Brenda Parker’s paper entitled Constructing Community Through Maps? Power and Praxis in Community Mapping (2006) discusses the growing practice of community mapping.  Furthermore, she suggests that community mapping isn’t quite the ‘emancipatory’ tool practitioners claim it to be, but rather can serve to reproduce hegemonic power relations over the landscape.

As an example for her discussion, Parker chronicles the development of the green mapping project in Portland, Oregon.  Through Parker’s discussion we can come to question the notion of ‘community’ and question just whose community is it?

Green mapping initiatives endeavor to map out businesses that are concerned with ethical, social, and environmental responsibility.  Green maps also locate institutions that are deemed culturally relevant or promote environmental sustainability.  Through the act of mapping certain locations, the community is created in the eyes of those who create it.

Typically, ’sustainability’ and ‘environmental responsibility’ are issues and markets that are supported by those whose subject positions are aligned with the hegemonic elite.  Sustainability and environmental responsibility are luxuries that not everyone in society, or the community, can afford.  Furthermore, it has been shown that places like museums and art galleries are accessible to only those with a particular cultural capital.  So even though community maps are claimed to empower communities, just who in the community do they empower?  In the case of the Portland Green Map, it only served to reproduce elite notions of community.

We can see that the definition of community, like so much else in this world, is fluid and open to a myriad of interpretations.  Unfortunately, even under the guise of empowerment, it is often elite notions that are represented and reinforced on the landscape.  It is important for individuals who work on ‘community’ maps, to be utterly aware of the implications of the work and the maps they produce.