The Treasure Map of the citizen childhood

Abstract. We are cartographers, trained and dedicated to our respective institutions around the world. Our cartographic works are gradually being developed, combining our multiple professional scientific and artistic skills, in the service of citizen information through the production of our maps.

The performance of our works, submitted to the confidentiality of informations and data bases we process, remains invisible to public. In our complex job, confidentiality is a rule we first respect. We don’t usually explain our sophisticated manufacturing processes. Only our final result counts: THE MAP, completed, faithful to its project, editable, interpretable and memorizable at a first glance of its users.

Among the Ecomuseum scientific team that was created in Battir, Palestine, after 2003, there was no cartographer. The team of young Palestinian professionals in architecture and civil engineering, just graduated, was armed with the rigour of their newly acquired knowledge, armed with their human freedom and citizen convictions. Isolated from everything they produced their collections of topographic maps from their own local survey.

After the recall of its exceptional frame, this presentation aims to demonstrate how, through mapping-workshops open to everyone at the Public Library of their village, the children of Battir created their “Treasure Map” from their local proprietary geospatialized data they extend to neighbouring villages.