Critical GIS

Critical GIS incorporates both social theory and geographic information science (GIS) with the goal of increasing the relevance of GIS to multiple communities. The critical GIS agenda is concerned with science and technology studies, feminism, ontologies, and qualitative and participatory GIS.

While critical GIS emerged from critiques by human geographers, it has morphed in the 2000s into a creative blend of human and technical geography that has the potential to uniquely shape GIS and obliquely influence other information sciences. There are a number of issues that contribute to an understanding of critical GIS. They include its history, its relationship to science and technology studies (STS), feminism and GIS, ontology research, and public participation GIS (PPGIS).

Critical GIS did not materialize as a cohesive entity in the 2000s but rather descended from the struggles between human geographers and GIScientists in the 1990s. The 1990s witnessed a series of critiques of GIS by human geographers. That antagonism—which was influenced by the “Science Wars”—was based on concerns that GIS obeyed the dictates of the quantitative revolution. Human geography critics were keen to stress that GIS was based on Cartesian perspectivalism and, as such, could not contribute to an “emancipatory” politics. Critics were suspicious that GIS served large corporations, public agencies, and governments while eschewing the socially disenfranchised. By the end of the 1990s, however, human geography critics and GIS practitioners had reached a détente. This truce can be linked to two separate phenomena. First, GIS was pervasive by this time, and there was a general recognition that it formed a foundation of the discipline, regardless of its antecedents. Second, many GIScientists had listened closely to critics and had begun to incorporate social theory, feminism, and ontology research into their approaches to spatial research. This marked the inception of critical GIS.

This trend toward a constructive, creative critical GIS is partly due to a number of collaborative efforts between GIS researchers and social critics. At the same time, GIS researchers began to see that critical GIS is a way of democratizing the technology and extending its purview. One of the chief characteristics of critical GIS is that it is housed within the discipline rather than based on critique from outside.

Whereas external critique has little invested in the outcome, internal critique is necessarily cautious and careful, as it has a stake in the future of the technology. To be constructive, critique must actually have something invested in the subject. While critical GIS began as an external critique with an attendant harshness, it has decidedly coalesced as an influence within GIS that is wedded to the goal of a better technology. Critical GIS shoulders the burden of responsibility to a discipline while simultaneously attempting to improve on it from a theoretical and applied basis. The following section describes the fundamental research areas within critical GIS, including epistemology and ontology, feminism, qualitative methods, and public participation GIS.