Deconstructed Mapping with 826 Boston (2023)

From September 2022 to April 2023, the Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design Participatory Mapping team (comprised of Professor Cara Michell, Angel Pollydore, Tessa Hocquet and myself) partnered with 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing, tutoring and publishing youth organization in Boston’s Egleston Square neighborhood. Collectively, the group decided to create a participatory cartography project in which 826 members were given the space and tools to recreate maps of their neighborhoods according to their experiences. Using tools of psychogeography (mapping based on sense and memory), we iteratively co-developed the maps below, working back and forth to digitize student-drawn icons, capture memories and solidify the color pallet. Once the maps below were completed, we embarked on a deconstructed mapping process to challenge the cartesian organizational system we had been using up to that point. The team was invited to cut up different elements of the map and rearrange them, also according to their perceptions and experiences. This exercise was very generative; once 826 members were comfortable, they were able to visually rearrange infrastructure and neighborhoods to better represent their lived experience. (As an example, one member described the experience of boarding the Orange Line in Roxbury and zipping downtown, later connecting to the harbor ferry dock in Seaport.) The maps were exhibited at La MaMa Galleria and the New Museum in New York City the summer after their completion.