Critical Mapping and Empowerment: Exploring the Role of Maps in Spatial Dynamics, Representation, and Collective Action amidst Rapid Urbanization in Coastal Kenya

The research project focuses on the nexus between Mapping, Indigenous/local communities, and social innovation/empowerment. It critically questions the notion and mechanisms of maps, their mapping processes, and how they empower or disempower indigenous/local communities, especially in urbanizing contexts. Through action research, and in an exploratory manner, the research project seeks to engage local/indigenous communities in coastal Kenya through participatory and critical mapping exercises that would put their issues in the foreground and enhance their capacity in negotiating and taking part in determining their sustainable futures.
The research aims to investigate whether and under which conditions (critical) mapping and its inherent agency contribute to empowerment, in regards to subaltern populations, such as the local/indigenous Mijikenda community residing in the rapidly urbanizing context of Coastal Kenya. The research critically questions the ontology and epistemology of contemporary maps and their mapping mechanisms, and how they positively or negatively contribute(d) to the survival of the local/indigenous communities’ spatial practices amidst burgeoning rapid urbanization, while simultaneously, exploring alternative cartographic literacy and legibility that is more embedded in the community itself, that pays attention to the complexity and specificity of their intelligent spatialities that play a role in enhancing their resilience and adaptive capacity to rapidly transforming realities.
The research applies an interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical framework that mobilizes theories in critical mapping, socio-spatial transformations, political ecology and, social innovation. This gives a framework, embedded in cartography, that helps in critically examining coastal urbanizing spatial, environmental and societal transformation processes, their inherent effects on the inhabiting community of the Mijikenda, and the ways the latter build resilience and adaptive capacity as a counter measure. The socio-spatial theory anchors the fieldwork approach and lens, by helping to understand spatially embedded transformations and their processes in a relational manner that puts more focus on understanding the spatialities of the current users of space, embedded in a wider technical, social, cognitive, economic, political, cultural, and discursive dynamics. A relational approach to space departs from conceptualizations of space as a territorial entity and stresses relations between diverse meanings, identities, actions, places, and so on. It implies an understanding of space as a social, cultural, economic, political and ecological construction. Space and spatial transformations are produced, negotiated, institutionalized, multi-scalar, perceived, conceptualized, power imbued and fundamentally dynamic, implying an analysis of materiality, design and spatiality as mutually embedded in environmental and societal processes and transformations.