Mapping urban poverty: The unfolding of competing accounts through accounting visualizations

Poverty is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon whose definition and governance remain highly contested, despite its recognition as one of the most significant global challenges. While accounting plays a central role in constructing the poor and poverty through calculative practices, little is known about accounting visualizations creating a shared space for competing understandings of poverty to simultaneously unfold. We address this gap through a study of French urban policy documents. Our analysis focuses on the 2014 Lamy law, which introduced a new method for identifying poor urban areas eligible for public funding based primarily on mapped revenue data. Maps are particularly promising objects for such inquiry because, as the paper shows, they embed abstract accounting metrics into physical spaces and act as epistemic objects whose inherent incompleteness continuously stimulates further inquiry and knowledge development. Through this paper, we contribute to accounting research in two ways. First, we show that maps function as palimpsests of accounting information in which stable technical representations and successive partial accounts coexist within the same visual inscription, enabling the continuous exploration of complex epistemic objects. Second, we demonstrate that mapping accounting mediates the ‘distance-closeness’ tension in poverty governance by enabling local elected representatives to negotiate and develop alternative accounts of poverty despite enduring power asymmetries in favor of state representatives.