Las políticas de contra-mapeo o hackear espacios y abrir códigos: Historias de producciones cartográficas por parte de movimientos sociales urbanos

Abstract:

"Do-It-Yourself mapping have become a tool among contemporary struggles. The Counter-Cartographies Collective (3Cs) have released a series of critical disorientation guides to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
These counter-maps of 3cs were explicitly aimed at acting as an interface of a particular space, that of the university. The goal was to open it up, getting into the program (in this case, an engrained spatial understanding and reified uses of the campus), in order to decode and recode that space; the map becoming a malicious add-on.
The aim was decoding the spatial understanding of the university, in particular the generalized notion in the US of the university as an ivory-tower, isolated from other social realities and constructed as an unreal space separated from surrounding material networks at the local-urban, regional, and transnational scales.

Mapping the university to disrupt the standard spacious programming becomes a prototype that is reproducing both in other urban campuses -CUNY in NYC and QueenMary in London. Also, the cultural practice of counter-mapping is traveling as a tool in other related struggles, particularly around the effects of gentrification and restrictive migration/border policies.

These counter-maps are product of assembly-based processes, caring for the processual details involved in collective and decentralized knowledge production.

The open-code politics of the mapping practices are also challenged by the timing requisites and the technological learning curve that a cartographic project involves.

Our participation in the workshop of "The City as Open Interface" would engage the Intersections of mapping and resistance practices in the production of counter urban territories." By Maribel Casas and Sebastian Cobarrubias.