Many stories exist in the landscape, says a wooden frame erected at Jericho Beach Park, What do you see? Do different stories render different cities? Or is it, as so exquisitely suggested by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1974), that different framings focus a city differently, evoking a multiplicity of stories, each one rendering some aspects of a landscape legible to the exclusion of others?

I am a bricoleur-as-researcher, conducting transdisciplinary investigations into everyday urban geographies through both affective and technoscientific research practices. I craft multimodal artifacts which perform bricolage with the physical-conceptual fields of my encounter. In my master's research-creation, I explored thinking with place and feeling the city through deep mapping, or situated, embodied inhabitation as a practice of ongoing and open-ended dialogue with the world. Much of my fieldwork involved walking Vancouver, my empirics emerging as inextricable layerings of sensorium, affect, and infrastructure. At the same time, for my job teaching and consulting on geospatial matters in the library, I facilitated a workshop on building a walkability index of Vancouver using a geographic information system (GIS). This endeavor assumed as its empirics geospatial datasets which render the city down from above as a collection of points, lines, and polygons. The entire index can be made without any reference to on-the-ground, everyday navigations.

Thinking with my ongoing work in Cartesian cartography, GIS, and deep mapping, I have grown critical of academic framings that render so-called 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' mapping practices in opposition to one another. Both are boundary making practices for configuring worlds. What matters is the effect of their differential articulations of what gets to count––what is included in the frame of an empirical formation. What becomes intelligible is not an innocent matter, however, for the constitution of a determinate form entails the exclusion of all other/ed possible configurations. What is needed to produce 'situated knowledges' (Haraway 1988) of the place one inhabits is not reflexivity on the part of the researcher, or an approach which counters the hegemonic one, but an account of how differences come to matter as the effect of boundary making practices.

In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Karen Barad attends to this by "building diffractive apparatuses to study the entangled effects differences make" (73). For context, when two or more waves occupy the same place in time they do not oppose one another but interfere; a diffraction pattern marks the effects of their interference. Barad conducts a close reading of Niels Bohr's philosophy-physics to illuminate his complementarity relation as explanation for quantum entanglements, particularly the wave-particle duality of matter. Position and momentum, properties of particles and waves respectively, are indeterminate prior to their measurement. Reading Bohr and Foucault through one another, Barad defines apparatuses as ongoing and open-ended material-discursive boundary making practices which resolve the indeterminacy of a property by performing an "agential cut" whereby the "agencies of observation" and "object of observation" are differentially articulated. "Agencies of observation" and "object of observation" are provisional configurations––entangled states which "intra-actively" mark (mutually constitute) one another within and as part of phenomena. According to Barad's agential realism, "measured properties refer to phenomena…" (Barad 2007, 197, emphasis in original). Wave and particle are therefore phenomena within which momentum and position are made differentially determinate through apparatuses that constitute the mutually exclusive conditions for either property to become intelligible. Read through agential realism, a walkability index is not the result of a researcher using a technoscientific instrument to expose a property of the city (walkability) that was already there. Rather, a GIS, the computer, and spatial analyst equipped with technical expertise are marked as "agencies of observation" by the boundary making practice, or apparatus, through which walkability is produced as an "object of observation".

I want to suggest "the city" as a phenomenon within which empirical formations (themselves phenomena) like spatial data and maps (be they mental or physical/digital) are intra-actively produced through both technoscientific and affective agencies of observation. 'Top down' and 'bottom up' mapping practices simply perform different agential cuts, the effects of which do not oppose one another but overlap in the everyday, their interference constituting the entangled viscera of urban bodies as they are rendered differentially intelligible. To study phenomena, their entangled states, and/or the apparatuses performing agential cuts from an exterior position, however, requires building a larger diffractive apparatus (Barad 2007). This is what I propose to do.

In my PhD, I will build a diffractive apparatus to study how the phenomenal city comes to differentially matter through the entangled effects of 'top down' and 'bottom up' boundary making practices. First, I will assemble an account of each apparatus, engaging with feminist new materialisms, affect studies, performativity theory, posthumanisms, critical GIS, critical cartography, spatial humanities and post-qualitative inquiry. I will conduct interviews with geospatial researchers as well as inhabitants of Santa Cruz County. Second, I will read these two apparatuses through one another. Assuming referent "the city" as a phenomenon allows for a multiplicity of stories to be superpositioned in one place. The indeterminacy of which story comes to matter is resolved by apparatuses which differentially frame the landscape. Accounting for apparatuses is important in order to remain responsive to how some stories become privileged while others are "excluded from mattering" (Barad 2007, 220).

