A counter-map cannot be reduced to a visual artefact but is preceded by experiences, activities and doings. Theorists Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle believe that a risk in working with maps is that the fetishes of scale and precision can captivate one to the point that they “smooth over the world’s contradictions”[1] and thus constitute an obstacle to the mapping itself.1 Based on such assumption, this text focuses therefore on mapping as process rather than the map as outcome. With examples taken from our work in the collective SIFAV Söderorts[2] Institut För Andra Visioner (Southern District’s Institute for Other Visions), we want to show methods that, in retrospect, can be considered as parts of a critical cartography or counter-cartography.

During the years we operated as SIFAV, we were dedicated to the self-imposed mission of exploring methods and languages ​​for thinking life, place and city beyond four-year policy cycles and its dominant economies and discourses. We tried a variety of working methods and expressions with the aim of jointly (re-)learning about the city and the commons. Among other things, we wanted to let Stockholm’s city sell-offs and privatisations, packaged in a story of brilliant future prospects, meet the experiences of living in the city under the policies pursued. The bringing together of these poles became important, not to dissolve the conflicts but rather to measure out a territory that made the conflicts visible. When money flows, language and values ​​were drawn into our bodies, homes and streetscapes on a level both visible and invisible to the eye, we strove to try to understand the geography and make it legible. Two of the methods in our varied repertoire became cut-up workshops and city walks. In this retrospective text, we will situate them in a tradition of critical cartography which not only gives our practice a history but also a yet undetermined future. The fact that in this text we use the map – or rather the mapping – as a tool to highlight the practices, can be further justified by how our work originated in a combination of images of and stories about places, and that these were presented as ‘objectively’ desirable and true even though they were entirely ideological—in the same way that maps have an inherent claim to objectivity even though they are always ideological products. Our interest in counter-cartography can also be motivated by the fact that we sought to find other ways to navigate in an unwanted world order in unwanted change. This text thus becomes a way to test the idea of ​​mapping as a tool for creating and thinking otherwise.

Critical cartography, counter-cartography or counter-mapping are terms for mapping practices that are based on the basic assumption that maps and mapping both reflect and create social power relations. The starting point is that the creation of maps, both geographical and other, can be consciously used to study power and propose new power arrangements, and thus also challenge ways of thinking and action patterns. Maps not only help us navigate but also create discursive, mental and political spaces. While the hegemonic map reproduces bird’s-eye views and Eurocentric approaches to the world, counter-cartographies can be summarily said to insist on both situated knowledge and more egalitarian spatial relations. It can therefore be about looking for visual representations beyond what Donna Haraway called “the god trick” – that is, the idea of ​​the disembodied gaze – by showing, in different ways, how the mapping was made and where it departs from. Cartographic strategies can be used to question and challenge dominant ways of understanding place and spatial relations. Such an exploration of the possibilities of representing a place also raises questions about what can actually be called a map.

If a map often represents something and aims to be analogous to specific conditions in a specific place, its being, then the project of counter-cartography is often to follow networks of events and relations, how the place is made. The sociologist W.E.B. Dubois’s hand-painted data visualisations of living conditions for blacks in the United States around the turn of the last century, and geographer William Bunge’s cartographic practices in 1960s Detroit, are both examples of successful attempts to create context by connecting events, places, economies and discourses that are otherwise kept separate. Today, critical cartography has developed into a well-established artistic and activist research method and spans from MIT architect Laura Kurgan’s data-saturated mapping of the American prison industry, to artists Marianne Lindberg de Geer’s or Minna L. Henriksson’s personal mapping of social relations in local art worlds and mapping projects of a participant-based, collective nature such as Nermin Elsherif’s project “The Other Maps of Egypt”, where residents of Port Said in Cairo are invited to jointly redraw the history of their neighbourhood.

Counter-cartography as a method and tradition of doing comes largely from post-colonial practices of “mapping back”. The concept of counter-cartography was coined by the sociologist Nancy Lee Peluso in 1995 when she worked with mapping, together with the indigenous Dayak people in Indonesia, to recover land that had been stolen.

