“Mashups” are web-based maps that intermix user-created data with information gathered from multiple online sources. As part of the wave of “Web 2.0” technologies, mashups represent a shift toward distributed authoring and sharing of Internet content, complicating traditional modes of knowledge production. Mashups originated in the open source “hacker” movement and are now associated with the term “neogeography,” used to describe the practice of amateur mapmaking online. In this thesis I ask whether mashups facilitate a cartography that is more accessible and democratic, studying the ways in which mashup authors create alternative community or personal cartographies while remaining dependent on existing power structures for data and resources. I illuminate these issues through a series of examples, such as: mashups that render personal memories about places, maps created by activist groups to counter dominant representations of geography by governments or corporations, and websites that facilitate the collaborative creation and sharing of spatial knowledge within community groups. Contrasting these case studies with traditional paper cartography and GIS, as well as the professional online mapping technologies of the Geospatial Web (or GeoWeb), I explore how mashups attempt to represent personal, subjective, overlapping and contradictory perceptions of space and place. While enthusiastic claims about the ability of mashups to wrest mapmaking from state and corporate hands are currently overstated, I conclude that mashups do in fact provide new ways of collaboratively representing space whose implications are still to be determined.

“Mashups” are web-based maps that intermix user-created data with information gathered from multiple online sources. As part of the wave of “Web 2.0” technologies, mashups represent a shift toward distributed authoring and sharing of Internet content, complicating traditional modes of knowledge production. Mashups originated in the open source “hacker” movement and are now associated with the term “neogeography,” used to describe the practice of amateur mapmaking online. In this thesis I ask whether mashups facilitate a cartography that is more accessible and democratic, studying the ways in which mashup authors create alternative community or personal cartographies while remaining dependent on existing power structures for data and resources. I illuminate these issues through a series of examples, such as: mashups that render personal memories about places, maps created by activist groups to counter dominant representations of geography by governments or corporations, and websites that facilitate the collaborative creation and sharing of spatial knowledge within community groups. Contrasting these case studies with traditional paper cartography and GIS, as well as the professional online mapping technologies of the Geospatial Web (or GeoWeb), I explore how mashups attempt to represent personal, subjective, overlapping and contradictory perceptions of space and place. While enthusiastic claims about the ability of mashups to wrest mapmaking from state and corporate hands are currently overstated, I conclude that mashups do in fact provide new ways of collaboratively representing space whose implications are still to be determined.

“Mashups” are web-based maps that intermix user-created data with information gathered from multiple online sources. As part of the wave of “Web 2.0” technologies, mashups represent a shift toward distributed authoring and sharing of Internet content, complicating traditional modes of knowledge production. Mashups originated in the open source “hacker” movement and are now associated with the term “neogeography,” used to describe the practice of amateur mapmaking online. In this thesis I ask whether mashups facilitate a cartography that is more accessible and democratic, studying the ways in which mashup authors create alternative community or personal cartographies while remaining dependent on existing power structures for data and resources. I illuminate these issues through a series of examples, such as: mashups that render personal memories about places, maps created by activist groups to counter dominant representations of geography by governments or corporations, and websites that facilitate the collaborative creation and sharing of spatial knowledge within community groups. Contrasting these case studies with traditional paper cartography and GIS, as well as the professional online mapping technologies of the Geospatial Web (or GeoWeb), I explore how mashups attempt to represent personal, subjective, overlapping and contradictory perceptions of space and place. While enthusiastic claims about the ability of mashups to wrest mapmaking from state and corporate hands are currently overstated, I conclude that mashups do in fact provide new ways of collaboratively representing space whose implications are still to be determined. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Human social interactions imbue the world with meaning, transforming abstract spaces into lived places. Given the digital conduits of much modern social interaction, online narratives increasingly affect material places. Yet the emerging glut of online information demands new methods of investigating place narratives at multiple scales. Drawing on novel geographic visualizations of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of photographs of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands posted on the website Flickr, this study shows that online portrayals are 1) highly uneven in terms of distribution, visibility, and content, 2) fundamentally influenced by "real-world" geographies, 3) often culturally reductive, and 4) made to appear unduly exhaustive by the naturalizing visual slant of the internet as a medium of communication. These processes stand to influence how places are constructed in the information age, especially given the presence of "digital divides" that work against internet access for much of the world's population.

