Chinatown Invisible: Hybrid-mapping and making-do

Abstract

This article is a proposal to address visual mapping as a means to reveal the interrelationships between a place represented, a place lived and a place perceived. A form of critical cartography called hybrid-mapping is used to interrogate the combined sociocultural and biophysical legacies of the continually changing landscape. This approach expressly facilitates a focused interpretation of the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the nuanced connections between landscape, history and culture. Offering to a larger conversation about landscape representation, this article introduces, situates and analyses the application of hybrid-mapping in a creative research project entitled Chinatown Invisible about Manhattan's Chinatown. The Chinatown Invisible project uses hybrid-mapping to interrogate the quotidian practice of 'making-do' to adapt existing urban structures to fulfil everyday needs. Capturing and understanding making-do is vital because it sheds light on the ways in which residents informally claim space and how they shape the ongoing physical evolution of their neighbourhood, establishing their 'right to the city'. Chinatown Invisible shows how hybrid-mapping unveils the dynamics between culture and landscape in an urban setting, bridging critical geography and landscape representation to examine multiple ways in which we can interact with the processes of real, imagined and perceived space.