverse economies, post-capitalist politics
La science de l’information g�eographique critique comme outil de transformation sociale
Lorsque la science de l’information g�eographique critique est apparue durant les ann�ees 1990 et a gagn�e enpopularit�e au cours des ann�ees 2000, son potentiel pour un changement social progressif a suscit�e unenthousiasme consid�erable. En combinant les potentiels de la cartographie, des technologies de l’informationet de la th�eorie sociale critique, elle a ouvert de nouvelles possibilit�es de tirer parti des contradictions socialescroissantes de l’�ere n�eolib�erale. Elle a sembl�e ouvrir un plan d’action pragmatique en fusionnant des vuesg�eographiques progressives avec des cartes concr�etes et tangibles. Alors que je r�efl�echis �a l’�etat de la sciencede l’information g�eographique critique au milieu de la deuxi�eme d�ecennie du 21e si�ecle, de nouvellesconfigurations du pouvoir des classes, du patriarcat et du racisme red�efinissent rapidement notre mondeg�eopolitique et social et pr�ecipitent le d�eclin environnemental. Pourtant, je tente de d�evelopper l’id�ee que lesSIG sont un outil de transformation sociale parce qu’il peut produire de nouvelles cartographies et denouveaux espaces de possibilit�es et batir et �etendre des g�eographies de l’espoir et de la bienveillance quichangent l’imaginaire social au profit de relations de classes, de genres et de races non hi�erarchiques. Bref,le cursus d’�etudes en science de l’information g�eographique critique implique des politiques progressistes et
Correspondence to / Adresse de correspondance: Marianna Pavlovskaya, Department of Geography, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave, New York,NY 10065. Email/Courriel: [email protected]
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peut �egalement cr�eer de nouvelles possibilit�es pour le changement. J’ai examin�e plus particuli�erement deuxinterventions : la cr�eation de cartographies de solidarit�e et p�edagogiques.
Mots cl�es : SIG critique, �economie solidaire, enseignement, �economies diversifi�ees, politiques postcapitalistes
Introduction
When critical GIS emerged in the 1990s and gainedmomentum in the 2000s, its potential for enablingprogressive social change generated considerableexcitement. By combining the powers of mapping,information technologies, and critical social theory,it promised new possibilities for acting upon thegrowing social contradictions of the neoliberal era.Critical GIS seemed to open a pragmatic plane ofaction by fusing progressive geographic imagina-tions with concrete and tangible maps.
Critical GIS has produced a vibrant body of scholar-ship, as exemplified by many journal articles andseveral books on the topic (e.g., Pickles 1995; Schuur-man 2004; Cope and Elwood 2009; Crampton 2010).Topics in GIS and society are now taught as academicsubjects at several universities and gather growingattention fromgraduate and undergraduate students.Mapping projects inspired by critical GIS scholarshiptake place across the globe where they assist commu-nities engaged in struggles over their resources,territories, and place as well as over representationin social imaginaries.
As I reflect on the state of critical GIS in themiddleof the second decade of the 21st century, newconfigurationsofclasspower,patriarchy,andracismare rapidly reshaping our social and geopoliticalworlds and are precipitating environmental destruc-tion. Old struggles and alliances are falling apart andnew alliances and struggles are emerging. What cancritical GIS contribute to progressive social transfor-mation when the world is being reconfigured bydeepening economic inequality and a diminishingstability of livelihoods? How can it intervene inthe new geographies that are taking shapewithin thecontext of terrorism and the war on terror, refugeeand migrant crises, increased state violence, blindenvironmental destruction, violence against womenand children, insecurity amidst mass surveillance,police brutality, assaults on racial minorities andindigenous people’s rights? What can critical GISdo when powerful elected officials appear to onlyrepresent, and even celebrate, the power of the 1%while positioning sexism, racism, homophobia, and
ignorance as values to admire? The rise of thepolitical right after the 2016 presidential electionin the United States (US) puts progressive projectson the brink and reconfigures politics from further-ing the change to defending current boundaries. Yet,the projects that build geographies of hope still takeplace and continue to change the world under thedirest of circumstances.
In this essay, I attempt to develop the idea that GISis a tool for social transformation. GeographicInformation Science today is not only an importantdomain of knowledge, technology, and cartographicpractice with complex and contradictory socialeffects, it also actively produces new cartographiesand spaces of possibility. Indeed, it can work tobuild and expand geographies of hope and care(Lawson 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Healy 2008; Raghuram2012; Raghuram et al. 2009; Peck et al. 2014)that change social imaginaries in favour of non-hierarchical class, gender, and race relations. In short,critical GIS scholarship engages ongoing progressivepolitics and can create new possibilities for change.In the remainder of the paper, I will examine thepotential of critical GIS to advance social transforma-tion as it pertains to technological innovation, socialcritique, and production and enactment of progres-sive social imaginaries. I will then discuss twointerventions from my own work: creating cartogra-phies of solidarity and teaching. While they speak tovarious aspects of the transformative potential ofcritical GIS, I will primarily relate them to the urgentand the least researched task of creating socialimaginaries necessary for preventing the unfoldingconservative social contexts from eclipsing hope.
In which ways is Critical GIS critical?
