Mapping practices are evolving beyond orientation and representation
toward futures built in dialogue with communities: blending oral
histories, sensor networks, ancestral memory, and speculative
modelling. Across a range of collaborative projects—from sea level rise
workshops to mental health geographies—designers and artists are
forging speculative cartographies that insist on community authorship
of spatial futures.
Sea‑Level Rise as Participatory Story‑Map
Stamen Design is a
data visualization and cartography studio based in San Francisco,
renowned for translating climate data into spatial tools and public-
facing experiences. For example, their [_Surging
) collaboration with [Climate
Central](https://www.climatecentral.org/?ref=criticalplayground.org)
created interactive sea‑level rise visualizations aimed at helping
people understand risk at the neighborhood level by overlaying
inundation projections with familiar local cityscapes. While Stamen
offers public and custom workshops on spatial data and
visualization—such as hands‑on “Working & Designing with Spatial Data”
classes in JavaScript and cartography tools—they do not publicly
document specific community workshops that combine flood projection
maps with community video‑recorded testimonies.
[
](https://criticalplayground.org/content/images/2025/07/Stamen-Design-Surging-Seas.jpg
)
Image Credit: Surging Seas, Stamen Design in collaboration with
Climate Central
In parallel, the work of speculative cartographer [Jeffrey
Linn](https://conspiracyofcartographers.com/about/?ref=criticalplayground.org
), featured by Stamen, repurposes vintage gas‑station maps as backdrops
for superimposed sea‑level rise overlays. His maps, part of the
[Petrofuture](https://conspiracyofcartographers.com/?ref=criticalplayground.org
) series and his broader [Conspiracy of
Cartographers](https://conspiracyofcartographers.com/?ref=criticalplayground.org
) archive, visualize how global coastal cities might reconfigure under
extreme melt—turning conventional climate visualizations into tactile
speculative scenarios.
[
](https://criticalplayground.org/content/images/2025/07/Petrofuture_Chevron.-Close-Up.jpg
)
Image Credit: Petrofuture 1953 Sea Level Rise Map of San Francisco Bay
Area (close-up), Jeffery Linn
[Eve
Mosher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Mosher?ref=criticalplayground.org)’s
landmark public‑art
intervention [HighWaterLine](https://www.evemosher.com/highwaterline?ref=criticalplayground.org
) similarly harnessed community engagement as data generation. Walking
hundreds of miles along shorelines in New York and Miami, she chalked
predicted flood heights in public space, inviting passers‑by to engage
directly with climate projections and share stories. The eventual
validation of her projections during Hurricane Sandy underscores the
power of community‑situated mapping to anticipate future change and
catalyze preparedness.
[
](https://criticalplayground.org/content/images/2025/07/HighWaterLine_6.jpg.webp
)
Image Credit: HighWaterLine, Eve Mosher
Ancestral Waterways and Riverhood Frameworks
Beyond sea‑level futures, speculative mapping also draws on ancestral
river ecologies. Research initiatives like [_RIVERHOOD: Living Rivers
and New Water Justice
), an ongoing 5‑year research initiative led by [Wageningen University
& Research](https://www.wur.nl/en.htm?ref=criticalplayground.org),
investigate new water justice movements across global cases in Ecuador,
Colombia, Spain, and the Netherlands. These movements rethink rivers as
living socio‑ecological agents and develop frameworks around water
justice, nature‑rights, and hydrosocial territories. While primarily
academic in orientation, _Riverhood_ introduces conceptual tools such
as “river‑as‑ecosociety,” “river‑as‑territory,” “river‑as‑subject,” and
“river‑as‑movement.”
The project explores how Indigenous guardians, grassroots
organizations, and water justice coalitions conceptualize and enact
ancestral river ontologies—offering a theoretical foundation for
participatory studios that might map ancestral flow‑paths, historic
river networks, and multi‑species territories in collaboration with
communities and oral‑memory holders.
A notable practice in this vein is [_Kartta
Labs_](https://research.google/pubs/kartta-labs-unrendering-historical-maps/?ref=criticalplayground.org
), an open‑source, time‑travel mapping tool that reconstructs
historical cityscapes from archival maps and crowdsourced data. Though
focused on urban form, the infrastructure supports layering oral
histories and sensory memory data to destabilize fixed
timelines—inviting communities to trace ancestral ecologies and
projected environmental futures within a unified interface.
