Description
This paper examines evidence from community-designed mapping of place-making practices amongst Bedouin, Druze, Palestinian, Syrian, and Chechen groups who co-habit the levantine desert oasis of Al Azraq.
Applying OpenStreetMap community practices activated in African settings, research focuses on water management, socio-economic taxonomies, and tangible/intangible heritage in these marginalised multi-ethnic groups, whose language, traditions and cultural practice/skills are eroded by agro-industry, climate change and water scarcity.
This wetland has dried to desert within living memory. How do people invisage their place-based lived experiences of climate and cultural change on this scale, and at this speed? What geospatial indicators can they devise to express climate memory in the Arabian Peninsula, and how can displacement, livelihoods and wider determinants of well-being be visualised in the universal spatial language of the wiki-map?
An industrialised humanitarian sector consistently fetishises innovation, favouring systematised data colonialism and surveillance capitalism over the emancipatory power of simple, free, community-centred tooling (Allan, 2020). I unpick ‘climate justice’ in the context of Big Tech innovation, where ‘Solutions in search of Problems’ obscure humanity. I scrutinise how top-down techno-colonial greenwashing can occult hyper-local ethnic identity, having wider security implications for an already culturally unstable region.
