Mapping Vernacular Terrains

Mapping Vernacular Terrains is a call for reflection on the scope, diversity, interconnectedness, and at the same time, diasporic nature of vernacular studies in 2024. It is an opportunity to consider cartographies as research tools that produce conceptual mappings to navigate the complex ‘terrains’ of the contentious and often ambiguous notion of what might be defined as the ‘vernacular’. ‘Mapping’ is an operative term, which may be interpreted as identifying, locating, representing, discursively conveying, re-constructing, and delineating the built and landscaped environments pertaining to the concept of the vernacular. While maps are considered static representations of an environment, mapping is a recognised process for investigation of time and space in cultural geography but is atypically utilised as a method in vernacular studies. 

Viewing the vernacular through a cartographic agency, it is proposed as a strategy to decipher the relational and global nature of the vernacular. This process of extension of the scope of the research beyond a particular community, geographical boundary, and built typology, but to position the vernacular in its broader contexts such as historical migration patterns to the migration of ideas; using visual and discursive forms of recording; documenting and theorising vernacular traditions will highlight the extents and capacity of influence of which is this field. Therefore, ‘terrains’ may be considered geographical, philosophical, topographical, cultural, spiritual, and highly conceptual in exploration of the spread of ideas, ways of building, being in the world and inhabiting an intellectual concept which since the 1980s has been referred to as the vernacular. We seek positioning of vernacular terrains within rich, evolving, contemporary contexts to understand the continued resonance, persistence, continuity of the vernacular for the twenty-first century.