Housing insecurity, lived reality, and the right to stay put in a gentrified southern European neighborhood: The case of Sant Antoni in Barcelona

The State uses cartography to make land and labor legible; that which can be (re)defined, divided, and controlled by sovereign authorities. State-sponsored social vulnerability mapping is increasingly used to assess displacement risk, yet it has generally been ineffective in cultivating community resilience or supporting resistance to gentrification. Informed by Indigenous and Black feminist geographers’ theories of embodied sovereignty, this chapter offers a conceptual framework for regenerative mapping with a set of tools for researchers to unite with other counter-mapping methods: asset mapping, story mapping, promise mapping, and kinship mapping. We illustrate the practical application of regenerative mapping with a case study of participatory action research against gentrification. We argue that by shifting the cartographic gaze from “seeing like a State” to “sensing like a sovereign body,” researchers and community members can enact geographies of radical resilience through acts of resistance and regeneration supported by an expanded set of mapping tools.