City, Culture and Society 11 (2017) 1–3

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

City, Culture and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ccs

Introduction to Valletta2018 Cultural Mapping: Debating space and place T

a,b,c,∗ d
Pier Luigi Sacco , Graziella Vella
a
IULM University, Via Carlo Bo, 1, 20143, Milan, Italy
b
Harvard University, Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
c
metaLAB (at) Harvard, 42 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
d
Valletta 2018 Foundation, The Exchange Buildings, Republic Street, Valletta, VLT, 1117, Malta

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In 2018, Valletta will be the European Capital of Culture. A series of four international conferences has been
Valletta2018 foundation organized along the path to the ECoC year, dealing with some of its key topics, one for each year from 2014 to
European Capital of Culture 2017. This special issue presents a small selection of papers from the 2015 conference on cultural mapping and
Cultural mapping its relation with culture-led development.
Spaces and place
Inclusive social and economic development
through culture

In 2018, Valletta will be the European Capital of Culture: a title that,
as it is well known (e.g. Sassatelli, 2013), has steadily evolved its
function from a celebration of local cultural identity to a challenging
laboratory of inclusive social and economic development through cul-
ture. In this spirit, Valletta has envisioned the path toward 2018 as a
gradual process of local capability building and European networking.
A milestone of such process is a sequence of four international con-
ferences, one for each year from 2014 to 2017, which interrogate both
the international scientific community and the local community of
scholars, policy makers, and cultural operators, on issues of special
relevance from the point of view of culture-led development. The
second conference of the series, held in Valletta in the Fall of 2015, was
devoted to the theme of cultural mapping, that is, to the socio-cognitive
platform upon which cultural planning may build targeted projects and
actions. This special issue of City, Culture and Society offers a small se-
lection of some of the contributions that were originally presented at
the conference, and which appear here in substantially revised form.
At face value, cultural mapping might look like just another varia-
tion on the topic of refining mapping tools and techniques to fit the
characteristics of a given sector. But the specificity of cultural and
creative production is the contraposition between a considerable ag-
gregate sector size, and an extremely fragmented galaxy of micro-
players, not only at the amateur or semi-professional level, but also at
the professional one (Jeffcut & Pratt, 2002). Therefore, mapping does
not only play a representational role in the cultural sphere, but also a
definitional one: it is only through mapping that it becomes possible for
experts, policymakers, and practitioners, to develop a sound
understanding of the spatial, functional and organizational articulation
of such activities, and to lay the premises for extrapolating future trends
(Ferilli, Sacco, Buscema, & Tavano Blessi, 2015). This extreme frag-
mentation necessarily calls for decentralized, highly participative
mapping processes which pursue different goals at the same time, in-
cluding an improvement of mutual knowledge and dialogue among
local players, strengthening community cohesion, and developing a
participatory basis for policymaking (Evans & Foord, 2008). Moreover,
the inherent complexity and ambiguity of the cultural sphere may elicit
different, and sometimes even conflicting, approaches to cultural
mapping and interpretations of their outcomes (Perkins, 2004). It is
therefore not surprising that cultural mapping projects have often be-
come platforms for innovative approaches to cultural planning and
local development (Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, & MacLennan, 2015).
In this special issue, we present a collection of studies on cases from
different European countries that considerably vary in focus and
methodology, but provide a stimulating sampling of the diversity and
vibrancy of this new, blooming field of research and community prac-
tice. Mapping projects happen at all kinds of scales, on the initiative of
an extremely varied range of actors, and are formalized and transmitted
in a variety of different ways. It is therefore probably too early to at-
tempt a systematic meta-analysis of the ongoing initiatives, but it is
certainly important to raise awareness about their potential, which in
best cases may even assume a transformational character.
Samuel Murray's (2017) paper provides a clear example of how
cultural mapping may become a platform for community engagement at
the urban scale in the Cardiff urban area. In this case, the mapping