We live in a moment where locative technology is ubiquitous. Becoming lost no longer requires going out of one's way. Instead, "disoriented discovery" (Kurgan 2013) begins with a choice to not reference Google Maps, to turn location off and allow position to remain indeterminate. Reading Barad (2007) and de Certeau (1984) through one another, I believe place and space (the differentiation of which preoccupies geographers) to be phenomenal expressions of the world differentially articulated through trace and practice. I am particularly interested in how pedestrian tracings of Google Maps––a locative technology which renders the city down from above as a place––inform everyday navigations and thus the production of (urban) space. How does Google Maps define intra-actions between humans and urban infrastructure, becoming part of dialogue with the urban surround it both enables and constrains? How are categories like human|nonhuman or field|researcher performatively constituted through embodied methodologies and sensory, more-than-human, and imaginative (Elliott and Culhane 2017) ethnographies? Drawing from my master's research-creation, I wonder how posthuman embodiment might inform mapping practices in ways that reconfigure delimitations presumed by Google Maps. To this end, I will also build a proof-of-concept destination-disoriented navigational application for 'spacing' (Crouch 2003) the city of my inhabitation.

Pedestrian performances of “the city”: a diffractive inquiry into Google Maps and mental maps at the site of digitally-mediated everyday navigations

Google Maps came to smartphones in 2007 (Gibbs 2015) and in the subsequent decade, accrued over a billion monthly users worldwide (Russell 2019). Today, in many places, Google Maps is ubiquitous to the point of being backgrounded. Urban inhabitants' increasing reliance on tech monopolies for spatial navigation has led to what Laura Kurgan calls a "tyranny of orientation that erases the possibility of disoriented discovery…" (2013, 17). At stake is the subordination of mental maps' situated, local knowledges under Google Maps' totalizing view from above which imposes "a conquering gaze from nowhere" (Haraway 1988, 581). However, it is not simply that use of Google Maps is diminishing our capacity to make mental maps and thus navigate on our own (Stromberg 2015, Dahmani and Bohbot 2020); this erosion of mental mapping capabilities is a symptom of what my research seeks to establish as a much more consequential effect of Google's creep into everyday life, viz., Google Maps is reshaping our mental maps in its image. What is the significance of "Google’s cartography empire" (Schranz 2021, 24) increasingly directing the way the city comes to 'matter'? Moreover, why is the shift to using Google Maps—in addition and even instead of mental maps—so backgrounded? And, how does this occlusion assert a hegemony of 'top-down' productions of geographic knowledge?

My project objective is to bring this process under scrutiny and problematize "the city" as a singular, self-referential object of analysis which it is still largely constructed as by discourses of GIS (geographic information systems) and cartography. Drawing from Karen Barad's theoretical framework of posthumanist performativity and agential realism (Barad 2003, 2007), I argue the city does not exist as a fixed, determinate place with distinct boundaries but rather materializes through often digitally-mediated everyday navigations. Crucially, these navigational practices enact (what I theorize as) spatial citations of maps—mental and hand-held—performatively configuring the city into different empirical formations.

In contrast to 'top-down' orientations to mapping which abstract and totalize the world from above, 'bottom-up' approaches like counter-cartographies (see Mesquita 2018; Mason-Deese 2020) and participatory GIS (see Dunn 2007) account for embodied, experiential, situated, local geographic knowledges. While existing scholarship frames 'bottom-up' maps and mapping as effective means to oppose the hegemony of 'top-down' configurations, I argue the ubiquity of Google Maps (in cities especially) makes its effects impossible to disentangle from those of mental maps. More and more, we use both at once to navigate our everyday. My research therefore employs diffraction as a more generative heuristic than opposition to study the process and significance of Google's reshaping of mental maps and thus the production of urban space (Lefebvre 1991). As Donna Haraway explains: "diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replica­tion, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear" (1991, 70, emphasis in original). By applying a diffractive methodology (Barad 2007, van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012, Murris and Bozalek 2019) in my analysis, my project attunes to how the effects of using mental maps and Google Maps—those effects being different configurations of "the city"—overlap, interfere, and combine with one another in and through everyday navigations. Mapping the effects of the differences in Google Maps' and mental maps' configurations of the city leads to an account of how mental maps are being insidiously reshaped by pervasive locative technology.

