Berkeley Geography Professor Clancy Wilmott is conducting innovative research on the political stakes of mapping in its digital and physical forms.
She focuses on critical cartography, a subfield of geography that critiques the structures behind how mapping knowledge is produced. Wilmott’s research perceives mapping as a tool not just for representation, but also as a means of influencing the world. Her work at UC Berkeley, which intersects critical cartography, new media and spatial practices, bridges theory and practice through community-driven projects.
Throughout her career, Wilmott has structured her work around decolonial practices. Through mapping projects with the Sogorea Te, an urban land trust with the goal of returning Chochenyo and Karkin lands to indigenous people, and a homeless community in Oakland, her work exposes the limits of traditional cartography. In her upcoming book Cartotopia, she investigates how AI reproduces biases in geographic datasets. Her mapping practices center around building a more equitable future.
Wilmott recently spoke to Berkeley Social Sciences about her background, research and critical cartography. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to UC Berkeley?
Clancy Wilmott: I’m a cartographer with a background in communications; a focus on media arts and production and international studies; and a focus on Italian. I received my postgraduate degree in cultural studies from the University of Technology in Sydney. While studying in Italy, I had an interesting set of research projects about how people navigate and make sense of space. Those research projects led me to realize how much maps and mobile technologies affect our everyday lives.
From there, I ended up doing more research on mapping technologies for my postgraduate honors degree. I then pursued a Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Manchester. I was part of a research cluster that focused on Geographic Information Science, which bridges both physical and human sciences.
After completing my Ph.D., I came to UC Berkeley for a position that allowed me to work with both the Department of Geography and the Berkeley Center for New Media. I was familiar with the work of scholars from both fields, so joining a space where I could speak both disciplinary languages felt like a dream come true.
What drew you to the field of critical cartography? How did your research in that field begin?
Clancy Wilmott: I’ve always been obsessed with maps. When I was a kid, my aunt bought me the Heinemann Atlas, and I spent a lot of time reading it. I particularly liked the maps in the back that showed things like vegetation and climate. I hadn’t realized that was something you could do as a job yet.
From there, undertaking research on power, technologies and representations of space and place in Australia gave me a different view of how the world is represented in the context of settler colonialism. For example, a map might show a green park, when in reality it’s dry, overgrown and full of snakes. Through that research, I tried to understand how people navigated those false representations.
While working for the local government in Sydney, I saw firsthand the distance between representation and lived experience. That distance was the space in which contestation occurred, with local people feeling like their voices weren’t being heard. Around the same time, GPS became available on smartphones, and I started asking questions about both the consequences of that distance and the politics of using a mobile phone map on settler colonial land.
Can you walk us through your current work on critical cartography, new media and spatial practices?
Clancy Wilmott: Critical cartography is an approach to mapping that critiques the structures behind how cartographic knowledge is produced. What sets critical cartography apart from other subfields is that it doesn't just use maps to challenge power, but rather understands mapping itself as a form of power. Maps don’t just represent worlds; they produce and generate them. So, if we want to generate alternative visions of the world, we have to wrangle with those representations.
In my own work, I’m a firm believer that some of the best critiques of cartography come from the ground and from community practice. Oftentimes, the failures we encounter in maps aren’t just technical glitches, but foundational failures in the way a map asks us to think about space and how people actually use it. My work aims to fix that.
At any given time, I undertake two or three community-driven mapping projects. Right now, I’m collaborating with the Sogorea Te Land Trust to translate their vision of land into a digital map. I’m also working with the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens and the Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective, a group that aims to expand Pacific Islander visibility in academia.
I also do theoretical and experimental work as well. In my next book, Cartotopia, I train generative adversarial networks, or models for AI learning, on map datasets to bring a geographical approach to AI. AI has the appearance of being objective because it’s quantitative, but it constructs worlds in very uneven ways. I’m interested in exploring how AI absorbs biased geographic datasets and recreates them in its outputs.
What are some of the key findings from your research?
Clancy Wilmott: One of the more interesting pragmatic findings I wrote a paper about was about a project I did for a community of homeless people who were living under the I-80 in Oakland. They wanted a map of who owned the land under the I-80 in order to build a tiny home ecovillage. It should have been straightforward, but it turned out there were almost 40 parcels of land in the area and the ownership was extremely fractured.
To determine who owned the land, I went down to the county assessor’s office in Oakland and looked up each parcel individually. However, I had to go through a metal detector and wait in a room with several security guards. There was no way someone who lived in the community I was working with would be allowed to enter. That system wasn’t as open and accessible as one would think – it only imagines a certain kind of citizen.
In creating the maps, we ran into a lot of issues with the creation of base maps and satellite imagery. However, in the end, that collective did manage to get some money promised to them to work on their vision. After proposing a plan that was doable and actionable, the state of California gave $4.7-million to the city of Oakland to build the village.
In my work with the Sogorea Te Land Trust, I’ve discovered a real problem with how maps work for indigenous communities. In the way mapping programs are structured at the moment, indigenous communities have to choose between efficiency and identity. We have a real problem, which is that we’re constantly asking indigenous communities to compromise.
Sogorea Te’s problem isn’t theoretical, however. For example, waterlines are mapped as fixed objects to facilitate shipping. However, depending on where the waterline is, sometimes you can’t fish or access mussels. Also, places along the coast that have been converted to land are still at risk for liquefaction. One of my key takeaways from that project is that representation is critically important.
Furthermore, one of my findings from Cartotopia so far is that AI is not that special – it’s just extremely resource intensive. The problem is in the standardized representations it creates through flawed datasets. There’s a significant distance between representations and the things they are purporting to represent, and I want to address that.
Can you tell us about the broader impact of your work?
Clancy Wilmott: The map I worked on for the unhoused community in Oakland was deposited in the Library of Congress as a piece of archival evidence, which I felt was important.
Three years later, the map I made for the Sogorea Te Land Trust is still informing how we think about building digital software. We recently launched it at the Oakland Museum of California, and it’s on display in the You Are Here exhibition in the Gallery of Natural Sciences. It’s been quite impactful for opening up a series of conversations between community researchers and people interested in environmental justice.
I’ve presented that map at a range of different institutions, and I’ll be presenting it at the International Cartographic Association conference, a global exhibition in Bangladesh. I’ve also presented it to the federal government as a starting point for discussions about decolonization.
The outcome of the project for the Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective will be a tool that researchers can use to shape files for several islands, which currently can’t be done. We’re also designing signage for the Botanic Gardens, which I feel would have a pretty direct impact. It tells the story of how plants move without referring to the nation-state.