The counter-cartography collective Orangotango highlights in its foreword to their impressive anthology This is Not an Atlas that the mapping struggles of indigenous people shed light on a paradox that often arises in counter-cartography: to be heard and recognized in their claim to land, a holistic understanding of place must be translated into dominant cartographic tools. A counter-cartographic practice therefore means nothing in itself, the risk of instrumentalization is always there, and every attempt must question the relations to the prevailing cartography and examine the possibilities of going beyond and/or positioning oneself in relation to more clichéd and violent visual representations.

As a possible response to these, counter-cartography is often process-oriented and focused on mobilizing specific groups and conducting joint investigations. While counter-cartography thereby breaks with a scientifically specialized view of cartography, both the collection of data and the collective decisions regarding selection become an integral part of the work. Regardless of whether it is about creating open-source coded websites or working out a new iconography by hand, the joint work is a way to democratize cartography’s repertoire of techniques. By emphasizing the creation of place in this way, joint mapping can, at best, reproduce places and cities in their historical contexts and at the same time, through a collective and cognitive process, point to new realities and other ways of organizing space and resources.

On a weekday evening in March 2013, a small crowd gathered around a worn table in the local Tenants Association’s premises in the centre of Hökarängen. There were coffee, scissors, glue sticks and pencils, and the activity of the evening was: cut-up. On the table was a pile of yellow brochures consisting of information material from the City Hall about Stockholm’s “Vision 2030”.[3] The brochures were adorned with a grey-blue logo that proclaimed “Stockholm The Capital of Scandinavia” in English, placed obliquely above the title: “A city in world class”. We took turns reading aloud from the texts while our hands tossed sentences around, tore and rearranged images and text, broke apart and reassembled. Individual words tumbled out and landed like flakes on the table: “attractiveness”, “growth market”, “world famous”, “experience city”. The clichés of place marketing slowly loosened, while the conversation around the table alternated between insecure and enthusiastic speech acts about events taking place in our neighbourhoods in Stockholm’s southern suburbs and their future. The joint work of the hands constituted a quiet protest against the documents’ insistence on agreement, but even more so, they made an attempt to, with the help of words, orient us in a rhetoric that is difficult to understand, to say the least. Through our hands we moved in the landscape to be mapped, but the landscape was at the same time a map, a represented territory, which we both viewed and actively read. During this time, we witnessed the consequences of the selloffs and property speculation in our home neighbourhoods. The jointly owned properties were taken over in record time by private venture capital companies, whose logos were affixed to the facades and corporate flags flew over the centre’s facilities. As the vision documents of the private-public collaborations spoke of “putting places on the map” – as if they were outside – we investigated, based on our experiences and bodies, what such a grid did to the places.

The searching movements of the hands supported us. Women’s history researcher Louise Waldén, who has researched textile study circles, so-called syjuntor (sewing circles), has described the social significance of joint handcrafting and enabling of conversation and community: “Togetherness and conversation are as important a part of the textile circle’s life as the busy hands.”[4] She writes further: “In my circles there was a kind of sonic movement going on all the time, which embedded the work in a warm, relaxed atmosphere. It never disturbed concentration, rather promoted it.”

Our cut-up workshops became a recurring activity, and for each occasion new policy documents or brochures from municipalities, real estate companies, private-public cooperation organizations and brokerage houses were on the table. As in Waldén’s sewing circles, the soundscape of the crafting hands formed a togetherness and background against which counter-languages ​​and counter-maps, and new ways of navigating were slowly invented. During a squatting of an old school building in Högdalen in the spring of 2017, the property owner, Norwegian housing company Veidekke, was the topic of conversation and cut-and-paste material. On another occasion, we read aloud from the list of Sweden’s financial elite while our hands worked with pictures from local newspapers and real estate ads. The compilation became a montage of words and images where the gap between the lived place and real estate capitalism’s marketing of it emerged. In this way, the concrete and the abstract were connected, while the activity distributed agency – a forum for “talking back”, to speak with bell hooks,[5] to counter the more authoritarian narratives.