In an effort to suggest alternative ways of performing the city, I will build a digital navigational application that invites destination-disoriented discovery of Vancouver. This component of my PhD is a multi-year endeavor which makes use of my expertise in Cartesian cartography, embodied spatial practices like deep mapping (see McLucas 2000, Biggs 2010, Roberts 2016), and web development. Its current stage involves designing speculative directives for navigating Vancouver that subvert those imposed by Google Maps. Taking seriously Luke Bergmann's call to "'data' differently" (2016, 976), my objective in designing and prototyping such an application during this award's tenure is to think through how geographic information may be differently created, structured, and visualized. Specifically, finding ways that enable the historicities and affects that haunt data (Blackman 2019) and the boundary drawing practices through which data are constituted as empirics to be included as part of the data themselves. Building this digital application will put heretofore theoretical speculations into material practice.

My project outcome is therefore twofold: my diffractive inquiry will contribute an account of the ways in which Google maps is reshaping our mental maps of the city, and my digital application for destination-disoriented discovery will contribute invitations to data differently and perform the city otherwise. Significantly, my research locates navigations as everyday sites of knowledge reproduction through which the broader consequences of Google's creep into everyday life are not just revealed, but can be interfered with to reassert 'situated knowledges' (Haraway 1988). My navigational application contributes a tool for such interference. In building this application, I bring the vibrant work on speculative data within qualitative inquiry (see in particular St. Pierre 2013, Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, and Tesar 2017, Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, and Ulmer 2018) into concrete relation with discourses in quantitative data, exploring how cartographic empirics like spatial datasets and coordinate reference systems might be differently articulated. As a whole, my project brings onto-epistemological frameworks of feminist new materialisms into productive dialogue with critical cartography, urban geography, and digital geographies.

Navigating the urban everyday: how Google Maps is reshaping pedestrian performances of the city

Google Maps came to smartphones in 2007 and in the subsequent decade, accrued over a billion monthly users worldwide (McQuire 2019). Today, in many cities, personal use of digital navigational applications has become ubiquitous to the point of being backgrounded. Urban inhabitants' increasing reliance on Cartesian maps for wayfinding has led to what Laura Kurgan calls a "tyranny of orientation that erases the possibility of disoriented discovery…" (2013, 17). At stake is the subordination of situated, local knowledges under a totalizing view from above which imposes a "conquering gaze from nowhere" (Haraway 1988, 581). However, it is not simply that habitual use of navigational applications is diminishing our capacity to make mental maps and thus navigate on our own (Dahmani and Bohbot 2020); this erosion of mental mapping capabilities is a symptom of what my research seeks to establish as a much more consequential effect, viz., changing pedestrian practices in response to pervasive locative media are reshaping our mental maps. I take Google Maps as a case study because of its unparalleled proliferation—to personal devices, rideshare apps, and car interfaces—and Google's creep into 'practices of everyday life' (de Certeau 1984) through expansion into the geospatial sphere. What is the significance of a tech monopoly increasingly directing our everyday spatial practices—the walking, rolling, bussing, cycling, driving, and otherwise transiting we do to get around the city? In what ways does using Google Maps influence how urban inhabitants navigate and imagine their cities, and, in turn, cultivate spatial awareness? For whom is Google Maps useful and for whom is the using of Google Maps valuable? In other words, what is the commodity at the heart of the Google Maps Platform?

My project objective is to interrogate the role of navigational applications—particularly Google Maps—in re/figuring the urban everyday. Situating everyday spatial practices as sites of subversive resistance, I call for an active reconfiguration of mental maps through alternate approaches to urban navigation. My proposed project is a research-creation endeavour: I will think via the speculative design and digital construction of a counterhegemonic navigational application for cultivating spatial awareness via destination-disoriented discovery of Vancouver. Critically informing the creation of this artistic artifact will be a rigorous inquiry into Google Maps as platform, infrastructure, and "digital technical object" (McQuire 2019), as well as a mixed-methods qualitative study described below. I contend that such a disciplinary and "methodological eclecticism" (Roberts 2018) is necessary in developing a theoretical and conceptual framework for studying how the structural effects of "Google’s cartography empire" (Schranz 2021, 24) manifest in our everyday. As my project will demonstrate, it is precisely Google Maps' banality that works to obscure its hegemony.