It would be useful to first reflect onwhat it means topractice Critical GIS as opposed to other types ofGIS-based research. Since its origins in the 1990,critical GIS scholars keep redefining their agendas inresponse to the fast-changing field of GIS, evolvingneoliberal economy and governance, and new waysin which geospatial technologies are deployed to
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2 Marianna Pavlovskaya
resist the new frontiers of marginalization, exploi-tation, and exclusion (see Wilson 2015; Thatcher,Bergmann, Ricker, et al. 2016; Pavlovskaya 2017b).Previously, I suggested that critical GIS couldquestion the status quo in three ways (Pavlovskaya2009): by challenging the status quo of technology,by challenging the status quoof social power, andbycreating spaces of possibility. It is exciting to seethat critical GIS research has made strides in allthree of these directions.
Technological innovation and the shift to digitalmapping
Pushing the limits of technology expands the knowl-edge domains of GIS and the ways we can representpeople and places. Critical GIS also engages socialtheoretical critiquesof representation andspacewithregard to new spatial technologies. In particular,critical GIS is attentive to the problematic of an“epistemology of the grid” (Dixon and Jones 1998),and seeks new, non-Cartesian, ways to representspace in order to embrace processes, phenomena,experiences, events, and ideas that absolute spacefails to account for. Pushing the technologicalbounds of GIS invites its fusion with different kindsof communication and internet-based and mobiletechnologies, and also opens GIS to those forms ofgeographic knowledge that do not fit well with theepistemologies of spatial science. As a result, newways to visualize and analyze spatial informationbecome possible. The contributors to this issue,among others, have done groundbreaking workin this direction. It includes, for example, the “newspatialities” proposed by Luke Bergmann (2017),ways to “queer” GIScience offered by Jack Gieseking(2015), as well as framing the advent of code as acomponent of flexible GIS by Renee Sieber (2016).This work is continuous with the feminist andqualitative GIS that earlier sought to incorporatenon-quantifiable human experiences and ways ofthinking intoGIS (Kwan2002, 2007;McLafferty 2002;Schuurman and Pratt 2002; Cope and Elwood 2009;Pavlovskaya 2017b).
The political economy and social practice ofgeospatial technology have profoundly changedin the last two decades. In the 1990s and 2000s,GIS was solidly in the hands of corporations andthe state and, to a large degree, served theirinterests (e.g., marketing, urban planning, census,industry, military, and similar applications). The
state of GIS was, perhaps, epitomized by a desktopGIS, a corporate software package with comprehen-sive spatial analytical functionality that ran onpersonal computers and required considerablelevels of technical expertise. Making the technologyavailable to the public and communities has been aserious challenge (Lake 1993; Elwood 2008; Haklay2013). In addition to corporate training sessions,universities across the US began providing technicalexpertise as part of their academic programs.Teaching GIS soon evolved into teaching particularsoftware products and the spatial logics built intothis software (St. Martin and Wing 2007).
In the last decade, however, the field of GIS took asurprising turn. GIS functionality has quickly de-centralized and is represented today bymany kindsof geospatial technologies and applications, manyof which rely on Geoweb, mobile computing, andadvanced visualization. New tools for geographicvisualization and analysis are often open source andfree or easily affordable. Desktop GIS no longersolely dominates research or applications. In com-parison, the new geospatial tools now more oftenexist as programs with a smaller scope of discretefunctions or routines tailored to specific mappingand analytical needs, such as the internet-basedCarto (until recently CartoDB) or different pluginsfor QGIS, itself a desktop but free and opensource package. The freely available geospatial tools(like components of the code in R or parts of GoogleEarth, for example) can be embedded in customizedscripts that might then drive a web-based applica-tion, and so on. While using these tools still requiresgeographic thinking and knowledge of techniquesin spatial analysis, advanced learning of a particularsoftware or even data structure is no longer the onlyoption to become an expert mapper. The rapidmovement away from desktop GIS and towardinternet-based and open source digital mapping isopening new virtual territories to be mapped, iscreating new spatial imaginations, and is generatingnew types of geographic information. Furthermore,new, non-expert communities have been formingaround grass-roots mapping projects and suchdecentralization has contributed, although notwithout considerable contradictions, to the democ-ratization of spatial knowledge production (Cramp-ton and Krygier 2005).
For example, “596acres” project in New YorkCity aims “to build more just and equitable cities”through “resident stewardship of land” (596acres
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GIS for social transformation 3
2016). It began in 2011 as an onlinemapping projectthat visualized the vacant lots (the number refers totheir combined area) in order to encourage nearbyresidents to convert them to community gardens.A cutting-edge innovation at the time, the dynamicmap reflects the different stages of conversion ofeach community garden and provides informationabout how to start the process and where to getlogistical and legal help. As the project becamewell-known, the content of the website has expandedfrom Brooklyn to all of New York City and nowincludes other resources. Using the latest geospatialtools and being inextricably linked to the internet,596acres exemplifies how new technologies formapping and visualization can become tools fororganizing and change.
Revealing spatial configurations of power
The second way in which GIS can do critical work isby participating in human geography projects thatinterrogate geographies of class, race, gender andstate oppression, post-colonial power differentials,and environmental injustice and destruction. Here,critical GIS can advance the explanation of howspatial inequalities are produced and maintained(Pavlovskaya 2006). Such practices emerged fromand were inspired by early critiques of GIS whichgo back to the 1995 book Ground truth, editedby John Pickles (1995). Chapters in this seminalvolume compellingly exposed the role of GIS infurthering corporate and state control over society,andmilitary intervention. Critical GIS continues thistradition of critique by drawing on emancipatoryepistemologies of feminism, post-structuralism,Marxism, and critical race theory. For example,critical GIS reveals newly emerging spatial config-urations of power manifested in big data, militaryintelligence, drone wars, and spatial surveillance(Gregory2010;Kitchin2014;Cramptonetal. 2014). Itexamines how geospatial information and toolschange domains of political governance (Wilson2011), as well as traces digital practices of resistance including advocacy for indigenous resourceuse rights (Palmer 2009; Dalton et al. 2016).
