Counter-Cartographies: Spaces of Belonging for the Unhoused in Philadelphia
- Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics and the Bethesda Project
- Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics
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Community Partnerships Grant
Bethesda community members celebrate at a community event.
Counter-Cartographies engages with those experiencing homelessness in Philadelphia through collaborative mapping and art practice to challenge spatial exclusion within the American city; where mapping has been used to reify dominant, exclusionary and racist structures, this practice of counter-mapping disrupts such power relations by using and representing maps to reclaim agency over narratives. Rather than representing de facto power relations, these maps reclaim and affirm belonging. Counter-Cartographies collaborates with the Bethesda Project – a non-profit providing shelter and social services to those experiencing homelessness in Philadelphia – to create individual counter-maps with unhoused individuals. These social and spatial maps, created by unhoused individuals through guided map-making sessions, provide insights into the support networks, movement patterns and urban negotiations that the unhoused engage with in Philadelphia. Created maps will be coalesced and creatively displayed through a large-scale, physical art installation and an online archival resource.
The project uses mapping as an urban anthropological practice and the representative capacity of art to dual ends. First, it affirms the importance of the voices of the unhoused and creates lasting artifacts of how those experiencing homelessness engage with the city of Philadelphia. Second, in engaging the Penn community and the public at large with the perspectives and experiences of those experiencing homelessness, the online resource and installation challenge their social and spatial exclusion, situating the claim of belonging and contesting the ‘othering’ of those who are unhoused.
Bethesda Project Website
Nayantara Ghosh Website