Maps of urban practices
Introduction
Social cartography is a collective, horizontal and participatory method of producing social maps. This particularity, which at first glance seems to respond to the current fashion in intervention and research methods, rescues the oldest modes of construction and production of maps: the collective.
For López Trigal,
For Alfredo Carballeda").
While the traditional map is born regulated and rests on the paradigm of representation, the social map") is made by consensus on the experience lived on a common plane; for its part, the traditional is created vertically and the social is produced horizontally. However, both share the problem of the power of cartography given that the cartographer is a social subject, immersed in political interests that shape the social reality of his time, his knowledge does not It is neither neutral nor impartial, it is inserted in the plots of power and its knowledge is instrumentalized by it.
Therefore, in social cartography, the cartographer is collective; That is, there is no cartography without community. This collectivization involves the objects and actions existing in space being shared and exchanged. Thus, each member of the workshop notices new objects and new actions. The social cartographers of the "social map" are learners of their own space; a space that at the same time they are producing. These are participatory maps (see table 1), in which community knowledge is configured.
Table 1: Criteria to identify and denote participatory maps in Participatory Cartography.
Source: Barragán[3].
Currently, social cartography has a great development in Latin America, where the contributions of Montoya Arango stand out; Kastrup and Passos.
Methodology
The work devices may vary, based on the different approaches that each work group has. However, it is considered that the process of creating the device is always collective; Whether it is a process of social intervention, research and/or extension, all the steps of the device will be discussed and agreed upon by the community.[9].
Within the methodological elements, a course is used. The course is “a sequence of mappable and referenceable aspects with a scenic order that can be systematized.” This can be seen as a “referentiality” that collaborates as a guide with the construction of the text-map and with its reading. The route is the symbolic code that will allow the design of the social cartography. At the same time, the objective of the work, the recipients and everything that wishes to be socialized with the social cartographers is made explicit. In this way, the route constitutes the central guide for the thematization, discussion and production of the social map. In this we work with a “layers” format that They are differentiated with colors. Each of them can include a sub-theme or element to be mapped. Thus, it functions as a guide in the "drift" in situationalist terms") that the cartographic method provides, since it is not a strict and fixed guide, but rather the tracing of a direction along which the discussion and the work that the map will produce will go.[10].