Mapping Urban Displacement: Co-Creating Counter-Cartographies as a Design-Ethnographic Approach to Trace the Impact of the Train Express Régional in Dakar

Date: 14 March 2025
Theme: Diffracting the Critical
Panel: 27. Tools in and for Design Ethnography – Stories from the field

This paper explores the colonial continuities (Bigon 2009) embedded in the Train Express Régional (TER), an urban train line in Dakar that led to the forced displacement of neighborhoods and reshaping the capital’s social fabric. While the TER represents a presidential promise of modernization, connecting Senegal to global mobility networks, for many it meant the loss of homes and livelihoods. In a collaborative effort to illuminate the personal stories of those affected, the impactés du TER from Wakhinane Colobane participated in a co-creation workshop (Gunn et al. 2013). This workshop aimed to make sense of the fragments from a range of sources gathered in the previous seven months of ethnographic research including testimonies from interviews, official documents, photographs and field notes. For the examination of the urban practices of exclusion at play, methods from design and ethnography were employed to trace the changes and emotional scars left by the construction works in their former neighborhoods. The first exercise focused on tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1958) from embodied experiences (Scheper-Hughes 1994) combining individual testimonies with visual maps created from tile fragments of demolished houses. In a second exercise, participants used drawing (Ingold 2020) to create a collective cartography of their displacement journeys, marking key stations and moments. This counter-cartography (Peluso 1995) illustrates how displacement, spatial segregation, and social exclusion were driven by the clash between global transport infrastructures and local mobility practices (Stenmanns 2020, 190). It leaves a material trace (Krämer 2016) of the traumatic memories of violent displacement and family disintegration. Finally, this paper argues that combining ethnographic and design methods allows for the collective creation of knowledge within complex socio-spatial and neo-colonial contexts. These visual and material practices offer a way to mediate research collaboration on sensitive topics and traumatic experiences, making visible the silenced (hi)stories of the displaced in Dakar.