Moreover, because of the wide use of geospatialtechnologies by new generations of activists resist-ing the conservative realignments of power, map-ping projects have become a vehicle for organizingagainst the assault of the neoliberal economy,neoliberal urbanism, and neoliberal policy. The first
“Resistance GIS” conference held in Portland StateUniversity in May 2017 (https://resistancegis.wordpress.com/) featured suchprojects—for exam-ple, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP;https://www.antievictionmap.com/). AEMP has amulti-media story-telling website that documentsthe resistance to displacement caused by gentrifi-cation in the San Francisco Bay area. In particular,“through digital maps, oral history work, film,murals, and community events, the project rendersconnections between the nodes and effects of newentanglements of global capital, real estate, hightech, and political economy” (AEMP, n.d.). Theproject directly traces its epistemologies to “anti-racist and feminist analyses as well as decolonialmethodology” and through the broadly understoodprocess of digital mapping and narration createstools and disseminates data that contribute to“collective resistance and movement building”(AEMP, n.d.). In the critical GIS spirit, the projectuses new geospatial technologies to combine visu-alization of displacement and struggles against itwith critical analysis of the new rounds of politicaleconomy, neoliberal urban restructuring, and racialcapitalism. It is clear that the blending of mappingwith geospatial tools on the internet and in socialmedia opens new opportunities for social move-ments andmobilization. Critical GIS scholars shouldcontinue to highlight such progressive struggles,but also to critically examine how geospatial tech-nologies may facilitate the ongoing conservativeconsolidation and mobilization (e.g., the alt-rightmovement).
It is important to note that conservative GISpractices have also evolved in relation to thereconfigured social relations of the neoliberal era.In particular, the instrumentalist leanings of techno-logical innovation, the ongoing commercializationof GIS, and the growing identification of geospatialtechnologies with the entirety of geographic knowl-edge,allposechallenges toprogressiveGISpractices.I will briefly discuss these developments below.
Instrumentalist bent. While moving beyond thetechnical bounds of GIS makes room for new formsof digital spatial knowledge, the uncritical valuationof GIS and related geospatial tools also grows.As the scope of spatial data and opportunities forits analysis increase, so does a faith in GIS to solvesocial and environmental issues. Our fascinationwith new digital frontiers, big data, new forms of
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spatial information, and practices for its creation(e.g., neogeography, crowdsourcing,mobile computing,movement tracking, social media, and so on) leadsus to treat technological possibilities as an end initself. For example, should the visualization of crowd-sourced data (e.g. FourSquare, Twitter, or Uber), asinteresting as it is, be a substitute for a critical analysisof the same data and its spatial distribution? In otherwords, the attractive instrumentality of GIS enables asituation where algorithms and enticingvisualizations overshadow the nature of theknowledge they produce. Critical GIS must continueto interrogate the consequences of the instrumentalistbent for geographic knowledge production, especiallywithin the new domain of “big data analytics.”
Geoweb as a capitalist and surveillancespace. Another growing concern is that theGeoweb (including social media and mobiletechnologies), which has been largely perceived asa space of democratic interaction and emancipatorymapping, is rapidly being turned into a space ofcapitalist production. It has been taken over by, andacts as a tool for, primarily commercial interests;as it facilitates the delivery of commodities, italso works to gather information, market andadvertise, and, indeed, manufacture “big data”(Kitchin 2014). It appropriates free labour fromwebsite users and turns knowledge intocommercial products (Leszczynski 2012;Thatcher, O’Sullivan, and Mahmoudi 2016). It hasalso become a space of political and commerciallydriven surveillance (Haklay 2013; Leszczynski andElwood2015). In fact, corporations and the state areonly expanding their use of digital geospatialinformation, thus enhancing and reconfiguringtheir power.
Cannibalization of geography by “GISimperialism.” Finally, geography as a disciplineis increasingly equated with GIS by somegeographers, students, and the public. In thissense, the dream of Stan Openshaw (1991) forGIS to put back together the broken fragmenteddiscipline of geography has come true to a largeextent. The attraction of geospatial technologiesoften overshadows the significance of academicgeography in university education. GIS is no longerseen as an intellectual product of geography andcartography; it is perceived as a thing in itself andautonomous from geographic thought. The
geospatial industry prizes technical expertiseabove geographic thinking and this undermines theneed for geographic education, per se. GIS indeedstands in for the discipline of geography in many(although not all) university settings, and in somecases, it is GIS that keeps geography departments onthe university map. Seeing their majors decline andresources being taken away, geographydepartmentsare enlarging their GIS programs and adding fee-based ones, hoping for larger enrollments andgreater self-sufficiency. Kevin St. Martin and JohnWing (2007) described this process as “GISimperialism” and warned us of consequences ofthe “disciplining” of geography by GIS.
In short, the growth of GIS in general is certainly awelcome development, yet there is a danger thatthe uncritical support for the instrumental capabil-ities of geospatial technologies may turn a blindeye to the importance of geographic knowledgemore generally. The focus on technology itselfalso disregards the configurations of social powerthat shape the technology and its mapping practi-ces. Considering GIS outside this context of powermay strengthen its role in conservative socialprojects and stifle the construction of progressivegeographies. Thus, critical GIS scholarship shouldmaintain its sharp focus on the ongoing neoliberalsocial and economic change and its alignmentswith the newest developments within geospatialtechnologies.
