Maps and contradictions: Urban political ecology and cartographic expertise in southern Appalachia

•Exurbanization produces new objects and subjects of environmental knowledge.•Critical cartography and urban political ecology show how exurbia is conceived and contested.•Local knowledge and cartographic expertise can conflict about southern Appalachian landslides.•Contradictions of exurban growth complicate objects and subjects of landslide knowledge.

Commissioned by the State legislature after a succession of deadly and damaging landslides and decades of exurban growth on steep mountain slopes, the North Carolina Geological Survey produced a series of landslide hazard maps detailing for the public landslide prone areas of Macon County, North Carolina, USA. While widely supported at the state and local levels in 2005, by 2011, the mapping program was defunded in the state’s budget and the maps were highly politically criticized in Macon County. Even today, the maps remain unused in any legal capacity and are unknown to many residents of the region. Empirically, this article narrates the political fate of the maps in Macon County from 2005–2011 and theoretically, it draws upon a synthesis of urban political ecology (UPE), science and technology studies (STS), and critical cartography to interpret the rapid downfall of the landslide hazard maps. I show that a particular intervention of scientific expertise in exurban contradictions not only produced the maps, but also provided the political conditions for their ultimate discard. Finally, the article concludes by offering a contribution to the growing exurban studies literature as well as the ‘second wave’ of UPE.