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L’armature verte urbaine rassemble tous les éléments de végétation contribuant à répondre aux défis majeurs associés à l’Anthropocène, comme l’adaptation au changement climatique, la préservation de la biodiversité, l’infiltration des eaux pluviales ou l’amélioration de la santé des populations. La cartographie précise des espaces végétalisés urbains fait aujourd’hui défaut bien que les données spatiales issues de capteurs aéroportés soient disponibles depuis de nombreuses années. De ce fait, il est aujourd’hui difficile d’évaluer la fonctionnalité des armatures vertes. Pour répondre à ce besoin d’évaluation, il s’est agi, dans le cadre d’étude de la Métropole de Lyon, de cartographier le territoire à un mètre de résolution spatiale entre 1984 et 2015 en utilisant une procédure orientée objet, et de rendre ces cartographies disponibles sur une plateforme web dédiée. Il en ressort que les surfaces végétalisées de la métropole sont comparables à celles d’autres agglomérations de même rang, mais que l’accès de la population à cette végétation est très inégalement réparti. Par exemple, seuls 11 % des habitants disposent d’un espace vert de plus de 2ha à moins de 5 minutes de chez eux. Souvent sous-estimés dans les politiques urbaines, les jardins des particuliers représentent deux fois la surface des espaces verts publics, et devraient faire l’objet des mêmes questionnements, quant à leur valeur pour la mitigation climatique ou pour la biodiversité. L’évaluation de l’armature urbaine ne s’arrête pas à sa cartographie, mais doit conduire à l’exploration de sa perception à différentes échelles spatiales, pour différents acteurs (habitants, professionnels et autres organismes vivants) et selon plusieurs mesures de bien-être physique, mental et culturel. / The urban green infrastructure brings together all the elements of vegetation that contribute to meeting the major challenges associated with the Anthropocene, such as adapting to climate change, preserving biodiversity, infiltrating rainwater or improving the health of populations. The precise mapping of urban green spaces is today lacking although spatial data from airborne sensors have been available for many years. As a result, it is now difficult to assess the functionality of greeninfrastructures. To meet this need for evaluation, the territory of the urban area of Lyon was mapped at one meter resolution between 1984 and 2015 using an object-oriented procedure. All maps generated were made available on a dedicated web platform. The results show that the green areas of the urban area of Lyon are comparable to those of other agglomerations of the same rank, but that the population’s access to this vegetation is very unevenly distributed. For example, only 11% of the inhabitants can find a green space of more than 2ha closer than a 5 minutes’ walk from home. Often underestimated in urban policies, private gardens make up twice the surface of public green spaces, and should be the subject of the same questions about their value for climate mitigation or the conservation of biodiversity. The evaluation of urban green infrastructures only starts with theirmapping, and should lead to the exploration of its perception at different spatial scales, for different actors (inhabitants, professionals and other living organisms) and according to several measures of physical, mental and cultural well-being.

This dissertation analyzes the geography of information in the 21st century where BigData, social networks, user generated production of content and geography combine to create new and complex patterns of space, context and sociability. Both online and offline, social networks are creating a space that simultaneously unifies individuals and identifies distinct differences in their patterns and their relationships to space. Using methodologies derived from spatial analysis, geographic information systems (GIS), and Social Network Analysis (SNA), this dissertation identifies how Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) both mimic and bolster existing social structures and allow individuals to extend their activities into flows between non-contiguous spaces. Simultaneously it demonstrates how the adoption of user-generated geographic information has not been uniform. Instead it has resulted in an uneven distribution of content and more nuanced digital divides. Although geographically uneven, social structures developed through online networks of user-generated content are most effective at transmitting information at a local level. This dissertation provides a comprehensive examination of online networks and representations of the GeoWeb. It repudiates previous assumptions that online content provides liberation and collaboration among users without regard to geographic constraints and demonstrates the locally constrained nature social networks and the demographically constrained nature of geographic information.

In recent years Crowdsourced, or Volunteered, Geographic Information (CGI, VGI), has emerged as a large, up-to-date and easily accessible data source. Primarily attributable to the rise of the Geoweb and widespread use of location enabled technologies, this environment of widespread innovation has repositioned the role of consumers of spatial information. Collaborative and participatory web environments have led to a democratisation of the global mapping process, and resulted in a paradigm shift to the consumer of geographic data also acting as a data producer. With such a large and diverse group of participants actively mapping the globe, the resulting flood of information has become increasingly attractive to authoritative mapping agencies, in order to augment their own spatial data supply chains. The use of CGI would allow these agencies to undertake continuous improvement of their own data and products, adding a dimension of currency that has previously been unattainable due to high associated costs. CGI, however, through its diversity of authorship, presents a quality assurance risk to these agencies should it be included in their authoritative products. Until now, this risk has been insurmountable, with CGI remaining a “Pandora’s Box” which many agencies are reluctant to open. This research presents an algorithmic model that overcomes these issues, by quantifying trust in CGI in order to assess its implied quality. Labeled “VGTrust”, this model assesses information about a data author, its spatial trust, as well as its temporal trust, in order to produce an overall metric that is easy to understand and interpret. The VGTrust model will allow mapping agencies to harness CGI to augment existing datasets, or create new ones, thereby facilitating a targeted quality assurance process and minimizing risk to authoritativeness. This research proposes VGTrust in theory, on the basis of existing examinations of trust issues with CGI. Furthermore, a facilitated case study, “Building Our Footprints” is presented, where VGTrust is deployed to facilitate the capture of a building footprint dataset, the results of which revealing the veracity of the model as a measure to assess trust for these data. Finally, a data structure is proposed in the form of a “geo-molecule”, which allows the full spectrum of trust indicators to be stored a data structure at feature level, allowing the transitivity of this information to travel with each feature following creation. By overcoming the trust issues inherent in CGI, this research will allow the integration of crowdsourced and authoritative data, thereby leveraging the power of the crowd for productive and innovative re-use.

In the post-World War II era land development in the United States has largely been focused on the expansion away from urban centers and out into the surrounding suburbs. While the development of suburbs began with utopian ideals of spiritual wholeness, their actual manifestation on the American landscape has been subject to harsh critiques about their long-term economic and environmental feasibility, fostering of social alienation, and general placelessness. In this thesis I address the criticism of suburbs as placeless, asking ―What are the particular practices of place-making in North American suburbs?‖ Examining interviews, cognitive map surveys, participant observation, archival materials, and geoweb activity through lenses of imageability and anticipatory action I seek to better understand how the residents of an Indianapolis suburb narrate, structure, and produce a sense of place in their own community. In doing so I argue that that suburbs force an understanding of place as both experiential and social that is beyond mere aesthetics.