∗
Corresponding author. Department of Humanities, IULM University, Via Carlo Bo, 1, 20143 Milan, Italy.
E-mail addresses: pierluigi.sacco@iulm.it, pierluigi_sacco@fas.harvard.edu (P.L. Sacco), graziella.vella@valletta2018.org (G. Vella).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2017.09.003
Received 12 September 2017; Accepted 12 September 2017
Available online 02 October 2017
1877-9166/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
P.L. Sacco, G. Vella
project was launched by Cardiff University as an attempt to improve
knowledge and understanding of the local cultural and creative
economy, and the initiative naturally developed into the creation of an
urban scale network supporting activities, exchange of information, and
collaborations among local players. Having a university as the initiator
of a cultural mapping project is far from common, and this experiment
therefore becomes a potential source of inspiration for an innovative
role of the university as the catalyst of local culture-led development.
The approach followed here focuses upon the spatial distribution of
cultural and creative activities across city boroughs, and to relate it to
the socio-economic dynamics of the urban space as a whole – a view-
point that naturally conforms to the city planner's one, with a special
attention to the developmental, industrial dimension of cultural pro-
duction in the context of urban development strategies. In this way,
cultural mapping may at the same time become an opportunity to
pursue the third leg of university mission in terms of civic engagement,
while at the same time providing a powerful basis for future partici-
pative planning actions led by the public administration or other key
local stakeholders.
Jelena Savic (2017) takes a very different perspective on the city of
Porto. Here, mapping is linked to the development and negotiation of
the sense of place between planners and city residents. Rather than
sticking to a formal protocol for measurement and geolocation, the
methodology of the inquiry here follows a multi-sensorial approach to
the urban space, that establishes a dialogue both with the visitor's and
the city inhabitant's gaze as elements of a shared responsibility. To
transfer this attention to sense-making processes into concrete mapping
practices, the study analyzes a series of workshops based upon a direct
creative collaboration between artists and citizens, providing a pow-
erful illustration of the richness of possibility that the deployment of
artistic modes of inquiry can uncover in terms of appraising and un-
derstanding the phenomenological complexity of the city. Savic's ap-
proach then sits in the quickly developing stream of research that is
experimenting with the combination of artistic and geographical ap-
proaches to urban space to reciprocally expand the scope of the es-
tablished disciplinary practices (Hawkins, 2012). In this context, the
primary aspiration is not to produce tools for future urban policies, but
rather customizing knowledge resources for a personal and collective
appropriation of the urban space that reflects desires, curiosity, and
expressive urges, and results in creative rewriting and reinterpretation
of available cartographical knowledge within a given flow of experi-
ence.
Huovinen, Timonen, Leino, and Seppälä (2017) make an ingenious
use of cultural mapping by analyzing different neighborhoods of the
city of Helsinki taking as a guide the path of a public transportation
line: Helsinki's #8 tram. This allows them to develop a discursive map
where different urban identities, values, and imaginaries are juxtaposed
as parts of an urban continuum that naturally assumes a narrative di-
mension. The mapping results here from a collection of the personal
recollections of inhabitants that connect different places, times, and
circumstances. A surprising and subtly poetical turn of the methodology
is the dissemination and analysis of open diaries left at tram stops and
made available for the passengers' spontaneous, unforced contributions
that complement the interviews. The collection of the materials in the
discursive framing of the mental itinerary designed by the tram line
invites a comparative assessment of neighborhood-scale narratives that
identify a number of different local urban subjectivities. These unique
characters of different neighborhood identities, that are so often evoked
in our own experiential narrative rendition of different corners of a city,
is then ingeniously transformed into a new mode of inquiry that pro-
vides us with yet another creative variant of a mapping methodology,
and at the same time opens very stimulating connections with narra-
tive-based ethnographic approaches to city identity, which should re-
ceive considerably more attention also in participative planning pro-
cesses and in community-level qualitative GIS experiments (Dennis,
2006).
2
City, Culture and Society 11 (2017) 1–3
The paper by Milia Khoury (2017) considers again the relationship
between the artistic and geographical dimensions of mapping, but from
a different perspective: reviewing artists’ practices that may be con-
sidered as exemplary. The analysis focuses upon one of the most
burning issues for the Europe of today: that of migrations as a form of
painful, sometimes tragic dialogue between Europe and Africa. Eur-
opean colonialism in Africa has also meant a physical transposition of
European cultures of place-making and city-making in Africa, and the
current migratory waves are likewise creating, although on an inter-
stitial, undercover level as opposed to the European pervasive planning,
