Mapping everyday urban political ecologies: Experiential cartography as embodied methodology

Recent years have seen a growing interest in embodied urban political ecology. In this article we offer a generative methodological intervention into the field: engagement with a form of experimental mapping we call experiential cartography. This approach incorporates not only tangible data but also engages the senses, feelings, emotions, and perceptions, offering a richer and more nuanced way of understanding and visualizing the world. To present experiential cartography's potential contributions to UPE research we draw on some recent research in the Philippines emerging from our Embodied Ecologies project that has sought to study and intervene in how people sense, know, and act on the cumulative toxicities that permeate everyday urbanized life. Experiential cartographies of cumulative toxicities offer an interesting case for UPE to explore situated experiences and everyday embodiments of planetary urbanization. We organize our examples around Henri Lefebvre's triadic theoretical formulation of the production of space to argue that experiential cartography involves mapping embodied perceptions of spatial practice, creating embodied conceptions and representations of space, and cultivating embodied spaces of representation based on lived experiences. In this way, experiential cartography provides a methodology for not only (academically) analyzing but also (collectively) intervening into the production of urban spaces and ecologies. We suggest experiential cartography is one way that UPE scholars may pay greater attention to embodied activities, experiences, and knowledges. As the intentions of this article are methodological, we lay out some concrete foundations for UPE scholars (or others) who may be interested in their own experiential mapping practices.