A review of the concepts presented in the
paper:
“Beyond Cooptation or Resistance:
Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and
GIS-Based Spatial Narratives”
by Sarah Elwood, Dept. of Geography, University of Washington
Presented by:
Tyler Beemer Eugene Choi Jason Yaich
for Oregon State University’s GEO 599:
Virtual Seminar in Public Participation GIS, Oregon State University,
moderated by Dawn Wright, PhD, GISP
Evolution of Community
Organizations
 Community and neighborhood organizations’ roles in
urban planning, problem solving and service delivery
have increased / evolved as government tries to
provide more with less
 Many new non-governmental organizations forming
 increased competition for funding
 These organizations are utilizing and/or being
manipulated by use of spatial knowledge (a.k.a. GIS)
BOTH in empowering and dis-empowering ways
GIS used by community organizations
in ways that go beyond simple effect of
empowering or dis-empowering
 Author uses three concepts of :
 “Spatial Politics”
 “Institutional Politics”, and
 “Knowledge Politics”
. . . along with many examples from literature research, to illustrate a
balanced look at empowering, dis-empowering and evolving
applications of spatial knowledge to decision making
Author also cites two Chicago community organizations’ use of GIS as a
case study
How is GIS being used to empower ?
 NGOs use spatial knowledge to gain power in decision-making
opportunities
 Use GIS to produce “flexible forms of spatial knowledge to
support different objectives at different times”
 Strategic tool to allow importation of spatial knowledge in
decision-making process, strengthen relationships with other
actors and decision-makers, help shape and achieve vision for
community’s development
 Examples of organizations resisting a government’s attempt to
limit power spatially by expanding the discussion in the
decision-making process to cover a larger geographical
context or assigning special meaning to a place to give the
organization more power to change
How is GIS being used to
dis-empower ?
 Examples of use of “Spatial Politics” –
decision-makers defining geography either by
scale or quality as means to limit the power
of other organizations
 Scale (ex. “neighborhood”) – limits influence
of organization to specific geography even if
their concerns may relate to larger
geographical context
 Quality (ex. “decaying” neighborhood) –
assigns a value to a place – diminishes an
organizations control over it’s own
representation and vision of that place
Spatial Politics
 Politics of Urban Planning,
Problem-solving, and service
provision are fundamentally
spatial
 Using scale and “place framing”
plays role in power and
authority of institutions,
Do the words “urban
decay” color your
individuals, and organizations
understanding of a place ?
How would you map it ?
Change perception of place through
GIS modeling / visualization
BEFORE…
AFTER…
Images courtesy of ESRI
Institutional Politics
 Historical lines of authority between
different actors in decision-making process
 Strategies used by each actor in influencing
other actors
 Allowable terms of negotiation over urban
spatial change
Institutional Politics continued
 Other variables affecting organizations’
control in decision making:
 Altered organizational structure
 Funding practices / sources
 Shift toward increased level of participation of
NGOs supported by provision of resources or
real decision-making authority ?
Knowledge Politics
 Two means of
influencing power of
actors in spatial
decision-making:
 Different types of
knowledge
 Ways of representing
needs & conditions of
a place
Perception that “expert knowledge” and quantitative, scientific data
leads to greater power and more influence in decision-making than
experiential data
Knowledge Politics continued
 How does GIS play into this role ?
 “spatial knowledge and cartographic representations
produced using a GIS and other digital technologies
are often given greater weight in planning and
policymaking than knowledge presented in other
ways”

(Aitken and Michael 1995; Elwood and Leitner 2003)
 NGOs make choices about what knowledge to
present & how
“Countermapping”
 Marginalized social groups using maps to
define and negotiate spatial goals, claims and
perceptions to their own advantage
 BUT… paper also cites examples where GISbased spatial information was used by
powerful social/political actors to control
decision-making process (“quash disent”)
Author’s Proposition
 Literature review of impacts of GIS on
community organizations leads to polarized
view of whether GIS empowers or disempowers
 Cooptation or resistance
 Activist vs. service delivery of gov’t mandates
 Expert vs. experiential knowledge
 No longer a dichotomy  organizations now
fill multiple and diverse roles / spatial
meanings (neither pawn nor guiding hand)
Multiple roles in spatial decisionmaking
 Grass-roots organizations “are, for
instance, actively working with and for
state institutions and programs while
simultaneously operating to mobilize
protest.” (Elwood 2006)
 Organizations use GIS to create spatial
narratives that represent community
priorities in shifting and flexible ways
(Elwood 2006)
Chicago Case Study
 Urban planning and revitalization
activities in an inner-city neighborhood
northwest of the downtown Chicago
 Conducted through a participatory
research design that relied on
ethnographic data collection and
qualitative data analysis techniques
The “Which, What, & How”
 The community participants direct the
GIS application themselves, making
choices about which spatial data will be
acquired or developed, what analysis
and mapping will be performed, and
how the resulting output will be used by
their organizations
 This aims towards sustainable GIS
production and application
The Community Goals
 The particular goals of these community
organizations are focusing on housing
improvement, better access to
affordable housing, employment
training and job development, youth
and family support, crime reduction,
retention of employers, and prevention
of residential and business displacement
Roles and Activities
Narratives
Example
Questions to ponder . . .
 Is your impression that GIS is empowering, disempowering, or a hybrid of both?
 How has the evolution of grassroots organizations
altered the realm of public participation GIS?
 How would you illustrate the term “Urban Decay”
graphically on a map?
 Considering the first paper by Rina Ghose, how does
the Chicago project compare to the one done in
Milwaukie?
 Can “narratives” be abused? Examples?
 PPGIS and Public
Participation policy
- Are they placed in the
same context?
http://deathstar.rutgers.edu/ppgis/Tulloch.PPGIS.2003_files
Participatory model
 Unit of analysis: Individuals, not groups, classes, elites, etc.
 Assumptions:
1) Individuals (voters) participate in political life spontaneously;
they are not elite-directed.
2) The majority of eligible voters participate in the policy process.
3) Individuals are informed and knowledgeable about
political/policy affairs; they are not manipulated by elites.
4) There are fair, honest, and egalitarian means for citizens to
express their political desires - e.g., elections, town hall
meetings, public meeting, etc
5) Policy is the product of majority preferences, not group, class, or
elite preferences.
- Brent Steel
http://www.geographyhigh.connectfree.co.uk/s3settgeoghigh6urbdecay.html