Comapping

Comapping is a project that helps communities map themselves. It treats mapping not as a neutral technical exercise, but as a social and political practice shaped by power.

The project supports people to document lived experience, local knowledge, memory, care, and conflict in their own territories. So far, Comapping has released three open-source tools and supported projects in Berlin, Chile, and Argentina on issues including gentrification, state violence under dictatorship, and how to find community support in emergencies.

Comapping grew out of a simple conviction: communities should not just appear on maps. They should decide how maps are made, what they show, and whose knowledge counts.

Comapping works through workshops, collective walks, data gathering, and open-source tool-building. It gives communities practical ways to document what matters to them and turn that knowledge into maps they can use, share, and control.

The project currently includes three tools. Traces supports data collection during walks and fieldwork, allowing people to record geolocated observations through text, images, audio, and more. Comaps is a platform for creating collaborative maps, where communities can build shared cartographies or create their own. ReduceGeoJSON makes community-generated data lighter and easier to publish, reuse, and circulate.

Comapping also builds on the experience of relaunching Queering the Map as faster, fully open-source, and fully degoogled infrastructure. That process made something clear: community storytelling needs tools that can be adapted, forked, and rooted in different contexts, not locked into a single centralised platform. Comapping extends that logic, turning mapping from a platform into shared infrastructure.

Maps have long been used to claim land, enforce borders, manage populations, and erase inconvenient lives. They have helped colonialism, extraction, and state power look natural. But maps have also always been something else: survival tools, memory tools, organising tools. People have long mapped their worlds in ways that states and institutions refused to see.

Comapping stands in that tradition. It exists because communities need ways to represent their territories that do not flatten them into official categories or hand their knowledge over to extractive platforms. It matters because mapping is never just about geography. It is about who gets seen, what gets remembered, what gets named as harm, and what counts as real.

Comapping is about reclaiming cartography as a space of memory, care and collective power.