Map sampling is a collaborative tool for communities to visualize environmental and social injustices and determine opportunities for resilient grass roots design. Map Sampling remixes cultural, social, political, industrial, infrastructural and ecological conditions, histories and projections from the dual lenses of community institutional knowledge and GIS maptivism. Map Sampling shares planning tools with users for participatory design and cartographically rewrites histories and futures.
Map sampling is currently being utilized in collaboration with GrowHouse to visualize strategic opportunities and design spaces for community resiliency and networking in Central Brooklyn, from both cultural and environmental perspectives, appropriating existing underutilized urban infrastructures.
Map sampling will orchestrate recontextualized precedents from various times and locales into semi-fictional future urban environments overlaid and combined with current communities and the sources of their equity. Map sampling is a cultural representation of looking forward and back, graphic provocation, and unfettered community design seeking socio-spatial and environmental justice.
Phase 1 - Mapping will be conducted to reveal underlying socio-spatial inequities in Brooklyn New York City. For instance; environmental landscapes or lack thereof of parks, shading and heat islands, non-pervious surfaces, waterways and flooding; urban infrastructure or lack thereof of trains, expressways, Combined Sewer Overflow events and related watershed areas, high speed internet and renewable energy; Infrastructural, airborne and ground pollution; systems such as historical redlining, the palimpsest of urban fabric disrupted through urban renewal, updated and mixed-use zoning, and non-human centric land-use such as parking; and demographic boundaries over time.
Phase 2 - Community mapping visualizing abrupt and dramatic inequity. Graphic representation beyond literal community boundaries to represent the influences of inequity both literal and systemic. Graphic representation beyond spatial determinants of statistical, chronological and movement dynamisms. Concurrently precedents from any number of locales and times near and far will be appropriated as a palette of options to represent and replenish what the community thinks is missing, speaks to them more than their immediate and predetermined surroundings or serves to alleviate particular inequities whether cultural, institutional, infrastructural, geological, productive or defensive. Nothing within the community will be demolished.
