Recently I had the privilege of reading two books that occupy ground at the relative forefront of their respective fields. These books were “Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory” edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins; and “Qualitative GIS: A mixed methods approach” edited by Meghan Cope and Sarah Elwood. The fields represented by such work could be said to be Critical Cartography and Critical GIS respectively, however despite these two emergent traditions it is quite clear that there exists a lot of crossover and a lot of potential for crossover between them.

Critical Cartography is a catch-all for a set of mapping practices that engage critical theory. As a basic summary, analysis in critical Cartography aims to uncover the hidden social power structures operating within mappings; such intent derives from the post-positivist work of neo-marxists in the late 70s but is more commonly associated nowadays with the postmodern and poststructuralists. The origins of this kind of work are collected in the work of J. Brian Harley (see for example – “The new nature of maps: Essays in the history of cartography”), such an approach to mapping has since been supplemented, or surpassed, to include a broad number of critical readings of maps, notably focusing on characteristics such as process and practice, and reconceiving of mappings as inscriptions, propositions, part of the actor-network (see Latour’s work on Actor Network Theory) and more broadly as a suite of cultural practices.

Work Relating to Maps as Propositions. Source: Krygier J and Wood D (2009) "Ce n'est pas le monde (This is not the world)" in Dodge M, Kitchin R and Perkins C (Eds) "Rethinking Maps: New frontiers in cartographic theory" Routledge, London. Available as full-text pdf: http://makingmaps.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/ce_n_est_pas_le_monde.pdf

Critical GIS has a very similar remit to Critical Cartography, using critical theory to investigate the use of GIS. The work that sparked most interest in the discipline was John Pickles’ “Ground Truth: The Social implications of Geographic Information Systems” which was both conceived in conjunction with, and later dedicated to, the late J. Brian Harley.

Already is is clear that this two disciplines are not exactly distinct, the same man having played a significant role in work that could be recognised a precursors to the academic development of each. A loose distinction that works for me in identifying the notional difference between the two disciplinary areas is that critical cartography is dealing with in a sense a complete map, the maps is thus deconstructed or viewed in terms of the practices used in its creation, fundamentally however a map is a composition, notionally an image which is pre-constituted. In comparison a GIS is about layers, in a sense it is the ‘exploded-view’ of a map, whereas a map is ‘coherent’ as a single layer of image, a GIS may be incoherent in a number of ways, most significantly by: the layers that are included in a GIS visualisation; and the extent of the view chosen for any particular data set (often the data in a GIS actually ‘goes of the edge’ of a map). Such a view is only partial however, mapping practices, particularly those that embrace the movement towards crowd-sourced data and web mapping 2.0, are dynamic and so the boundaries between such a view of cartography and GIS are greatly blurred. Certainly it is true that in a vast majority of applications cartography is the output of a process started by GIS, thus the two are closely coupled, even in situations where a GIS may not have led to the creation of a map the practices may echo those used in a GIS.

Looking at the broader strokes of how the two disciplinary areas give shape to their discourse it is evident that there exist some generalisations that could be seen as distinct, Critical Cartography seems to align itself with the ‘everyday’ and the visual, whereas Critical GIS is concerned, as Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) is, with ‘local knowledge’ and the ‘community’. The differences between such elements are largely unremarkable however, and I suggest that the practice of choosing to define a criticism of either GIS or Cartography is largely reaching a middle ground in which researchers are more than happy to contribute to a broader critique of mappings and geospatial technologies unfettered by arbitrary sub-disciplinary definition. Such authors, including, but not limited to: Jeremy Crampton, Stuart Aitken, Martin Dodge, Meghan Cope and Mei-Po Kwan are to be lauded for such an approach.

I’ve been thinking about populations recently, perhaps unsurprisingly after the recent PopFest conference, nevertheless I tend to justify the presence of certain groups as characteristics of particular neighbourhoods or communities. In itself this seems entirely valid, certainly no population is perfectly homogeneous, they exist along a spectrum of heterogeneity. We can see simply from our own experience of the world that some areas exhibit spectacular diversity of inhabitants, particularly urban areas, my case study area of Southwark, London springs to mind. Situated in central London, south of the River Thames it contains a population that spans the inequality divide from the wealthy, young, City workers resident along the redeveloping ‘Bankside’ and the older, settled familied of the leafier southern part of Southwark, to the poorer, often non-white, communties in central Southwark living in social housing, to the poorer, older white residents historically attached to the docklands to the north-east of Southwark. Notably rural areas tend toward greater homogeneity, but still exhibit some diversity in some characteristics even if others, particularly ethnicity are constant.

This is, however, not the point, the real issue is the difference between neighbourhoods and communities. Both are very difficult to define clearly, my snap judgement is that communities realte to people and neighbourhoods to the territories that people inhabit. However some deeper research will show cracks in this simplistic approach, sure neighbourhood usually relates to a metric space, things that are near to, or contiguous to something else, however creating neighbourhoods for individuals seems like an approach to constructing communities for those individuals, likewise geodemographic classifications are increasingly being conflated with indicating something signifcant about the underlying communities. Similarly, communities occupy particular areas, the practice of mapping communities which come from government requirements seeks to territorialise community and new pratcices in public service causes further confusion: community policing for safer neighbourhoods?

The main rule that I have been able to extract from much of this is the propensity for communties to represent a ‘softer’, perhaps more public facing approach and conversely, by neighbourhoods a ‘harder’, more quantified method is often implied. There are notable splits within the disipline of geography between those who are willing to engage ‘communities’, which are intangible, temporally variable, socially realised relationships (perhaps) and come with the baggage of uncertainty and those that would rather deal with the geographically discrete entity of the neighbourhood, safe in the knowledge that the implied precision of areal units are not widely questioned. Even within GIS there has been a diversification of approach, from the mainstream GISci enforcing a ‘spatial science’-style approach that has persisted since the quantitative revolution (at least), to the public participation GIS discourse which actively engages communities and individuals, and by extension critical GIS which for a time has critiqued territorially bounded ‘descriptions’ of community. Finally consider the governmental binary of ‘neighbourhood statistics’ and ‘community cohesion’, many councils use neighbourhood statistics to ‘measure’ community cohesion!