In Memory of Phil Cohen

1943 – 2024

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Phil Cohen, co-founder and director of Livingmaps Network (2013-2023). The generosity, care and enthusiasm that Phil managed to impart on so many provides remarkable testimony for how he approached this work, as one of life’s great network builders. With much skill and warmth, he was adept at bringing people together, to share ideas, develop projects, or simply to meet and think together. Network engineering would be inaccurate, far too cold, for he was more akin to an artisan weaver, thoughtfully stitching and folding people and ideas together in the hope that fruitful nodes would emerge for those involved. They often did, and many involved with Livingmaps will be forever grateful to Phil for loosely tying things up, before leaving them with the threads whilst he moved on to other ideas and other people.

It was in this spirit that the Livingmaps Network was born in 2013. Initially set up by Phil, John Wallett, Loraine Leeson and others in the seminar rooms and events spaces of QMUL, The Young Foundation, UEL, UCL, Birkbeck and elsewhere in London, the aim was to create spaces for collaboration amongst artists, activists and academics that had an interest in creative and participatory approaches to map making. This was at a time when interests in creative and counter mapping practices were growing amongst a diverse range of communities, and not just within academic circles. As Phil would often say, ‘Maps are not only for geographers!’ The work that has found a home in the network certainly lives up to that. Phil was not a self-described cartographer; indeed, it would be a challenge to pigeonhole him to any discipline. He preferred ‘urban ethnographer’ and found much interest in maps, not for their representative qualities necessarily, but rather for the different ways they got him thinking about the multiplicity of city life and especially how maps and the process of mapping could be a force for good in highlighting individual stories, issues of inequality and marginalised culture.

Since its inception, Livingmaps has sprawled far beyond London and can now claim to be an international space for innovative approaches to mapping, through its research partnerships, journal and event series. I’ve no doubt that Phil was proud of this network, which has provided a stage for a mapping movement that counters so many of the issues created by mainstream cartography. Fittingly for this year, at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference in August, the chair Professor Stephen Legg, described the Livingmaps as a hub ‘for social change, public engagement, critical debate and creative forms of community campaigning’. That the network, born out of Phil’s disagreement with mainstream cartography, should receive recognition from a royal institution bound up in the history of cartography is a moment to celebrate Phil as a great agitator of the establishment, and to remember his achievements with Livingmaps.

Mike Duggan

Below are a series of tributes from Livingmappers:

I was fortunate enough to meet Phil in the early days of Livingmaps, attending inspirational lectures that awakened me to the multifaceted map-scapes of radical cartography. Many of my warmest memories of him come from conversations on summer afternoons in the garden at Wivenhoe, across the table over dinners for visiting speakers or chats over coffee that introduced me to new ideas and writing that radicalised my thinking, Bruno Latour and Walter Benjamin stand out as deeply influential and I am grateful to Phil for those introductions. We will endeavour to keep his warmth, generosity and radical spirit alive in Livingmaps going forward. 

Barbara Brayshay

I have many fond memories of Phil, his quirky and joyful character and the way he openly brought me into this Livingmaps community - how this continued not only through the great projects we have done together, but also through the friendships we have developed in this community. I feel a deep sadness and a loss, but I am eternally grateful for what he has engineered, just by being him. 

Kimbal Bumstead

I find it difficult as many others among us to put into words my memories with Phil and the infinite ways we’ll all miss him. I’m glad I got the chance to know such a generous person and he left me with a lot of memories and a network of such brilliant and different people that represent, each of them, the multiple sides of his brilliant soul. 

Giada Peterle

I remember Phil for his passion and energy, his breadth of experience and curiosity about the world, and for his genuine care for the people who took part in our workshops and research. I will always be grateful to him for persuading me to undertake things that were well outside my comfort zone and enlarged my own experience!

Debbie Kent