Counter Cartographies: Mapping Spaces of the Unhoused in Philadelphia

December 18, 2025, 4:30–7:30 PM

Light refreshments provided

Counter Cartographies is a community art project in collaboration with unhoused shelter residents served by Bethesda Project. The project spatially maps residents’ lived relationships with the city of Philadelphia – its paths, barriers, and refuges – and transforms those maps into collective art. The project’s artmaking draws on ethnographic mapping practices to challenge how power shapes spaces and their representations, using maps grounded in community experience and co-creation to collaboratively create art. This project was conceptualized and originated by volunteer contributor Nayantara Ghosh, who continues to participate in a volunteer capacity. Support for this project has been provided by The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.

The event will take place at the Rotunda from 4:30 – 7:30pm. Guests can view the art on display. The project’s conceptualizer and a member from Bethesda Project will all say a few words.

 This project was conceptualized and originated by volunteer contributor Nayantara Ghosh, who continues to participate in a volunteer capacity. Collaborators include Bethesda Project residents, staff and volunteers, and Design Fellows through PennPraxis and Civic House (University of Pennsylvania). Support for this project has been provided by The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.

Maps and map-making have long been used to concretize belonging – maps marked with red lines over places like North Philadelphia drew invisible borders around who was allowed to be in a space and who was pushed out. Our project invited twelve homeless shelter residents served by Bethesda Project to use map-making and art as a tool for reclaiming belonging in the city. The residents we worked with were co-creators of the project’s vision, sharing their stories, guiding discussions, and ultimately deciding how we would transform their accounts and maps into art. The discursive process for creating art with the residents was so key to the project’s philosophy of using map-making to reclaim agency over how stories about cities, space, and belonging are told. Nothing in this project exists without co-creation. Every map, every theme, every story emerged through a collective and collaborative practice of making and meaning. The process of creating through maps unearthed the many small truths and intricacies of experiencing homelessness that are difficult to share and rarely voiced aloud. We were struck by the diversity of experiences that surfaced – no two residents traced the same arc, walked the same paths, or marked the same boundaries. Still, a through-line of our mapping sessions and subsequent conversations was the lived, learned knowledge of navigating the city and bureaucracy – how to find a shelter bed for the night, how to traverse the city when you have to carry everything you own in a few bags, how to find a moment of respite when you have nowhere to go.