Public Participation GIS, Participatory GIS, and Participatory Mapping

Participatory mapping (PM) and public/participation GIS (P/PGIS) are umbrella terms under which a variety of mapping research and practice takes place. Local people who reside “in the map” are included in the collection, analysis, sharing, and visualization of geospatial data with the goal to make GIS and cartographic practice more inclusive and democratic. To make a map, the map-maker must elicit knowledge from local people to capture the human geography of the area. Until relatively recently this cartographic process was practiced either by, or for, those in positions of power. The subsequent use of the maps most often reinforced power relations between rulers and the populations “in the map.” In post–Second World War development circles, and as a part of inclusive social science initiatives such as participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and participatory action research (PAR), PM emerged as a response to criticisms of such cartographic practices. During the same period, native peoples in Canada used land use and occupancy mapping to defend their ancestral territorial rights. Two fundamental assumptions emerged from these parallel processes that remain relevant to all participatory map-making. First, information gathered by local populations in a participatory/inclusive research design is more useful than information compiled by outside cartographers. Second, PM can empower local communities. With the advent of relatively inexpensive and readily available GIS technology in the 1990s, P/PGIS emerged as a close cousin to PM. While the power of these tools for planning and development is undeniable, researchers and practitioners recognized that P/PGIS might cause negative social effects such as marginalization of underprivileged populations and that P/PGIS lacks methods to represent qualitative aspects of culture. Indeed, debates around empowerment, inclusion, access, application, and representation of culture comprise the core of PM and P/PGIS research. Notwithstanding, there is no one definition of PM or P/PGIS and several other synonymous terms exist including participatory 3D modeling (P3DM), public participation GIS (PPGIS), community-integrated GIS (CiGIS), community GIS (CGIS), bottom-up GIS (BuGIS), and volunteered graphic information (VGI). While there are subtle differences between these terms, with VGI as a recognized outlier, definitions overlap substantially. This bibliography traces the emergence of PM and P/PGIS from the original participatory development and occupancy mapping work, follows it through the critical cartography debates in the 1980s and 1990s, covers their crystallization as fields at the turn of the 20th century, and closes with their continuing development as active research programs.

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