Cartografia Resistente

An Experience of Participatory Mapping Implementing Open Source Technology.

Paper by Lorenzo Tripodi presented the Media-City conference, Bauhaus University – Weimar,
January 2008 and published in Frank Eckardt et al. (eds.), MEDIACITY: Situations, Practices and Encounters. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2008.

This paper discusses the use of participative mapping as a maieutic practice for local communities, considering both the emancipative potential and the risks of alienation that networking media can produce. It will present the empirical experience of Cartografia Resistente, a voluntary, self-managed workshop building up a net of shared local knowledge about the city of Florence. The project was aimed at designing an alternative atlas of the city by adopting a bottom-up perspective, privileging neglected aspects of the urban configuration and employing a simple set of open source software in order to share, organize, and publish the acquired knowledge.

Access the paper from Academia.edu