Constructing geographies of care and hope
In addition to pushing the technological boundsand continuing critique of spatial configurationsof power, the third way in which GIS contributesto critical human geography is by seeking to mapgeographies of hope and care (Lawson 2007a,2007b; Healy 2008). In fact, the critique of geogra-phies of exploitation and violence must occurside by side the engagement with progressivegeographies that are also being made. The feministpractice of “reading for difference” (Gibson-Graham1996, 2006) and “mapping for difference” (Pavlov-skaya and Bier 2012) calls for putting progressivealternatives on the map as a strategy to affordthem ontological and political significance. Map-ping spaces of possibility can keep social alter-natives alive, nurtured, and cared for even whileconservative neoliberal ideologies strengthen. Inother words, mapping geographies of hope helps
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GIS for social transformation 5
to incorporate them into forward looking socialimaginaries.
It is this aspiration to construct geographiesof hope and care that constitutes GIS as a tool forsocial transformation. For example, feminist andqualitative GIS scholars work to change mappingso it includes the experiences of women, people ofcolour, and other marginalized groups (Cope andElwood 2009). In many contexts, geospatial tech-nologies act as advocacy and counter-mappingtools, supporting and enhancing the work ofcommunity organizations and activists (Hodgsonand Schroeder 2002; Elwood 2008; Palmer 2009;Wainwright and Bryan 2009; St. Martin 2009; Snyderand St. Martin 2015). More recently, a “criticalquantitative” turn has reclaimed spatial data andquantitative methods for use within critical humangeography agendas (Wyly and DeFilippis 2010;Barnes 2009; St. Martin 2009). Such developmentshave kept critical GIS engaged with dynamic socialchange, both as a tool of critique and, as I willdiscuss below in greater detail using examples frommy work, as a tool of social change.
Mapping the ontologies of the futurehere and now
The discussion above has shown that critical GISpractices have made strides in many directions. Inparticular, the technology itself has become moreflexible and has incorporated new types of knowl-edge (e.g., qualitative, movement, and knowledgetied to new spatial ontologies); access to geospatialtechnology has widened while the authorship ofspatial information has expanded; and GIS theoryandpractice have fusedwith critical epistemologies.The evidence of social change promoted by criticalGIS is, however, harder to identify.
For the most part, critical GIS scholars focuson revealing, diagnosing, and analyzing the spatialconfigurations of power. Recently, it has been impor-tant, as discussed above, to expose how proliferatingmappingprojects get saturatedwith neoliberal logicsand, as a result, strengthen surveillance, privatizeinformation, dilute community power, and cultivateneoliberal subjectivities insteadof community ethics.Yet, it is equally vital thatwe examine the progressivesocial change thathappenswith theassistance ofGIS.The most obvious examples are, perhaps, counter-mapping projects by indigenous peoples and Public
Participation GIS community initiatives (althoughimportant limitations and dangers of co-optationexist here as well). The two projects that I alreadymentioned, 596acres and the AEMP, exemplify theongoing grass-roots efforts. There are, however, twoother directions in which critical GIS enables socialtransformation: research that aims to create ontolo-gies of non-exploitative economies and teaching.
The first example comes from my own researchon “Mapping the Solidarity Economy in the UnitedStates,” which is an NSF-funded collaborationamong university professors, undergraduate andgraduate student researchers, and community-based organizations that advocate for solidarityeconomy practices. The other example is teachingcritical GIS in the university classroom, as I havedone for many years in my “GIS applications insocial geography” class which most recently in-cluded mapping aspects of the solidarity economy.
Both examples share important characteristics.First, they envision social transformation as anongoing process as opposed to an all-encompassingand singular event. Second, they strategically usethe ontological power of maps (Pavlovskaya 2009)which, through map-based visualization, trans-forms the already-existing but invisible alternativelivelihoods into visible and “real” practices withinsocio-economic landscapes. Third, by affirmingthrough mapping the presence of progressive live-lihoods that people are already engaged in, want tolearn about more, and seek to share, both projectsattempt to activate new social imaginaries. Thisevokes a prefigurative politics that actualize possi-bility by fostering and engaging with desired socialpractices. Fourth, map authors (our research teamand teams of students working on class projects)and mapped subjects (solidarity economy partic-ipants) are collective actors. Mapping here worksto encourage cooperation among those who aremapping on behalf of and together with those whoare being mapped. Community organizations par-ticipate in research design and data collection,students work as research assistants and also learnabout and analyze geographic patterns of solidarityeconomy in the GIS class, while these and otheranalytical results are shared not only in academicvenues, but alsowith community participants and inpublic forums. The ongoing fusion of research andteaching conducted as non-hierarchically as possi-ble, has enriched the quality of both projects. Theresulting mapping practices often generate social
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6 Marianna Pavlovskaya
transformations which are yet to be understood(Snyder and St. Martin 2015; St. Martin and Olson2017). I will now discuss the two projects in greaterdetail and then turn to their synergies.
Mapping the solidarity economy
Solidarity economy can be broadly defined aseconomic practices that do not pursue profit-maximization or wealth per se, but rather supportlivelihoods. They prioritize an ethics of cooperationand mutual support such that people and planetare valued above profits. Solidarity economy practi-tioners advocate for collective ownership, work-place democracy, inclusion along all dimensions ofdifference, and social justice. Solidarity economyis also an international movement with strongparticipation in South America (e.g., Brazil andArgentina) and Europe (e.g., France, Spain, Italy)(see Miller 2010; Borowiak 2015; Borowiak et al.2017; Safri et al.,forthcoming).
