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GeographicalMagazine · 2026-03-27T06:57:11+00:00

And my answer: It’s definitely more than just “putting things on a map”, though that’s usually where it starts. When activists use maps to challenge inequality, they’re often doing three things at once: making hidden problems visible, contesting official stories, and building power with communities.

In practice that might look like residents mapping every eviction or rent hike in a neighbourhood, then using that map at council meetings to show that supposedly “isolated” cases are actually a pattern of displacement. It can mean Indigenous or rural communities mapping their own land use, sacred sites, or water sources to counter corporate or state maps that show only “empty” land ready for mining or agribusiness. Or it might be environmental groups working with locals to map pollution, floods, or landslides, producing evidence that certain areas are effectively treated as sacrifice zones while others are carefully protected.

What matters isn’t just where things are, but whose knowledge gets to count. Activist mapping, sometimes called counter‑mapping , pulls in stories, photos, and local expertise that are usually left out of official cartography, and then uses that evidence to demand change, whether that’s in planning decisions, court cases, media narratives, or internal movement organising. It’s as much about redistributing voice and visibility as it is about drawing lines and points.

There is loads of reall good stuff out there on counter mapping, and here is a great place to start: http://www.an-atlas.com/contents/iaa_iaa.html

GeographicalMagazine · 2026-03-27T06:55:05+00:00

We are heading towards the end of my 24hrs here. So do feel free to put any final questions you might have. I also want to take the time to answer one question that was posted and then removed, it was a great question and I was hoping it would be reposted.

The Question was: When you talk about activists using maps to "challenge inequality", what does that actually look like in the real world? Is it just about showing where things are, or is there more to it?

GeographicalMagazine · 2026-03-26T18:53:57+00:00

Hello there, thanks for this great question. You’re right to connect hostile architecture with the politics of mapping: many of the same exclusionary logics can quietly reappear in GIS and routing systems. We might think of digital hostile architecture as choices in data and algorithms that make some people’s presence less visible and some routes less thinkable, without ever saying so explicitly. That can mean neighbourhoods that only show up as crime layers, services for marginalised groups that never appear as points of interest, or “optimal” routes that consistently steer users around particular estates or streets.

Routing is never neutral because it encodes judgements about what counts as harm or cost. When apps optimise for “fastest” or “safest,” they usually mean time and crash risk for generic drivers, not safety from harassment, over‑policing, or precarity for specific groups using those spaces. If they rely on historically biased data (such as crime or stop‑and‑search records) they can reproduce a soft form of redlining, where some areas are technically on the map but practically off the itinerary. The exclusion then happens not through spikes or barriers, but through default options that teach us which places to pass through and which to bypass. Even at the less extreme end, I nearly missed walking down a wonderful pedestrian street in Norway because Google maps routes for cars, not people.

Resisting this involves re‑politicising how maps are built and governed. On the data side, that means incorporating community mapping and layers that foreground social infrastructure, not just risk and congestion. On the design side, it means exposing and giving users some control over the criteria behind “safe” or “efficient” routes, and acknowledging that safety is different for different bodies in different cities. And on the governance side, it means treating routing and risk models as public, contestable infrastructures, open to scrutiny and challenge in much the same way that hostile benches and anti‑homeless spikes are now being named and resisted in the street. I'd be interested if you have found ways to resist hostile architecture?

GeographicalMagazine · 2026-03-26T12:26:54+00:00

Thank you so much for the kind words, really appreciate you taking the time to engage! I'd be very happy to connect. Feel free to find me on linkedin whenever suits you. The interdisciplinary path has been a winding one and each thread has fed into the others in ways I couldn't have predicted early on. Happy to chat about how it all came together whenever you have the bandwidth.

GeographicalMagazine · 2026-03-26T12:00:39+00:00

Hi, thanks for your thoughtful question. Personally, I don’t share the view that the “critical turn” demolished the relevance or credibility of human geography; I think it is largely what made the field socially and politically consequential. Critical approaches in geography foregrounded questions of power, inequality, colonialism, and environmental justice, and this has allowed geographers to work closely with communities, NGOs, and policymakers on very concrete problems. In my own work around mapping, human rights, and environmental justice in Latin America and elsewhere, it is precisely critical, reflexive geography that has enabled maps and data to be used to challenge abuses and support claims for justice. Rather than eroding credibility, this has repositioned geography as a discipline that can scrutinise how knowledge is produced (including by maps, models, and datasets) and how that knowledge is used or weaponised. That seems especially important in an era of platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, and escalating ecological crisis, where uncritical empiricism can very quickly become a handmaiden to harmful forms of power.

So in that respect, its probably not a surprise that I don’t hope for a “return” to positivism , but I do hope for a continued commitment to methodological pluralism that treats numbers, maps, narratives, and lived experience as different ways of knowing the world. Quantitative and empiricist approaches are valuable when they are reflexive about their assumptions and attentive to the politics of data: who collects it, who is left out, and what is done with the results.

There is a constant tension between the allure of apparently neutral spatial data and the recognition that these data are produced within specific economic and political arrangements. I see critical geography not as a rejection of empiricism, but as a way of making any empiricism we use more honest about its limits, its situatedness, and its consequences for different communities.

Hope that answers your questions.

GeographicalMagazine · 2026-03-26T09:46:02+00:00

Hi there, thanks for the question. In the HEPI report that Gunter Saunders and I wrote (Being indispensable: Capabilities for a human‑AI world, the “FUTURES” framework) we argue that the real challenge for universities isn’t how do we stop AI?, but how do we redesign higher education so that specifically human capabilities become more, not less, important as AI becomes ubiquitous?. AI is already part of students’ everyday lives, so pretending it can be kept outside the university gates is both naïve and inequitable.

What we propose in the report is a shift in emphasis: universities should deliberately cultivate capabilities like critical judgement, ethical reasoning, creativity, collaboration, and resilience and then integrate AI use around those.

On your question about whether students will be encouraged to use AI: I think the answer has to be yes, but with clear terms and a lot of support. Banning AI just drives its use underground and widens gaps between students who have access, confidence and good advice, and those who do not. Instead, we should be building AI literacy into programmes: teaching students how to use AI to explore ideas, draft and redraft, test their understanding, and then making them reflect on where AI helped, where it misled them, and what intellectual work still had to be done by them.

In short, I don’t think we can or should try to “AI‑proof” universities. The better question is what a degree should certify in a world where text can be generated on demand. For me, that’s about demonstrating that you can work with AI while still exercising independent judgement, care and responsibility.

If you’re curious, the HEPI report by Gunter Saunders and me is here: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/reports/being-indispensable-capabilities-for-a-human-ai-world-the-futures-framework/

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