2026-08-28 –, La Réunion Language: English
Every map embeds choices: what to show, what to omit, what to centre, who is included as a stakeholder, who decides on the legend. Most of these choices are invisible to the people who use the resulting maps as inputs into their daily lives — and into democratic decisions, from a local town-planning vote to a national policy debate.
This panel asks who, and through what processes, should be in charge of those choices, and how communities like OpenStreetMap, official mapping agencies and emerging civic-cartographic movements can collectively raise the democratic stakes of mapmaking.
Animated by a moderator and three to four panelists from complementary horizons :
- an OSM contributor and community member;
- a public-sector cartographer;
- a researcher in critical, sensitive, radical or counter cartography
- a civic-tech or popular-education actor
The discussion will explore:
- Map-making as a civic act: when is mapping a form of citizenship, and what would it take for map-reading to become one too?
The role of national mapping agencies in opening up their data, infrastructure and methods to civil society - what to expect
The OSM model as a democratic experiment: its strengths, its limits, its blind spots, and what it could learn from other community-cartography traditions (counter-cartography, indigenous mapping, popular-education mapping).
Mapping as a civic act: a cross-community conversation.
Talk keywords:democratic mapping, civic cartography
Affiliation:La République des Cartes
Sponsors:IGN, La Banque des Territoires, La Fabrique de la Cité, Leonard, Ubisoft, NoDesign, OVHcloud, Docaposte, La Poste with the support of CY école de design, CNIG, AOC, Afigéo, OpenDataFrance, Fondation Université Gustave Eiffel, Apur and the Ville de Paris.
Matthieu Chatry coordinates La République des Cartes at IGN, the French national mapping agency. His real craft, though, is the animation of learning communities. For the past decade - first with leChaudron.io, then as an independent facilitator under the Amuseurs name, he has designed workshops and built communities of practice to help people of all backgrounds build a confident, hands-on relationship with digital tools and most recently generative AI.
He now brings the same approach to maps: animating the coalition of partners and organisers behind La République des Cartes.