Re-designing Rivers

How counter-mapping becomes part of the design politics?

This project experiments with counter-mapping as a tool to make knowledge visible, rendering local territorial understandings and representing the act of drawing as a political design project in the context of the contestations around large-scale hydraulic projects in the Yanuncay river in Ecuador. In that context, the use of counter-mapping becomes a political tool to understand struggles, conflicts, identities and sense of place in different territories within a larger research by design framework that aims to investigate complex territories to translate them into understandable drawings that convey complex knowledge into a common language that different disciplines and audiences can relate to and easily understand. Furthermore, the knowledge translated into the map comes from the communities themselves to communicate their own needs and understandings of their territory, giving them the opportunity to visualize their own understandings to develop place-based design solutions. In practice the objective is for the communities to produce ‘mental maps’ of what they understand as their own territory and water struggles. This process involves the affected communities, artists, farmers, landscape designers and indigenous communities. The mapping exercises gather the participants around an initial canvas where they are asked to draw and spatially locate ecopolitical relations, landscape interventions and territorial transformations. During the process they are guided through relevant and detonating questions based on their perception and representation of socio-geographical components. The resulted draft is further draw in detail by the researcher to be later analysed and discusses in a collective session to get the community input and interpretations in order to adjust it where necessary according to the narratives and participant stories, perceptions and knowledges. The opportunity of counter-maps as design project also brings closer academia and professionals with the affected communities, creating links and bridges between different knowledges, world visions and understandings. To a certain extent, it gives the opportunity to open up the design process to the communities instead of being a close-end process coming from hegemonic powers or professionals unaware of the socio-political context. In that sense, this proposal aims to present a reflection on the use of counter-maps as a tool to convey grassroot ideas and how these visualizations can translate complex realities and information into an understandable language to generate design opportunities and to bring knowledge back to society. To do so, the project exhibits some of the drawings from fieldwork experiences around counter-mapping in Ecuador (work in progress), which shows local territorial understandings and represent the act of drawing as a political design project.