Columbia GSAPP Urban Planning
Lectures in Planning Series
Mapwashing: Co-Opting Civic Design
September 17, 2019
For decades, as some federal agencies and municipal governments have sought to encourage public participation in urban planning, they’ve turned to maps, models, games, and other playful, designerly means of soliciting and validating public spatial knowledge, and ostensibly using that insight to inform design and planning processes. But as cities increasingly turn to private technology contractors to manage urban infrastructure and development projects, their proprietary platforms and processes are often obscured. Can civic design tools, like participatory maps and community engagement apps, meaningfully inform these often obfuscatory processes? Or are these methods susceptible to co-optation — “map-washing” — by design-savvy tech developers who’ve mastered techniques of discursive engineering through their virtual platforms? Looking at examples from New York and Boston to Toronto and St. Louis, I’ll examine how participatory planning methods stand up to algorithmic planning.
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