The collective 3Cs (where the three Cs stand for Critical Cartographies Collective) has coined the concept of autonomous cartography to describe collective mapping practices that promote self-organisation and that have their roots in autonomous politics and militant research methods. Unlike more traditional forms for information campaigns and political work, according to them a joint and non-hierarchical mapping activity can call for critical and reflexive self-organization as well as a situated knowledge production. Therefore, it is well suited for occasions when people want to come together to understand an economic-political structure and organize themselves. If autonomous politics refers to the politics formed from grassroots movements and a notion that politics is made in everyday life and not only through representative politics, and if militant research methods refer to methods that find things out by intervening in real situations, then the concept of autonomous cartography can describe what we did with SIFAV. Much of this work was done in collaboration and dialogue with both arts, academia and activist groups. We depended on the experiences we gained from organising in other groups as well as the larger context of urban social movements with which we were in constant conversation.

By this time, local social movements had emerged in Stockholm’s suburbs, and in our home suburbs they formed precisely along the southbound green lines and reinforced the metro’s cartography – the networks were called Line 17, Line 18 and Line 19. While we participated in these networks, we also wanted to explore the glue, the tears, the seams and the cross stitches between them. If the networks and a large part of the mental geography followed the subway’s thick green lines moving from the centre out to the terminus, then we wanted to see proximity where there was distance and vice versa. It was simply an attempt to draw new lines across as we underlined bus routes 172 and 183, the bike and pedestrian lanes that meander along paths and the forest and sly terrain in between. We asked ourselves: where are the boundaries drawn around a place, where does one place turn into the next? The counter-maps we wanted to draw could never be done at a drawing table or in a software – they depended on and were embedded in a context of rugged bushland and social movements, literally. The materials from the cut-up workshops were incorporated into the series of annual publications we published.[6]

The collage from the evening at the Tenant Association’s premises in Hökarängen, together with a transcription of the conversation from the evening, became a spread in our first free newspaper. It was titled “Everything is privatised and sold out. What remains of our feelings, homes and bodies? We are made into brands, and our voices are not given space. Many stories never become a headline” and released in the Hökarängen centre during the urban struggle week, which during this time was arranged annually by the activist group Allt åt alla (Everything for everyone). The newspaper’s content had been created through study circle-like editorial meetings where we together tried to understand the meaning of and the connections between concepts such as gentrification and property speculation, and their impact on our own lives and relationships. During the release party on a cloudy May evening, the newspaper was read out loud and distributed to everyone who was there and happened to pass by. The paper and its following issues then continued to be distributed for free, site-specifically and locally, often hand-in-hand in connection with public activities that were variously linked to the right to the city. In this way, the circulation of the material also became an integral part of a mapping of activities and places that were exceptions to the logics and economies that otherwise characterize Stockholm.

In his book Geography and Vision (2008), geographer Denis E. Cosgrove divides the cartographic work process into two stages. The first stage is a kind of measurement phase, the second is a compilation phase. What the surveying/measurement phase holds is a parallel collection and production of spatial information. In the past, this phase often took place outdoors: someone walked around and were in immediate contact with the landscape to be mapped. Nowadays, this mostly happens digitally.

Moving through a landscape together, and activating the senses together, also became a part of our creation of counter-maps. SIFAV organised city walks where, among other things, we worked actively to put seemingly separate places in relation to each other. In order to reach beyond our own closest circles, the walks took place in collaboration with activist groups but also universities, study associations and art spaces. Thematically, it could be about connecting Hökarängen and the neighbourhood Hammarby sjöstad, employing the concept of sustainability as a lens. Looking at the two districts’ sustainability initiatives and demographics, a story about class society and a divided city emerged. We also did a series of walks in the southern suburbs as an integral part of study circles at ABF (Workers’ Educational Association), as well as a walk in the wealthy villa suburb of Djursholm where, with our eyes on the super-rich, we dwelled on discourses about ownership and the segregated city. In addition to providing for another way of sharing and mediating the conversations and self-studies we conducted, the walks also became a way to explore and reformulate the (sub)urban space.