Our research demonstrates that, in the US, thesolidarity economy also exists and makes apositive impact on workers’ lives and communi-ties. However, it is invisible within dominanteconomic statistics and models. Solidarity-basedpractices are not considered because they are notmeasured; they have no place in the US economiclandscapes or within the country’s social imagi-nary dominated by capitalism. The Americanpublic is unaware that any proximate solidarityeconomy exists. Mainstream economic educationand public discourse focus almost exclusively onprivate enterprise and market economy, and theyassume that all economic actors (individuals,enterprises, and corporations) share or aspire toa profit maximizing behaviour. Compared to thescale and size of a presumably all-encompassingcapitalist economy, other alternative economicpractices are treated as either insignificant,complementary to capitalism, or a deviationfrom the norm with no future. It is in this contextthat my colleagues and I began working on theproject “Mapping the Solidarity Economy in theUnited States.” Our major goal is to address thediscursive silencing and resulting ontologicalabsence of progressive non-capitalist economicforms. We aim to produce solidarity economy,together with interested actors outside the acade-mia, as an ontological entity that would become asubject of theory, policy, and action (Safri et al.,
forthcoming; Borowiak et al. 2017). Importantly, weforeground the spatiality of the solidarity economy;making visible geographies of alternative economicpractices within the social landscapes of the USworks toproduce apublic discourseon the solidarityeconomy where none had previously existed. Whilethe final product is a map, we understand mappingbroadly, as including the entireprocess, interactions,and negotiations that produce the maps and theirfuture digital and social lives (c.f. Del Casino andHanna 2006).
Over the course of several years, we have workedas a research collective that includes four projectPIs (political scientist Dr. Craig Borowiak fromHaverford College; geographer Dr. Stephen Healy,a Research Fellow at the Institute for Cultureand Society at Western Sydney University; econo-mist Dr. Maliha Safri at Drew University; andmyself, a geographer at Hunter College and CUNYGraduate center); one professional activist/orga-nizer Dr. Emily Kawano, economist and a Coordina-tor of the United States Solidarity EconomyNetwork; a dozen undergraduate and graduatestudent researchers funded at various stages ofthe project; and several community-based organiza-tions that support worker co-ops, housing co-ops,credit unions, artist collectives, Community Sup-ported Agriculture (CSA) networks, communitygardens, and others. This collective effort is work-ing to map the collective subject of solidarityeconomy at the national level, as well as at finerscales in New York City, Philadelphia, and WesternMassachusetts, our case study sites.
The theoretical entry into the project is a diverseeconomies framework (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006;Gibson-Graham et al. 2013) that starts with theontological assumption that the economy (likegender, identity, sexuality) is always heterogeneous,despite the hegemony that particular forms gain.Even the US, always assumed to be a singularlycapitalist society, includes class processes thatexemplify non-capitalist forms of exploitation(e.g., unpaid housework in a patriarchal household)and those that are based on an ethics of solidarity(e.g., worker cooperatives). The hegemonic positionof theories of capitalism in research and policy,called by Gibson-Graham “capitalocentrism,” drawsour attention always toward capitalist logics andinstitutions while simultaneously making invisibleany alternative class processes or economic forms—despite their ubiquity and significant contribution
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GIS for social transformation 7
to livelihoods not just in developing or not-yet-fullycapitalist countries, but also in the US. While not allforms of economic diversity are progressive(e.g., slavery), we can identify, assess the role of,and theorize the current and future significance ofthose non-exploitative economies that foregroundthe wellbeing of local, national, and global com-munities (what Gibson-Graham calls “communityeconomies”).
We have discovered that putting together the dataon solidarity economy at the national scale, andmapping such data in meaningful ways, is indeed aformidable undertaking. Given the hegemony ofan understanding of “the” economy as singularlycapitalist, the realm of solidarity economy is largelyinvisible and informal; few statistics exist evenabout its widely spread formal components (e.g.,worker cooperatives), which are lumped togetherwith capitalist enterprises. Our research had to startfrom scratch and faced epistemological and meth-odological challenges at all stages. The first big stepincluded organizing our conceptual thinking in theform of a typology of the US solidarity economy.Although some of its components were to somedegree studied in the past, they have always beenunderstood separately and we sought to bring themtogether into an evolving and expanding entity.
Table 1 presents our typology of solidarityeconomy. This typology is by no means exhaustivebecause our project also seeks to stimulate socialimagination and creativity rather than provide afinal blueprint and conceptual closure. We used ourtypology as a guide for researching sources of datathat would provide us with the spatial informationneeded for mapping.
Table 1 makes it clear, however, that solidarityeconomy comes in many forms. Some of theseforms, such as worker cooperatives and creditunions, can be mapped once the data are acquired,while other forms are hard or impossible to mapusing available cartographic tools. This is thejuncture where new digital mapping and geovisual-ization technologies could make a contributionby finding new ways to visualize these phenomena.For example, household labourwhich, dependingoncontext, can express solidarity instead of patriar-chal exploitation cannot be easily and directlymapped to household location because it is notmeasured by statistics. Its non-monetized andinformal nature requires special research while,for example, household income that expresses wagerelation is part of the standard census dataset. Yetother forms of solidarity economy do not have alocation, such as community lending networks, timebanks, or even Mexican hometown associations,formal organizations that often operate via socialmedia (Smyth 2015, 2017). As a result, the databaseof solidarity economy that we have built is largelypartial and biased toward the formal institutionswith a precise geographic location because this iswhat gets counted and mapped with availabletechnologies. Nevertheless, it allowed us to analyzeselected geographies of solidarity economy andcreate a public internet-based platform that incor-porates the segment of the solidarity economy forwhich we found the data (Figure 1).
