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The title, “Communograph,” was developed to combine “community” with “writing” so as to ground this research in a writing of community from the perspective of the community itself. In this way, each of the five research activities serves as a platform for community members to enter into conversation, sharing their thinking and authorship. The goal is to build local questions, knowledge, audience and interpretation for what will, in the end, become an atlas for community members and institutions.

Also, a lot of [cartographers] don’t want to acknowledge any complicity with the way things are, and maps have a huge deal to do with the way things are. They want to pretend their hands are clean: maps are just a tool. But you can do bad things with a tool and you can go good things with a tool. I’ve been suggesting to the hardest-edged people of all that they could put their epistemological and ontological arguments on a really firm foundation by simply acknowledging the fact that they are making the world. And they recoil from that, viscerally and instinctively, as they continue to make the software that enables them to make the world. In explicit terms, some of the most brilliant analyses of how maps do what they do have been carried out by these people who are basically building machines to make maps. When someone drops a bomb on something and kills a bunch of kids, and they do that using a map that you made, you either accept the responsibility for it—a kind of well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs responsibility—or you say, “Damn it, I can’t do this anymore.”

The sharing economy doesn’t build trust — it trades on cultural homogeneity and established social networks both online and in real life

“Artists have the capacity, when we gather, to do what nobody else in the world can do. We can make out of a series of nothings, a series of abandoned buildings… things that people would discard. Artists have a way of connecting belief and ability and a willing to work at a thing longer than mosts would and create heat… wherever there’s heat, people want to be around it, and what we found is that people wanted to be wherever artists work. If artists could manage some of the cultural capital that we had, artists could be the real transformers of communities.”