The second year of Living Maps seminars titled "Territory Is Not Map" starts on Tuesday at the Young Foundation. 

In the era of globalisation, the ‘local’ has attained ever greater political resonance as a site of registration and resistance to its diverse effects. In this session we look at two different projects of ‘thick’ mapping in which an attempt was made to capture the peculiarities of place at a time of accelerated change.

Barbara Brayshay Community Development Through Participatory Mapping
Nicola Samson Stories of Belonging from an East London Street

PROGRAMME NOTES
Mapping Community Severance: Living with Seven Sisters Road - Barbara Brayshay
The Design for Wellbeing research project is funded by the EPSRC, ESRC, and AHRC as part of the Lifelong Health and Wellbeing Cross-Council Programme. It is a study of street mobility and network accessibility, aiming to develop tools for overcoming community severance. Community severance occurs where transport infrastructure or the speed or volume of traffic act as a physical or psychological barrier to the movement of people. Consequences may include reduced mobility and less use of streets as social places due to concerns for physical safety. Using a participatory mapping approach that privileges local voices in seeking explanations for the spacial patterns and processes identified in the other research strands Mapping for Change have recorded resident’s movement patterns and experiences, living with the upheaval of redevelopment and a busy six lane highway that dissects their community. The mapping records places people like to go, places they avoid, their preferred routes, barriers to mobility and “hotspots”. The community map provides evidence of local needs and priorities that will contribute to discussions about future planning decisions relating to the Seven Sisters Road.

Barbara joined Mapping for Change as the Community Engagement Officer in January 2014, she brings to the role her academic background, a BSc in Environmental Science and a PhD in Bioarchaeology, together with over 10 years’ experience working as a Research Associate with organisations such as Manchester Digital Development Agency and Substance Coop where she specialised in participatory research in community broadband and digital inclusion projects. More recently Barbara worked with the Guerrilla Archaeology Collective based at the University of Cardiff, delivering innovative Public Engagement with Science workshops at music festivals throughout the UK. She works with Mapping for Change delivering participatory mapping projects.

Stories of Belonging from an East London Street - Nicola Samson
What does ‘home’ mean, and where is it? What significance does place have in people’s lives and how can it be mapped in the changing context of 21st century East London? Belonging is commonly used as an expression of home, and is generally assumed to be determined by place. This paper will illustrate that complex and shifting notions of home, community and place can be mapped through the life course by exploring subjective belonging. Drawing on my recent PhD research, the notion of belonging will be shown as central to understanding the subjective experience of place. My empirical research entailed semi-structured interviews with 14 migrant and British women of diverse background, ethnicity, class and generation, all of whom live in one East London street, the one in which I also live. In a framework of childhood, citizenship, ethnicity, class, place and community, narrative interviews were used to elicit the multiple ways in which the experience of belonging is configured in these women’s life stories. Situated in its specific social and historical context, the research explored the women’s relationship with the locality and within the changing ethnic and class demographics of the area.

Nicola has lived, worked, studied and brought up two children in Tower Hamlets and Newham for the past 36 years. She gained her doctorate, Narratives of women’s belonging: life stories from an East London street, at the Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London, at the end of 2013 (AHRC funded). Nicola is currently managing the Raphael Samuel History Centre’s Bethnal Green Memorial Project, an oral history project recording the little known 1943 Bethnal Green tube disaster when 173 local people died trying to gain shelter in the underground. She has taught qualitative research methods, researching East London and London as a global city, and is currently teaching oral history and memory at UEL.
LIVINGMAPS is a group of researchers, educators, environmentalists, artists and activists committed to developing new ways of designing, reading and using maps for public outcomes. Our approach is interdisciplinary, traveling across ethnography, cultural geography, social history, graphics and digital media arts. 

Please check out the programme on http://www.livingmaps.org.uk and book tickets 

We would love to see you all there.

_______________________________________________________
[log in to unmask]
An urban geography discussion and announcement forum
List Archives: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/URB-GEOG-FORUM
Maintained by: RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group
UGRG Home Page: http://www.urban-geography.org.uk