The democratic stakes of mapmaking: a cross-community panel

Room: Talks II - Amphi Bienvenüe (Bienvenüe)

Friday, 11:50
Duration: 60 minutes (plus Q&A)

Language: en

• Matthieu Chatry

Every map embeds choices: what to show, what to omit, what to centre, who is included as a stakeholder, who decides on the legend. Most of these choices are invisible to the people who use the resulting maps as inputs into their daily lives — and into democratic decisions, from a local town-planning vote to a national policy debate.

This panel asks who, and through what processes, should be in charge of those choices, and how communities like OpenStreetMap, official mapping agencies and emerging civic-cartographic movements can collectively raise the democratic stakes of mapmaking.

Animated by a moderator and three to four panelists from complementary horizons :

• an OSM contributor and community member;
• a public-sector cartographer;
• a researcher in critical, sensitive, radical or counter cartography
• a civic-tech or popular-education actor

The discussion will explore:

• Map-making as a civic act: when is mapping a form of citizenship, and what would it take for map-reading to become one too?

• The role of national mapping agencies in opening up their data, infrastructure and methods to civil society - what to expect

• The OSM model as a democratic experiment: its strengths, its limits, its blind spots, and what it could learn from other community-cartography traditions (counter-cartography, indigenous mapping, popular-education mapping).