a parallel transmigration of African notions of place and space in the
fabric of European cities. Representing this uneven, yet powerfully
transformational exchange is again an extremely interesting goal for
cultural mapping that poses new disciplinary and methodological
challenges. Again, artistic practices provide researchers with a wealth
of visual experimentations and linguistic breakthroughs that may be
conducive to innovative modes of inquiry. This research is not confined
to the production of new images, but also builds on sophisticated ar-
chival research leading to the phylogenetic reconstruction of certain
representations and of their cultural, social and political implications.
Cultural mapping may thus become a fruitful way to embed the current
political debate about migrations and their long-term consequences in
the historical perspective of the continuation of European colonialism
with other means.
Finally, the paper by Briguglio and Debattista (2017) brings us back
in the educational sphere, examining a school-based project of creative
stimulation in Malta, again involving artists and creative professionals
as instigators. In this example, the role of mapping now emerges not at
the level of the cultural project itself, but in the analysis of its outcomes.
The project funded many small initiatives scattered over the Maltese
territory, and therefore trying to comparatively assess their results is a
necessity in terms of policy evaluation and design of future initiatives.
In this study, we therefore see at work a constructive use of cultural
mapping as the backbone of project accountability at the territorial
scale, where multiple dimensions are simultaneously measured, geo-
located, and evaluated. It is therefore an ex post exercise, which elu-
cidates how cultural mapping, which in the previous case studies was
often a key poietic element, can also be considered as part of a con-
ceptual toolbox to be applied to the analysis of projects with a clear
spatial dimension but in which mapping itself was not directly im-
plicated. On the other hand, an evaluative mapping approach also
stresses the usefulness of a gradual enrichment of the toolbox, for in-
stance in terms of reconstructing the dynamic network relationships
that are created by different territorial hubs as a consequence of their
joint involvement in the project. Mapping is clearly not a static exercise
despite the fact that the cartographic representation tends to provide an
instant snapshot, and conveying its dynamic nature through suitable
tools is a formidable challenge for future research.
Our small collection of papers cannot aspire to provide the reader
with an exhaustive classification of the manifold potentials of cultural
mapping as a basis for academic research, art-based research, civic
activism, policymaking, artistic creation, and many other aspects.
However, we think that it gives the reader some useful tips about both
the state of the art of the practices, and some of the promising direc-
tions for future work. We look forward to seeing this valuable knowl-
edge and experience at play in many culture-led development projects
in future years.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Glen Farrugia for his constant support and advice
in the scientific preparation and organization of the international con-
ference from which this special issue has originated, and in the pre-
selection of the special issue papers.
P.L. Sacco, G. Vella
References
Briguglio, M., & Debattista, A. (2017). Mapping the outcomes of a school-based cultural
programme. this issue City, Culture and Society.
Dennis, S. F., Jr. (2006). Prospects for qualitative GIS at the intersection of youth de-
velopment and participatory urban planning. Environment and Planning A, 38,
2039–2054.
Duxbury, N., Garrett-Petts, W. F., & MacLennan, D. (2015). Cultural mapping as cultural
inquiry. Introduction to an emerging field of practice. In N. Duxbury, W. F. Garrett-
Petts, & D. MacLennan (Eds.). Cultural mapping as cultural inquiry (pp. 1–42). London:
Routledge.
Evans, G., & Foord, J. (2008). Cultural mapping and sustainable communities: Planning
for the arts revisited. Cultural Trends, 17, 65–96.
Ferilli, G., Sacco, P. L., Buscema, M., & Tavano Blessi, G. (2015). Understanding cultural
geography as a pseudo-diffusion process: The case of the Veneto Region. Economies, 3,
100–127. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/economies3020100.
Hawkins, H. (2012). Geography and art. An expanding field: Site, the body and practice.
City, Culture and Society 11 (2017) 1–3
Progress in Human Geography, 37, 52–71.
Huovinen, A., Timonen, E., Leino, T., & Seppälä, T. (2017). Changing urban identities in a
discursive map. this issue City, Culture and Society.
Jeffcut, P., & Pratt, A. C. (2002). Managing creativity in the cultural industries. Creativity
and Innovation Management, 11, 225–233.
Khoury, M. L. (2017). Meditations on the ‘wrong place’: Europe in Africa; Africa in
Europe. this issue City, Culture and Society.
Murray, S. (2017). Creative Cardiff: Utilizing cultural mapping for community engage-
ment. this issue City, Culture and Society.
Perkins, C. (2004). Cartography – cultures of mapping: Power in practice. Progress in
Human Geography, 28, 381–391.
Sassatelli, M. (2013). Europe's several Capitals of Culture: From celebration to re-
generation to polycentric capitalization. In K. K. Patel (Ed.). The cultural politics of
Europe. European capitals of culture and European union since the 1980s (pp. 55–71).
London: Routledge.
Savic, J. (2017). Sense(s) of the city: Cultural mapping in Porto, Portugal. this issue City,
Culture and Society.