The resulting interactive and searchable mapwith over 25,000 entries is located at www.solidarityeconomy.us. Being present in this Geowebspace makes the solidarity economy visible to
Table 1Typology of solidarity economy in the United States.
Consumption Production Finance Exchange Governance
researchers, participants, and the general public.As participants can now become aware of eachother using this map, one potential effect of thisproject might be that they, then, support eachother through the development of supply chainswithin the solidarity economy. For example, aworker cooperative in the cleaning industry mightorder supplies from manufacturers that are alsoworker cooperatives and food from a pizza workerco-op or a CSA farm. The public platform also hasthe capability for solidarity economy participantsto add themselves to the map. Thus, it being onlya front-end for the evolving realms of solidarityeconomy, we hope that the map will continue toevolve long after our research project ends. We alsohope that the map will invigorate imaginationsabout economic possibility and continue to expandontologies of solidarity economy.
As alreadymentioned, themap is currently biasedtoward formal institutions because of the absenceof metrics for the solidarity economy in US statis-tics. Gaps in data collection, as well as the informal,non-monetized, and non-locational nature of many
solidarity economy practices, also contribute togaps in representation. It would take years ofresearch and creative visualization to map all typesof solidarity economies. Although mapping standsfor the host of activities comprising research, socialinteraction, technology, and teaching, it provides aninvigorating, but not the only, way to create spacefor solidarity economy within the public discourse.In fact, we think of this mapping initiative as thebeginning of and impetus for conversations andfuture research projects concerning the solidarityeconomy. It certainly cannot be disentangled but isdifferent from other research methods used by ourteam to shed light on the meaning of solidarityeconomyand its role in supporting livelihoods, suchas participant observation, surveys, and in-depthinterviews with its participants. It is also connectedto the other modes by which we disseminatedinformation about our research, including analyti-cal briefs for worker co-op organizations, presenta-tions at the academic conferences and to themembers of the community, and incorporation ofideas about solidarity economy into teaching.
Figure 1Screen shot of the solidarity economy website map and directory.SOURCE: www.solidarityeconomy.us. Reproduced with permission of Emily Kawano, Craig Borowiak, and Maliha Safri.
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TeachingTeaching is a powerful transformative practice.Teaching students to see and map the world as adiverse economic landscape presents itself asanother opportunity to engage in social transfor-mation with GIS. While I raise the topic of solidarityeconomy in many classes, it is in the course “GISapplications in social geography” where studentscan most clearly see the link between spatialknowledge production and social transformation;indeed, the case of the solidarity economy com-bined with a critical GIS perspective makes themacutely aware of the progressive and social justicepotentials of mapping projects.
In a recent class, as part of their final projects,students worked with our solidarity economy data-sets. They worked in teams and had to collectivelyparticipate in all stages of the mapping process andlearn to take advantage of their mutual strengths.Each teamconsisted of undergraduate and graduatestudents with different levels of expertise in socialtheory and GIS. These differences necessitated andgenerated productive discussions among the stu-dents about the phenomena they were mappingand about what and how to represent them on themap. The final posters and submitted reports had toexamine the phenomenon itself, including itshistory and geography; explain the nature of dataand how well they do or do not represent particularqualities of solidarity economy; and find creativeways to analyze the available data as well asvisualize and explain its spatial patterns at nationaland local scales.
Four student teams mapped different aspectsof solidarity economy: the national geography ofworker cooperatives; the national geography ofcredit unions; the geography ofworker cooperativesin New York City; and the geography of solidarityeconomy in Philadelphia (New York and Philadel-phia being two of our research sites). The postersthat students produced then became part of aposter session on the last day of class (see Figure 2for a poster example). These posters have, for thestudents, reinforced the visual power of mappingand, importantly, made students feel their own rolein the creation of an ontology of solidarity economy.During the poster session, they engaged each otherin conversations with great care and insight becausethey all now shared a technical and critical knowl-edge of GIS, were versed in its potential socialimpact, and understood the politics of mapping.
They could all talk about their struggles with data-sets, categorization of data, the emerging patterns,and other key issues, and they all knew what ittook to create their maps and posters as part of acooperative and supportive team. Importantly, how-ever, students also became quite knowledgeableabout the subjects of solidarity economy; for exam-ple, although they had no idea what worker cooper-atives and credit unions were at the beginning of theclass, by the end of the course they knewmuchmoreabout their geographies than the location alone.
Spatial patterns of solidarity economy generatedin class corroborated some of the most surprisingfindings from the larger research project. Oneunexpected conclusion was that the professionaland middle classes use and thus benefit morefrom certain types of the solidarity economy thanmore marginalized groups (Pavlovskaya 2017a).Examples of this include employment-based creditunions and worker cooperatives, albeit with somenotable exceptions. As we did ourselves, mystudents initially expected to find solidarity econ-omy primarily in low-income and minority areas. Inthe case of Philadelphia, however, the studentsdiscovered that it was concentrated in middle-classneighbourhoods (see Borowiak et al. 2017) whichmade them critical of solidarity economy outcomes.The students interpreted the absence of solidarityeconomy in the neighbourhoods where it was mostneeded as evidence of a compromised commitmentto social justice.
