Mapping meanings: methodological innovations to restore memories of place in a public park in Santiago de Chile

In its conventional conception, the map has been defined as a “map-instrument,” that is, as a technical device of an informative-practical nature. However, from the perspective of critical cartography, representation is understood rather as a spatial discourse, capable of “producing” political images of the territory and integrating subjectivity as one of its constitutive elements. In parallel, environmental psychology has long examined how people construct places through their interactions with and modifications of their environment, thereby linking places to meanings and to personal and collective experiences. Traditional approaches within this field have increasingly been questioned for their apolitical and uncritical assumptions, underscoring the need to recognize that the person-place relationships emerge from the interaction of personal, social, and political-contextual dimensions. This critique resonates with challenges posed by critical cartography to positivist approaches to map production, emphasizing how individuals and groups actively construct their social and spatial reality. This paper builds on data produced as part of a study conducted in Quebrada de Macul Park in Santiago de Chile, with the aim of developing a novel methodological approach to the study of place-assemblages. Place-assemblages are understood here as an ontological concept for examining analytical entities that intertwine material, symbolic, and practical dimensions of people-place relationships. Our guiding research question is: (How) Can subjective and/or psychosocial processes embedded in people-place relations be cartographically represented? To address this question we conducted (i) a systematic literature review to synthesize recent publications that integrate psychosocial and/or narrative processes with cartographic representations, and (ii) a reflexive thematic analysis of two in-depth interviews from the original study aimed at understanding how narratives might produce diverse multi-layer cartographies through which place is conceived as socially and politically intertwined. In doing so, the paper aims to advance methodological strategies, as well as onto-epistemological discussions, on how to operationalize the ontology of ‘place-assemblages’, translating this conceptual proposal into a concrete framework for capturing the symbolic, material, and practical nature of the person-place’s unity.