Paper short abstract:

This work presents a form of mapping cities called Sustainable Cartography in the Global South. The purpose is to construct a mapping method of drawing and interpreting cities via an ecological lens, which delineates a storyline of spatial justice with examples in Mexico, Brazil, India and China.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides the theoretical framework of a mapping method of cities called Sustainable Cartography in the Global South. Over the last fifty years cities and villages of this region of the world have experienced, in different intensities, an enduring ecological deficit.

For half a century, evidence suggests that industrial dynamics in Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia are responsible for the extraction and consumption of more ecosystem services than their lands and bodies of water can offer. This environmental debt challenges the capacity of architects, urban designers, and civil society to craft maps that register -interactively and simultaneously, local and global forces that influence the development of cities in the Global South.

The aim is to construct a hybrid form of drawing and reading cities via an ecological lens. One that visualizes them as biospheres that consume electricity, water, food, oil, and telecommunications through buildings and infrastructure networks. What patterns do they form? What is the impact of those spaces on the ecological imagination of cities?

This cartographic system first seeks to identify Ecological Utopias and Dystopias that are imagined upon them. Finally, this mapping method focuses on two possible places of action called Eco-centric and Techno-centric landscapes, where we can delineate a storyline of spatial justice with the analysis of the size and scale of infrastructures. The idea is that, in the pursuit of sustainable cities in the Global South, layering cartographic data will allow the discovery of new relationships between previously dispersed infrastructures.