The Power in Maps: Reviewing a ‘Youth Violence’ Systems Map as Discursive Intervention

This paper offers a reflection on a systems mapping experiment undertaken as part of the Redesign Youth Futures project, which aimed to visualise the complex system producing youth violence in London. The paper brings together key ideas in the practice of systems thinking and mapping, with contributions from the literature on design and power, to theorise the map as an intervention in a discourse – in this case, the popular and policy discourse around youth violence. In doing so, it offers an account of how power is operant in and through such an artefact: in the embodiment of(and resistance to) ideologies or discursive themes, in the naturalization and normalization of certain ‘truths’ and the silencing of others, in rendering a system amenable to management, and through the selection of which perspectives and interests to represent.