Participatory mapping with urban youth: the visual elicitation of socio-spatial research data

Participatory mapping attempts to engage youth in the generation of personalized maps, as a way to both harness the value of individual knowledge about geographic space, and to concurrently empower the research participants by inviting them to take an active stake in the representation and explication of their spatial environment. Engagement in the mapping exercise facilitates a nuanced process of reflection – often unrealizable through purely textual methods – and can stimulate youth empowerment by seeding critical conversations around personal safety, mobility and technologies of spatial representation. Findings from a study that implemented participatory mapping in the context of an after-school program for urban high school students are used to demonstrate the potential of this research strategy as a participatory pedagogical intervention, and to extract methodological recommendations for its effective implementation in urban educational settings.