I begin my inquiry by reframing the terms by which we relate Google Maps and mental maps. In contrast to Cartesian, 'top-down' orientations to mapping which abstract the world, rendering it down from above, 'bottom-up' approaches like counter-mapping (see Mesquita 2018; Mason-Deese 2020) and participatory Geographic Information Science (see Dunn 2007) account for embodied, experiential geographic knowledges. While much critical cartographic scholarship frames 'bottom-up' maps and mapping practices as effective means to oppose the hegemony of 'top-down' configurations (Dalton and Stallmann 2018), I argue the nowadays common practice of using navigational applications and practical knowledge simultaneously to get around the city makes it difficult to disentangle 'top-down' from 'bottom-up' configurations. Indeed, local knowledges are often extracted by Google from users voluntarily (Tarr and Alvarez León 2019), and counter-mapping projects sometimes use Google Maps basemaps to visualize their own data (as was the case with queeringthemap.com (Brown and Knopp 2008) until their quite recent switch to a free and open-source platform). Recognizing the need for a more generative heuristic than opposition to study Google's reshaping of mental maps, my project employs the theoretical framework of diffraction (Barad 2007; van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012; Murris and Bozalek 2019). Diffraction describes the phenomenon whereby two waves that occupy the same spacetime overlap, interfere, and combine to produce a new wave. A diffractive mode of inquiry thus enables the relational scrutiny of two contrasting framings by reading them through (rather than against) one another, attuning not to their differences themselves but to how the effects of their difference consequentially materialize

To further explore navigational preferences and their differential effects on mental maps and spatial awareness, I will conduct a mixed-methods qualitative study of Metro Vancouver inhabitants' wayfinding practices. This will entail semi-structured interviews (n≈40) which engage ethnographic walking methods (Ingold and Vergunst 2008; Moretti 2011), meaning, whenever possible, I will join participants on their everyday navigations (such as commutes or errands) as we dialogue. I will also devise activities for individually directed disoriented discovery, inviting participants to explore unfamiliar areas without referencing Google Maps. Finally, I will conduct a series of small group discussions (n≈5) with participants in which Jack Jen Gieseking's (2013) methodology of mental sketch mapping is used to render visible aspects of people's mental maps of the city. What I learn from this qualitative study will inform the ongoing creation of my artistic artifact—a digital application for alternative urban wayfinding. This application will make use of existing data from the City of Vancouver and Open Street Map, MapLibre's programming libraries for web mapping, and creatively modified open-source routing algorithms such as Valhalla. Drawing on practical experience and technical expertise in web map and website development, user interface design, and programming, my application could, among other possibilities workshopped with study participants, allow users to wayfind through alleyways and select preferences for longer, shadier, or quieter routes.

A recent survey found Google Maps users feel the platform affords them agency in exploration, though the authors show the reality of this agency to be heavily circumscribed (Gentzel and Wimmer 2024). The intention of my research-creation is not to urge disinvestment from Google (Maps)—though I recommend the free and open-source alternative application OsmAnd—but rather to interrupt the assumptions of all Cartesian navigational applications that discipline pedestrian performances of the city. In crafting a destination-disoriented navigational application, I bring the vibrant work on speculative data within qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre 2013; Koro-Ljungberg et al. 2017; Koro-Ljungberg et al. 2018) into concrete relation with resonant discourses surrounding quantitative data, exploring how cartographic empirics like spatial data and coordinate reference systems might be differently articulated. Taking seriously Luke Bergmann's call to "'data' differently" (2016, 976), my objective in designing and prototyping this creative output is to consider how geographic information might be differently recorded, structured, and visualized. Specifically, finding ways that enable the historicities and affects that haunt spatial encounters to be included as part of the data themselves. Building this digital application is significant in that it will put heretofore theoretical speculations into material practice.

Overall, my project contributes a denaturalization of the tyranny of orientation whereby a tech monopoly increasingly directs the most mundane of everyday geographical expressions. Operating as "almost a knowledge infrastructure" (Plantin 2018, 491), Google Maps' ubiquity obfuscates how its habitual use cedes urban inhabitants' collective power to reimagine the city. However, scholars of platform urbanisms caution against dystopian, capitalocentric framings of cities' saturation with digitality, orienting instead towards opportunities for "mundane tactical interventions" (Leszczynski 2020, 189) at the "platform/city interface—or the emergent spatiotemporalities of where digital platforms, urban denizens, and cities meet" (191). My research-creation offers an alternate interface for encountering the city. By designing a navigational application where becoming lost is perhaps just the starting point, I advance the argument that spatial awareness is developed through intentional acts of disorientation. What I term "Google creep" is therefore an ambivalent, non-totalizing, and open-ended process with everyday opportunities to subvert prescription by performing the city otherwise.