Abstract: Participatory GIS has developed in far-reaching, sometimes contradictory, ways since its emergence in the mid-1990s (Elwood 2006, Sieber 2006, Radil and Jiao 2016). We observe this progress by tracing improvements in methods for data collection and analysis made possible by the emergence of mobile and web-based mapping technologies, open-source software, and big data. In the face of all this advancement, however, little work has been done to understand the effects of ‘participation’ on visualization and map design. This presentation attempts to fill this gap by examining the disciplining of ‘cartographic aesthetics’ and considering how the privileging of a particular ‘look of maps’ has profound impacts for participatory GIS.
I begin my analysis by offering a literature review of participatory mapping. Juxtaposing this review with my experiences as a participant observer at the NACIS Annual Meeting, I suggest that we continue to assign greater values to ‘beautiful’ maps. This mindset makes clear that we’ve fallen short of Sarah Elwood’s assertion: “[an] expanded notion of visualization is important as a conceptual framework under which critical GIScience might examine a fuller range of ways that knowledge and power are negotiated in and through participatory GIS (2006, 704). As such, I consider how we, as practitioners of participatory GIS working in the realm of digital geographies, might begin to privilege frameworks which value maps for the work they do in the world and not how “beautiful” they are
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