Our walks usually started from the centre facilities in Hökarängen, Hagsätra and Högdalen. Once again, we saw the importance of approaching the subway lines crosswise, and thematically these walks attempted to show two different kinds of gentrification processes – in Hökarängen driven by the municipal housing company Stockholmshem, in Högdalen by the private company Citycon and in Hagsätra Ikea-owned Ikano. During the walks, we stopped to look closer at spatial objects and visual details in the built environment, and through them talk about housing policies, finances and ownership. Signage, sand silos, flags and public art became gateways to track both decisions and never-implemented plans. The walks thus intended to dwell on often overlooked stories but also insist on a speculative “what if”, in order to point to the fact that the places we live our lives in every day could function in completely different ways. In line with the map’s ability to both show and hide, we worked with the sign’s duality: what it points to, but also what it conceals. In Hökarängen, we traced the new signs of the local shopkeepers, read the signage program that was developed for the place and put it in relation to Stockholm’s overall vision 2030 as well as the then new law, introduced in 2010 and called Allbolagen. This was pushed forward in the European Court of Justice, which meant that the municipal housing companies could be run according to profit-driven “business principles”. In Högdalen we reenacted the speech that the new property owner’s CEO gave at the reinauguration of the centre (which they named as inauguration, not acknowledging that it was already inaugurated in the 1960s) where it was declaimed that the centre was “dirty, shitty, broken”. To look at how artistic processes in the built environment are often intended to solve social problems, we followed a stone’s throw away, we followed Stockholm Public Art’s (Stockholm konst)[7] first major private-public-partnership project, in this case with the private real estate company Granen, and the municipal so called Exploitation Office and the Sports Administration. As Stockholm Public Art describes it on their website: “The symbolic value of collaboration projects is great because it can concretely serve as a good example that everyone must do their part if we are to build a world-class future Stockholm”. In Roger Andersson’s artwork, shadow figures inspired by former residents appear on red asphalt, which those who have moved into Granen’s new condominiums step on. We also drew attention to the fact that the owner of Granen property development – which has now changed its name to Arwidsro – Per Arwidsson, is an art collector and owns, among other things, early works by Öyvind Fahlström, who can be described as a pioneer precisely within a critical cartographic practice.

The city walks were a grounding practice where feet, eyes and readings were at the centre. As historian and urban researcher Håkan Forsell writes on his blog about city walking as a method: “S/He/They who walk/s must rely on his/her/their own authority; the body, the gaze and the intellect find each other again, and are not kept apart in different institutions. The walk can restore a reality and give a prevailing order of conversation – a discourse, an ideology about the city – its proper proportions. It can see through and normalise: why has a certain built environment been standardised and made history-less, while another is valued and filled with both material and immaterial value?”.[8]

The mentioned yellow brochure “Vision 2030” includes a geographical map with the heading “Stockholm 2030 – a world-class city”. The map is framed by thirty-one information boxes that present projects that “are in line with the vision of a world-class Stockholm”. As a result of the cut-up evening at the Tenants’ Association, we appropriated the map and published an edited version of it. The info boxes were crossed out and new stories added – instead of “leading clusters in IT and telecoms with a dynamic innovative power”, our boxes could be about conversion campaigns (i.e. when consulting firms are tasked with processing tenants to convert their apartments tenure from rental into private ownership in housing associations – so called bostadsrätter, comparable to British Right to Buy) and privatised swimming halls. Without really knowing it, we had made a counter-map. The question is whether our map would have been possible, or legible, without the craft evenings, city walks, readings and other activities that preceded and surrounded its creation. That flora of activities was part of the reorientation process which at one stage was articulated in the form of a (counter)map and those can also be read as mapping practices in their own right. The counter-map is thus best understood as multimodal, which means that it communicates and represents through a number of semiotic resources and needs to be read in its context.

The cut-up workshops, city walks, study circles, newspaper distribution events, SIFAV’s evening programs, exhibitions and other activities, can be seen as important components of a geographical alphabetisation[9]  – the kind of vocabulary that provides tools to understand the politics of the place, relationships, to navigate in the world, and to find your own position and room for action. The concept of geographic alphabetization is a further development of Paulo Freire’s term alphabetisation from the book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), which he uses to describe emancipatory learning processes, a bottom-up pedagogy that can thus be transferred to the knowledge-making of place and territory.

If the map risks standing in the way of mapping, then there is simply a great need for experimental cartographic practices that aim neither at representation nor at precision. To quote the Orangotango collective again: “the map can never be the territory, and the battles are not decided on paper”.[10] With this they want to remind that counter-maps are only tools, they can never be a solution in themselves. As tools, however, they have the powerful ability to redraw the map of imagined worlds and communities and stake out new directions and relationships. Based on our experiences with SIFAV, we believe that critical mappings and counter-cartographies can take shape through many different kinds of activities and methods, and combinations of them – often without thinking about it in the moment.