Abstract

Geographic Information Systems is a tool now used to broker nearly every aspect of the urban planning process. This suggests traditional cartography will soon be fully displaced with digital technology, and that the urban planning process will be permanently changed. Geographers have generated debate and discussion about the ramifications of digitization to traditional relationships to time, space, and discursive or face-to-face public spheres. There has been limited attention, however, to the ways in which the actual uses of GIS both generate new expectations about such relationships and reinforce particular models of embodiment. Fundamental to the impact of GIS on questions and issues of embodiment is the role of situated knowledge in shaping urban spatial development. This paper draws on ethnographic data gathered over the course of two years amongst a variety of professionals and neighborhood activists engaged in urban planning in Kansas City. Key questions were, how does the use of GIS change the urban planning process, and what kinds of expectations and perceptions of embodied knowledge emerge out of the use of this new tool? The data demonstrate that the use of GIS reinforces a particular model of the body premised on a certain suspicion of situated knowledge, and an accompanying mistrust of perspectives not brokered by technology.