Watering Mapping: Thinking with the Lachine Rapids

In this paper, Cecilia Chen proposes that thinking with water may radically reshape mapping practices. Water puts life in relation to other lives. It communicates between bodies of different kinds and at multiple scales. In its most lively and potentially deadly movements, water holds human cultures in relation with their others: whether human, viral, vegetable, animal, mineral or hybrid. Mapping is a representational practice that selectively frames knowledge, yet often holds a seemingly neutral authority that delimits how we navigate, think, and imagine future trajectories within a given “terrain.” Stable territoriality is eroded when we begin to practice mapping by following the movements of water within and between watersheds, landscapes, cities and diverse bodies. Each process of mapping acts to make place and thus reiterates the world. Through a critical but generative approach to mapping, we may shift topographic practices away from efforts to claim territory and to fix water as abstract resource, and towards collectively authored place-making practices that will help us to thoughtfully negotiate our relations with each other and with the environment. If human settlements may be understood as socio-natural hybrids inextricable from a context of larger watersheds and ecosystems, then the initial gestures of representing place through diverse practices of mapping are crucial to making these relationships comprehensible. Specifically, this paper examines how mapping with the watery relations of living beings and ecosystems in and around the Lachine Rapids may help us to imagine where we live as saturated and dynamically altered by the unruly relationality of water.