The city from thirty thousand feet: Embodiment, creativity, and the use of geographic information systems as urban planning tools

Technology and Culture

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 325-346

  Jackson, Shannon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI KANSAS CITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44349184907     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0039     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Nadine Schuurman, "Trouble in the Heartland: GIS and Its Critics in the 1990s," Progress in Human Geography 24 (2000): 577.
2. W. J. Craig, T. M. Harris, and E. Weiner, eds., Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems (New York, 2002), xiv.
3. The Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance is a nonprofit community development corporation (CDC), established in 1979, serving the metropolitan region of Kansas City. In 2003, KCNA launched the Neighborhood Renaissance Project, which used GIS to analyze housing conditions and as a means of empowering residents to better understand and change the conditions of their own neighborhoods. Research for this article was conducted under Social Science Institutional Review Board guidelines, which are very strict about preserving informants' anonymity. Where I am permitted to identify interview subjects, I have done so; where the SSIRB guidelines prohibit that, I have not.
4. Marie Alice L'Heureux, personal conversation, 1 March 2007.
5. See Renee Seiber, "Public Participation Geographic Information Systems across Borders," The Canadian Geographer 47 (2003): 50-61.
6. See also Gender, Place and Culture 9, no. 3 (2002), a special issue of the journal that addresses feminist geography and GIS.
7. Robert Lake, "Planning and Applied Geography: Positivism, Ethics, and Geographic Information Systems," Progress in Human Geography 17 (1993): 404-13;
8. Robert Rundstrom, "GIS, Indigenous Peoples, and Epistemological Diversity," Progress in Human Geography 17 (1993): 45-57.
9. Stuart Bollington, interview by author, Center on Aging, UMKC, 13 February 2003.
10. A. W., interview by author, 20 April 2004.
11. E. L., interview by author, KCNA offices, 20 July 2006.
12. Michael Curry, "Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities in Geographic Information Systems: Beyond the Power of the Image," Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22, no. 1 (1995): 58-69.
13. Ibid., 62.
14. Ibid.
15. Lorenzo Gilyard was accused of murdering thirteen women between 1986 and 1987; he was convicted of killing six. Many of the bodies were found in the vicinity of the Prospect Corridor in Ivanhoe; see Kansas City Star, 14 April 2007, p. 1. More recently, Terry Blair has been accused of killing eight women between 2003 and 2004, and several of their bodies were also found in the Prospect Corridor; Kansas City Star, 1 February 2008, B1.
16. The front page of the Kansas City Star, 7 August 2005, featured a story about vacant lots and a photograph of Ivanhoe residents picking up trash and clearing brush from a lot near 38th Terrace and Brooklyn Avenue.
17. Mike Frisch, interview by author, UMKC, 15 March 2005.
18. Sarah Elwood, "Information for Change: The Social and Political Impacts of Geographic Information Technologies" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2000).
19. Sarah Elwood and Helga Leitner, "GIS and Spatial Knowledge Production for Neighborhood Revitalization: Negotiating State Priorities and Neighborhood Visions," Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 2 (2003): 139-57.
20. Nadine Schuurman and Geraldine Pratt, "Care of the Subject: Feminism and Critiques of GIS," Gender, Place, and Culture 9, no. 3 (2002): 296.
21. The pain associated with complex imaging is discussed by Fredric Jameson in his essay "Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, Ill., 1988).
22. Eugene McCann, "Framing Space and Time in the City: Urban Policy and the Politics of Spatial and Temporal Scale," Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 2 (2003): 163.
23. Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Growth in the Heartland: Challenges and Opportunities for Missouri (Washington, D.C., 2002).
24. Joe Egan, interview by author and Phil Olson, UMKC, 10 September 2004.
25. Robyn Turner, interview by author, 30 March 2005.
26. Barry Mayer, interview by author, Kansas City, 24 June 2004. See also Derek Paulsen, "To Map or Not to Map: Assessing the Impact of Crime Maps on Police Officer Perceptions of Crime," International Journal of Police Science and Management 6, no. 4 (2004): 234-46. Paulsen demonstrates that the accuracy of police in responding to crime (defined as ability to assess areas most in need of police resources) was not improved with their use of GIS maps.
27. E. L., interview by author, Kansas City, 18 August 2004.
28. E. L., interview by author, Kansas City, 20 July 2006.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid. "Forecaster" is a function of Paint the Town, a custom ArcView extension that allows planners to simulate existing and future land-use patterns, but informants with both KCNA and MARC used the name of the function as shorthand for the whole custom application.
31. Steve Gay, interview by author, Kansas City, 20 July 2005.
32. Frank Lenk, interview by author, Kansas City, 19 August 2005.
33. Frank Lenk, remarks to UMKC Urban Faculty Council, 9 February 2005.
34. For a somewhat more detailed description of Paint the Town, see Max Dieber and Eliot Allen, "210 Cities Paint Their Future with GIS," ArcNews Online, http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0304articles/210-cities. html (accessed 19 February 2008). On MARCs use, see http://www.marc.org/gis/ paintthetown.htm (accessed 19 February 2008).
35. Steve Gay, interview.
36. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York, 1992).
37. Lenk, interview.
38. Anne Balsamo, "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace," in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy (London, 2000), 497.
39. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago, 1999).
40. AirTran (AirTran Airways inflight magazine), July 2006. For von Hagen's exhibit, see http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html (accessed 19 February 2008).
41. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Bell and Kennedy, 315.
42. Michael Liebhold, "Infrastructure for the New Geography," August 2004, 5, online at http://www.iftf.org/docs/SR-869_Infra_New_Geog_Intro. pdf (accessed 14 February 2008).
43. Donna Haraway has been instrumental in defining situated knowledge, and even relocating it. She sums this position up nicely in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York, 1991): "I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location . . . where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims . . . from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere. . . . Only the god-trick is forbidden" (p. 195).
44. Seeing implies its own distinct form of sentience and has, therefore, inspired its own body of literature. Two edited volumes in particular illustrate the special attention given both the historical construction of vision and its privileged position in the Western sensorium: Vision in Context, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York, 1996),
45. and The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London, 1998).
46. Other interesting approaches to the historical relationship between technology and vision include Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
47. the Manchester University Press Critical Image Series, edited by John Taylor, which focuses on photography; and Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York, 1990).
48. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 2004).
49. Rundstrom (n. 6 above); Michael Curry, Digital Places (London, 1998).
50. Rundstrom, 41. For other sources that explore the way GIS handles historically marginalized voices, see Gender, Place and Culture 9, no. 3 (n. 5 above); Seiber (n. 5 above);
51. Daniel Weiner et al., "Apartheid Representations in a Digital Landscape: GIS, Remote Sensing, and Local Knowledge in Kiepersol, South Africa," Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22, no. 1 (1995): 30-44.
52. I do not take "good urban planning" to be something universally agreed upon. I put the question to informants, "what constitutes good urban planning?" Though replies varied, they consistently mentioned rational and efficient use of information and resources. It was also mentioned, in other discussions, that one of the key obstacles to good urban planning is the competition and conflict that comes from lack of agreement over the distribution of resources. I therefore conclude that a rational political vision, one that helps transcend particularity and difference, is also part of good urban planning. Stuart Aitken and Suzanne Michel address this issue in "Who Contrives the 'Real' in GIS?" Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22, no. 1 (1995): 17-29. They compellingly argue that "the controllers of the technology may obfuscate decision-making processes by encouraging the illusion that, through rational science and technology, GIS can 'solve' political planning problems" (p. 22).
53. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York, 1985).