Dartmouth Events

Maps both conceal and reveal. Authors of maps make choices about what to include and ignore, about how to code information, and what to represent. Cartographic conventions rooted in colonialism legitimize the mapmaker’s claim that “this is here.” Meanwhile, in the midst of rapid urbanization, planning and urban design maps continue to privilege real estate that promote visions of a “world class” city and are typically created for an idealized public with assumed spatial practices.

I present the work of my research group, SLAB, that seeks new cartographies to recover ubiquitous but overlooked peoples and phenomenon in our understanding of contemporary urbanization. These have included street vendors and sidewalk life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and the 2 million people living underground in Beijing, China. I also present recent signs of reconsiderations from city managers, post-covid, that have opened up a nostalgia for the past and a more humanistic urbanism.

I discuss our cartographic challenge of trying to simultaneously map both human scale and urban scale, a problem of not only size, but perspective and aesthetics. Other issues raised include the role of visualization in non-democracies and the processes of spatial ethnography and authored maps in contrast to participatory mapping projects.

Speaker bio:

Annette Miae Kim is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California Price School of Public Policy and affiliated faculty at the University of Southern Roski School of Art and Design. Her books include Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s Transition Economy (Oxford University Press, 2008). Her current research project, ethniCITY, remaps how race and ethnicity shapes spatial patterns in Los Angeles.

She founded and directs SLAB which experiments with spatial ethnography and critical cartography in order to re-see the city. Her video installations have been shown internationally. She helped found the RAP collective around race, arts, and placemaking.

She received a Ph.D. in city and regional planning and M.A. in visual studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She received her M.P.P.U.P. from Harvard University and her B.A. in architecture and studio art from Wellesley College.

Sponsored by the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages