Affective Cartographies

Using Space as a Translation Device in Collaborative Processes

Abstract

We don’t live in abstract perfectly measurable space. We live in a material, fuzzy, and often ambiguous world. Yet urban analysis, design, and governance continue to privilege abstraction and quantification in their maps, metrics, and models at the expense of lived experience. This epistemic gap creates serious problems for the co-design and democratic governance of our cities, as it short-circuits our attachment to everyday environments.

The PLHEBICITE and PLURIELLES projects, developed at EPFL (2021–2024) in collaboration with the Commune of Vernier, Geneva, explored how this very gap between abstract and lived space might be employed as a site of dialogue for urban co-creation. For this, it built an Atlas of Affective Cartographies (https://alicelandings.epfl.ch/plhebicite) based on a series of walk-along interviews with neighbours to access, articulate and thus socialize atmospheres, attachments, and the micro-politics of place, all unquantifiable factors often missing in collaborative processes of urban transformation.

This paper will consider how by focusing on affects we can map the city otherwise, going beyond geolocations, quantities or the exact contour of things and onto the agency of said things. We will see how these affective readings can create a common ground for co-design processes. To do this, we will depart from the definition of affect by Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze to consider how this notion opens the way to a form of affective mapping attuned to the action of things rather than their form. From there, we will consider the need to rethink our representational tools and definitions at a time when visualizations abound, yet representations, understood as collective interpretations capable of enabling shared horizons of action, remain scarce. Then, we will explain how this method was applied within the framework of the PLHEBICITE and PLURIELLES projects. Finally, we argue that such an approach can be mobilized in urban co-design processes by operating space as a device of translation: rather than treating it as a neutral backdrop, space is understood as a mediating ground through which heterogeneous experiences, knowledges, and stakes can be rendered commensurable.