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Collective Mapping
To analyze and assess
Short term
Bottom-up
Top-down
Consultation
Small group
About

Collective mapping is a participatory methodology for interpreting dominant territorial narratives, focusing on personal experiences and community knowledge. Through visual and graphic tools, socio-ecological and gendered urban problems are identified, tracing their causes and linking their impacts to a specific territorial scope. 

Collective mapping serves as an analytical methodology and allows the documentation of space. It also gives communities the tools to rethink the boundaries, meanings, and spatial relations of the cities in which they live.

Benefits

  • It promotes the collective creation of new narratives about the city. Through shared experiences and creative methodologies, it enables communities to critically reflect on gender and ecological issues and identify and analyse socio-environmental inequalities.

  • It encourages new forms of visual expression that challenge dominant territorial representations and promotes sustainable and inclusive change.

Importance

  • Reveals invisible structures from a feminist and environmentalist epistemology

Facilitates inclusive and participatory processes that prioritise the voices of women and historically excluded groups to understand their territories better and promote transformative change. This ranges from unpaid care routes or affective landscapes, to biodiversity loss or lack of green spaces. 

  • Evidences spatial inequalities from an ecofeminist perspective

It points out on the maps those elements that hinder fair and sustainable development. In doing so, it connects individual and community experiences with broader structural dynamics, such as patriarchy or the dominant economic system, revealing how these influence the territory.

  • It makes intersectional realities understandable to foster collective action

It creates clear and empowering tools to make visible interconnected challenges linked to gender inequality, social exclusion, and ecological crisis. It supports communities in developing proposals for more equitable futures based on shared knowledge and collective experiences.

Steps

  1. Delimit the territorial scope and establish a common basis to serve as a spatial or conceptual guide for all participants.

  2. Determine the thematic axes and analytical categories to work on, prioritising dimensions such as needs, resources, relationships, emotions, or flows.

  3. Design a visual coding system using colours, iconography, shapes, or relevant labels, seeking clarity and intuition for collective understanding.

  4. Record the interventions and evaluate their relevance, location, and meaning, leaving space for clarification or further development.

  5. Carry out a collective reading of the map, confronting the visual result with the participants’ interpretations, seeking validation.

  6. Document the final product through photographic records and explanatory notes that summarise the group’s main findings and reflections.

Key Aspects

  • Duration and timing of workshops

Workshops should be structured in sessions of 3-4 hours maximum, including breaks, to facilitate concentration and sustained participation. Shorter and more focused sessions may be useful for complex issues such as in-depth analysis and action planning.

  • Materials needed for implementation

Participation requires visual and accessible materials such as large-format maps, markers, or stickers. 

  • Foreseeable difficulties during the process

The challenge stems from the difficulty of representing abstract concepts visually. Another main challenge is sustaining participants' commitment and involvement over time

  • Methodological recommendations for inclusive participation

Simple, visual, and interactive methodologies should be used to allow non-expert to participate. In addition, the facilitator’s role is essential to ensure fairness and a bias-free environment. When faced with divergent perspectives, it is advisable to document them as a legitimate expression of a plural reality, allowing for their treatment in subsequent sessions or their inclusion in the mapping process’s record.

Outcomes

  • Development of critical awareness and collective analysis

Their elaboration favours a deeper understanding of socio-environmental and gender inequalities, as well as the identification of power dynamics present in the territory. At the same time, they contribute to the strengthening of collective capacities to analyse spatial gaps and propose transformative alternatives.

  • Generation of action-oriented community maps

Through the creation of fairer territorial narratives, actors, infrastructures and deficiencies in urban space are visualised. It also proposes actions for more sustainable and fairer city planning.

  • Political advocacy and empowerment

Collective knowledge feeds public policy proposals based on lived experience and participatory research. Thus,  communities’s capacity to influence urban decisions and promote a more sustainable and just governance is strengthened.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This website reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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