This counter-intuitive finding pushedme to thinkmore about the nature of solidarity economy andrecognize that it is not a monolithic construct,but rather a set of diverse economies. Solidarityeconomy practices pursue similar ethical goals butoriginate in different settings and spaces, andinclude people with different histories, objectives,and imaginations. In most cases, they are grass-roots initiatives that emerge where people have aneed but also where there are sufficient resourcesand capacities to organize economic lives in a newway. In the US, building alternative economies isparticularly hard because the capitalocentrism ofthe mainstream economy plays down the currentrole and potential of solidarity economy and makesit hard to take it off the ground.
For example, only formal profit-oriented enter-prises count as the economy while many informalsocially embedded and ethical economic practicesthat support livelihoods on a daily basis in all kinds
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10 Marianna Pavlovskaya
of communities, and especially in the low-incomeones, are not included in economic statistics (e.g.,gift economies, community lending, family child-care, etc.). For the purposes ofmapping and analysisthey are invisible and do not lend themselves to thetraditional forms of cartographic representation.In fact, one could claim (and this is to be verifiedby our future research) that lower-income areasdepend more than other neighbourhoods on theseforms of solidarity economy that cannot be easilyvisualized.
Legal and labour regulatory frameworks in theUS also consider capitalist enterprise to be a norm.Consequently, it is logistically harder to set upa worker cooperative than a private enterprise.
Formalizing solidarity economy into worker co-ops,credit unions, and community gardens requireslogistical, time, and expert resources that aremore accessible to professional and middle classes.That solidarity economy initiatives can successfullyspread around wealth and create secure economicenvironments is clearly understood by the middleclass, that has resources to organize itself into theseeconomic forms (Pavlovskaya 2017a). While thisis another item for future research agenda, there isa clear need, therefore, to channel greater resourcesinto the creation of formal solidarity economyinstitutions in low-income communities and lendsupport to the informal solidarity initiativesthere as well. These heterogeneous geographies
Figure 2Example of a poster produced by the students: Geography of worker cooperatives in the United States.SOURCE: Students in the “GIS applications in social geography” class: Patrick Hanly, Alexander Sandy, Angelika Winner, and Kyle Winslow.
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GIS for social transformation 11
generated discussions about the meaning of spatialpatterns and the need for careful research thatwould explain them.
Finally, the classroom projects and discussionsdo indeed stimulate student imagination andgenerate their interest in non-capitalist economicforms that can potentially result in social transfor-mation. Several MA students wrote their theseson issues related to solidarity economy (e.g., workercooperatives, credit unions, consumer coopera-tives, food security and community gardens, andMexican hometown associations). One PhD studenthas a long-term interest in studying genderedaspects and regional geographies of solidarityeconomy (Hudson 2017). Several undergraduatestudents, too, have examined its spaces and pat-terns as part of their capstone experience (see thelist of recent topics in Table 2). Almost all studentshave used GIS to visualize geographic patterns ofsolidarity economy. Students also delivered numer-ous presentations, within academia and to the
community, on the subject of solidarity economy(recent student presentations are also listed inTable 2). Moreover, some graduate students havealready published or are about to publish theirresearch in top geography journals (Smyth 2017).Thus, students have contributed in a variety of waysto the process of creating ontologies of solidarityeconomy through their class projects and researchthat revolved around mapping with a GIS.
In the end, students understand that the progres-sive non-hegemonic practices and phenomenado exist but in order to make them part ofour collective imaginations, we need to be able tosee and recognize them as such. They also becomeinterested in finding out ways to participate in thesepractices. Similar to my students, many people inthe US would consider these economic alternativesa possibility once they were able to see them—bothon the map and as part of the social imaginary—asa viable and future looking practice. As the realiza-tion grows that, in contrast to the neoliberalized
Table 2Topics of student research projects inspired by solidarity economy mapping at Hunter College.
Topic Type Year/venue
Struggles of narrative and space in New York City’s solidarityeconomy
PhD student, conferencepresentation
The Annual Meeting of the AAG, Boston,MA, April 5––9, 2017
Evaluation of community gardens within the NYC metropolitanarea
Undergraduate Honours thesis 2016
Alternative childcare and single parent households inPhiladelphia
Undergraduate Capstone project 2016
Community gardens as part of NYC solidarity economy Undergraduate Capstone project 2016Poster #026: Credit union practices in mortgage lending: Non-
capitalist alternatives up to and through the "GreatRecession"
MA student, conference postersession
The Annual Meeting of the AAG, SanFrancisco, CA, March 29––April 2, 2016
Collectivities and the solidarity economy: Struggles over thenarrative of a movement
PhD student, conferencepresentation
The Challenging Collectivities Conferenceat Goethe University, Frankfurt, 2016
New York City: Struggles over the narrative of the solidarityeconomy
PhD student, conferencepresentation
The Annual Meeting of the AAG, SanFrancisco, CA, March 29––April 2, 2016
Making Puebla York: Diaspora spaces of Mexican hometownassociations in New York City
MA/PhD student, conferencepresentation
Making the City in Latin AmericaSymposium, University of Kentucky, 2016
Tensions and solidarity in collective remittance sending:Mexican hometown associations in New York City
MA/PhD student, conferencepresentation
The Annual Meeting of the AAG, SanFrancisco, CA, March 29––April 2, 2016
Spaces of solidarity: Mexican hometown associations in NewYork City
MA student, invited researchpresentation
The Society of Women Geographers NewYork City Chapter at Hunter College, 2016
Mexican hometown associations in New York City: A study oftransnational solidarity
MA thesis 2015
Alternative food networks in New York City Undergraduate Honours project 2014Geography of cooperative enterprises in the United States MA thesis 2013Credit unions: An alternative financial model MA research paper 2012Facing the food crisis: The political economy of alternative
agriculture projectsMA thesis 2010
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12 Marianna Pavlovskaya
capitalist enterprise, solidarity economies are capa-ble of providing working people with secure live-lihoods, the social transformation is ongoing.Mapping different alternatives to capitalism in thespirit of critical GISmeans doing it as part of a largercritical inquiry andperformed social practice. Doingso would continue to generate desire for post-capitalist economy, while also expanding the spaceof social imagination and creativity for its new andyet unknown forms.
