« J’te parle du Nord ! » réflexions sur un processus de cartographie collaborative

This article looks back at the mapping process with five young people from the North Montreal borough. The decision to work together using maps was driven as much by the need to gain a better understanding of the perceptions and practices of the neighbourhood as by the aim of establishing a collaborative method based on cartography, enabling the young people involved to collect and produce their own narratives and visuals of the spaces they frequent and live in via snapshots on Instagram and audio recordings of walking interviews. The ambition of this article is to use a reflexive approach to examine the design and reception of the maps produced, in order to understand where the collaboration fits into the cartographic process? The article begins by presenting the research project and its context, then looks at the notion of collaborative cartography and the stages in the map-making process leading up to the launch of “J’te parle du Nord” in 2021. Finally, the article discusses the limits of the project by looking at the blanks (white in French) of the map, defined here through the issues of representativeness.