[
](https://criticalplayground.org/content/images/2025/07/new-demo-walking-1.gif.webp
)
Image Credit: Kartta Labs, Google
Mental‑Health and Migratory Geographies
Community mapping also extends into psychosocial terrain. In Canada,
designer [Lucas
LaRochelle’s](https://lucaslarochelle.com/?ref=criticalplayground.org)
[_Queering the
Map_](https://lucaslarochelle.com/queering-the-map/?ref=criticalplayground.org
) platform launched in 2017 as a community‑created atlas of queer
experiences. Users drop pins and submit personal memories tied to
specific locations—mapping emotional geographies and migratory affect.
By 2025, the platform has gathered over half a million submissions in
23 languages, offering a powerful archive of place‑based emotional
history that frames queer temporal futurity rooted in spatial belonging
and movement.
[
](https://criticalplayground.org/content/images/2025/07/Lucas-Larochelle.png
)
Image Credit: Queering the Map, Lucas LaRochelle
More broadly, artists working across migration and mental‑health
mapping draw on natural‑landscape metaphors to render pathways of
displacement, resilience, and belonging. Emerging scholarship
references eco‑social perspectives where nature imagery becomes a
vessel for integrated, spatially anchored narratives of migration and
healing. Speculative cartographers are incorporating these ideas into
community workshops where participants trace mental‑health trajectories
across geographies of origin, transit, and settlement—rendering
emotional transitions visible through interactive visual forms.
Common Threads: Tools, Ethics, and Community Agency
Across these projects, several common threads emerge that highlight the
evolving role of mapping as both a design practice and a community
tool. Many initiatives employ hybrid data layers, weaving together
climate projections, sensor readings, oral histories, and personal
narratives to build multidimensional understandings of place. Eve
Mosher’s HighWaterLine, for example, combined scientific flood data
with community testimony as she marked potential inundation zones
directly onto city streets, making climate futures visible and
personally resonant. This emphasis on community co‑design is equally
evident in Lucas LaRochelle’s Queering the Map, where users themselves
contribute memories and experiences, effectively authoring a collective
cartography of queer life. Such projects also embrace material
experimentation: from Mosher’s chalk interventions in public space to
the digital interfaces of Queering the Map or Stamen Design’s
story‑mapping workshops.
[
](https://criticalplayground.org/content/images/2025/07/eve-mosher-highwaterline-miami.jpg
)
Image Credit: HighWaterLine, Eve Mosher
A commitment to temporal layering further distinguishes these works,
merging past, present, and projected futures—whether through ancestral
river tracing frameworks like Riverhoodor LaRochelle’s mapping of
affective histories and imagined queer futures. Underpinning all of
these practices is a strong focus on ethical design, ensuring
transparency around data sources, honoring the context of shared
narratives, and safeguarding community stewardship of the outcomes.
Institutional Networks and Future Mapping Futures
Organizations like the [Livingmaps
Network](https://www.livingmaps.org/?ref=criticalplayground.org) conven
e conferences, workshops, and exhibitions that foreground participatory
and speculative mapping. Their 2025 program on _More‑than‑human
Mappings_ included sessions led by practitioners such as [Kimbal
Bumstead](https://www.kimbalbumstead.com/?ref=criticalplayground.org)
and [Sana
Murrani](https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/sana-murrani?ref=criticalplayground.org
), whose project [_The Ruptured Yazidi
) explored trauma, Indigenous sensory geographies, and ecological
justice through embodied mapping practices. While the specific focus of
each event shifts with its invited contributors, the network
consistently frames maps as co‑constructed interfaces rather than
static artifacts—an approach that resonates strongly with
future‑conscious creative audiences.
]()
Image Credit: SONIC LANDSCAPES, Livingmaps Network, Kimbal Bumstead
Why It Matters for Creative Futures
For designers and artists working at the intersection of creativity and
foresight, speculative cartography provides a critical toolkit. It
grants communities narrative agency, shifting the act of mapping from
something done to them to something authored by them. It fosters future
literacies, enabling participants to visualize and anticipate projected
landscapes in ways that shape collective imagination. At the same time,
these practices advance design justice, grounding projects in consent,
cultural context, and equitable representation. Their strength lies
in cross‑disciplinary fluency, integrating GIS technologies, oral
histories, sensor data, storytelling, and participatory design methods
into layered, community‑driven maps. In this way, speculative
cartography functions not merely as representation but as a strategy
for engaging communities in shaping spatial futures—whether charting
climate resilience, mapping memory, tracing migration, or visualizing
mental health geographies.