Story of a Mapping Process. The Origin, Design and Afterlives of the Street Geography Map

This article focuses on the map drawn for Street Geography. Drawing Cities for a Sustainable Future (SG), a geo-artistic project realised in Padua in September 2018. The article reads maps from a processual perspective and focuses on the SG map as both a cartographic object and a set of related ongoing practices, further presenting the scope, themes and main actors of the SG project to explore the reasons for the realisation and use of a map in this specific creative context. The first part of the paper starts with the use of the word mapping in contemporary cartographic theories, shifting attention from data-driven cartography to emergent and cultural cartography. The second part of the paper explores the origin, design and afterlives of the SG map from an emergent perspective by retracing the different phases of the mapping process, from map-making to map-use. Not only mapping practices but even stories, memories and emotions continuously unfold from maps. Therefore, the second part of the paper recounts the story of the SG map from an internal, autoethnographic perspective that explores the issues of intersubjective collaboration and authorship, production, dissemination and reception that are connected to this cartographic object. This paper aims “to capture how maps emerge” (Dodge et al., 2009, p. 231), to explore more thoroughly not only the performative, participatory and political nature of the SG map but also its affective understandings.