Urban Co-Mapping: exploring a collective transversal learning model

As mapping pedagogy has shifted significantly the past era, collective mapping emerged as alternative approach. It is a means to debate, illuminate, challenge, and imagine different spatial experiences and understandings within a broader collaborative effort and in a more democratic way. ‘What we teach’ in mapping scholarship has become more critical and collaborative over the years, but ‘how we teach’ it can still improve. Therefore, we find it relevant to reflect on how transversal learning practices and collective methodolgies can further enhance mapping pedagogy. This article draws from experiences in the 2022 and 2023 Urban Notes courses (an in-situ urban sketching elective) and discusses the outcomes of student-organized collective mapping experiments. The debate centers on the students’ mapping results and survey responses. Overall, this article highlights how students were able to demonstrate creative and critical understandings of maps and how collective learning methods enhanced their overall architectural and planning educations.