Rethinking spatial analysis and analytics: Native, Black, and Latina/x feminist theories and methods for engagement, equity, and justice

Spatial analysis is fundamental to planning and design education and practice. It often includes different forms of GIS, mapping, and displaying various scales and details about space, usually conceived as land or buildings. Bodies as space and non-Western understandings of time and relationships connected to space are habitually absent from planning and design pedagogy and less frequently put into practice. These absences leave great holes in ideas about spatial production and engagement. In this chapter, I provide a set of methodological and theoretical interventions that can be taught to planning and design students to make planning and design practice more gender-sensitive. I will draw on Native, Black, and Latina/x feminist scholars to create a narrative highlighting their collective wisdom as they interrogate space in ways that challenge the underpinning logics of Western-male-hetero space, specifically related to the temporal and relational phenomenon while also providing opportunities to repair, redo, and renew. Together these feminist scholars of colour put us on a path to rethink spatial analysis methods for engagement, equity, and justice.