How is community done? Understanding civic learning through psychogeographic mapping

In this article we explore the potential of psychogeographic mapping for developing an understanding of community-as-enacted and discuss how this can help us to get a more nuanced sense of the dynamics of civic learning within communities of plurality and difference. We argue that civic learning has to do with the transformation of private interests into common concerns and show that such transformations can both be understood in a way that strives for a single-voice consensus and in a way in which such learning processes remain tied to a democratic commitment to plurality and difference. Against this background we introduce psychogeographic mapping and argue how it can assist in documenting how community is ‘done’ in a way that is sensitive to plurality and difference, to multiple perspectives, experiences and histories. We demonstrate this through a discussion of findings from a community education project—the community walking project—conducted in a sub-urban setting in Scotland. We conclude that psychogeographic mapping is not only an important research tool for understanding community-as-enacted, but can also contribute to the promotion of forms of civic learning that are guided by a democratic commitment to plurality and difference.