| Summary: | This thesis is about the ways in which people tell stories about places and the importance of
those stories to a community's capacity for adaptation and sustainability. I argue that the
traditional discourse of sustainability is embedded within a rationalist, techno-scientific
paradigm that precludes the inclusion of subjective, contextualised knowledge. If genuine
sustainability is predicated on social and environmental justice, as I argue it is, then it
requires an inclusive, ethical framework that can value beliefs, imagination, desires,
experiences and relationships. The concept of place, seen as an articulation of the dynamic
relationships between the material, cultural and experiential, offers a powerful basis upon
which to develop such an approach. Drawing on the theoretical relationship between
narrative and place, my aim is to investigate the potential of artistic community mapping to
offer an engaging, inclusive form of story-telling and place-making for sustainability.
I do this by presenting a case study of the Islands in the Salish Sea Community Mapping
Project, which took place in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia's Strait of Georgia between
1999 and 2004. This project worked with local artists and coordinators on 17 of the most
populated islands to engage local communities in identifying and documenting via handcrafted
maps what they valued about their home places. How this was achieved, the
successes, limitations and further possibilities of this way of working with communities to
tell stories about their places, are the concerns of this research.
By reviewing the theoretical foundations of this project, together with undertaking interviews
with coordinators, artists and other participants, it is my aim to present not a comprehensive
evaluation, but a detailed case study of how concepts of community story-telling and placemaking
can be realised "on the ground" and effectively used to help us in the work of
sustainability.
Specifically, my objectives were: to review the literature pertaining to the question of
whether place-based narratives, such as artistic community mapping, can help in the work of
sustainability; and to investigate the Islands in the Salish Sea Community Mapping Project as
a case study of how such work might be possible. === Arts, Faculty of === Geography, Department of === Graduate
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