Conclusion
I conclude this essay with the claim that critical GIScan enable social transformation in important ways.Critical GIS scholarship makes it explicit that mapsare not neutral knowledge statements, but ratherare powerful and empowering practices. In fact,maps possess ontological power; being part of thesocial process, they produce the worlds insteadof simply reflecting them (Pavlovskaya 2006;Crampton and Krygier 2005). With the advent ofGIS, digital and internet-basedmapping has becomea widely spread, socially involved, and technology-reliant practice that generates new ontologies andremakes places (Pavlovskaya 2016). These qualitiesturn maps and mapping practices into tools forsocial transformation that can shift the balance ofpower. In particular, they can promote economicchange by visualizing spaces of the existing pro-gressive economies that are marginalized by thedominant capitalocentric discourses. Maps, and thecollaborations through which they are made, un-derstood, and used, spur myriads of changes thatare open-ended and take place in multiple sites.Making room on the map of the US economy for theexisting alternatives to capitalism also enlarges thefield of possibility because it invites economic andsocial creativity by indicating that there is alwaysspace for new imaginations. I attempted to illustratethese potentials of critical cartographic and GISpractices by drawing on examples frommy researchwith colleagues on the solidarity economy in the USand my teaching that incorporates the insight fromthis research.
Over the course of the last several years, ourresearch project has generated a database of thesolidarity economy, an open and interactive publicinternet-based map, productive collaborations withcommunity-based organizations and participants
of the solidarity economy, and close cooperationwith undergraduate and graduate students, bothwithin and outside the classroom, around criticalcartography and GIS-based mapping. These experi-ences indicate that mapping in the spirit of criticalGIS can indeed be transformative as part of researchand teaching.
First, mapping ontologies of solidarity economyat the national and local scales and making theviable and already existing alternatives to capital-ism visible would hopefully help people to increasetheir economic security by practicing economicsolidarity. Second, it would acknowledge andhonour struggles of people who create non-capitalist economy on a daily basis and transferproperty, land, and labour outside the realm ofcapitalism and into the realms of solidarity andethical use. Third, it allowed students and myselfto better understand who participates in solidarityeconomy and why it brings tangible benefits tothose involved. Fourth, the research opened upquestions about whether today’s solidarity econ-omy can provide a path towards post-capitalismand become a basis of a broad movement, oneanalogous to the ongoing feminist revolutionwhich is individual in practice, yet global in scope(see Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Finally, we havebeen forced to think about how mapping can spursocial imaginations beyond already existing formsof economy (e.g., capitalism) and become a wayto enable a diverse and widely ranging politics ofpossibility.
The significance of revealing geographies ofsolidarity economy lies in the fact that it isan important site of class transformation today.Although the matter is complex, the relations ofproduction and distribution are changed oncepropertymoves fromprivate tocollectiveownership,and workers begin to appropriate their own surplusand/or control its distribution, make decisionscollectively, and create strategies for preservingworkplaces. In other words, they create viableeconomies that do not seek profit-maximizationbut instead secure livelihoods, while also radicallytransforming the society before our eyes. It isexcitingtosee thatcriticalGIScanmakeameaningfulcontribution to this transformation by being part ofhuman geographic research and pedagogy. Puttinggeographiesofhopeandcareonthemapisacounter-mapping practice that sets limits to conservativegeographies. At the same time, once on the map, the
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GIS for social transformation 13
newworlds ofwhich geographies of hope can bepartdo indeed feel possible.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the American Association of Geographerspanel organizers and editors of this special issue Luke Bergman,Jim Thatcher, and David O’Sullivan; my critical GIS colleagueswho now include several generations of academics; and myHunter College and CUNY Graduate Center students who sharean excitement for GIS, social theory, and progressive politics.I am especially grateful to those undergraduate and graduatestudents who over the years did wonderful work in my “GISapplications in social geography” class and those who passion-ately combined insights from critical GIS and critical humangeography with spatial analysis and mapping while working ontheir projects, independent studies, MA theses, and disserta-tions. Many thoughts articulated in this paper also emergedthrough collaboration with my solidarity economy researchcolleagues Craig Borowiak (Haverford College), Stephen Healy(University of West Sydney), Maliha Safri (Drew University), andEmily Kawano (U.S. Solidarity EconomyNetwork). I am grateful toKevin St. Martin and the anonymous reviewers for comments thatimproved this paper, aswell as toTheCanadianGeographer stafffor excellent editorial support. Parts of the research describedhere were supported by the NSF award #BCS-1340030 andPSC-CUNY awards #67762-00 45.
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