Cultural asset mapping
The process of systematically identifying and cataloguing a community's cultural resources (artworks, venues, organizations, traditions) so they can be planned for, invested in, and shared.
For public art, the mapping exercise is almost always revelatory: works appear that no department currently owns on paper, works listed in the inventory turn out to be missing or damaged, and whole districts turn out to have nothing at all. The map is a mirror: it shows a city where it has actually invested, as opposed to where it believes it has.
An asset map earns its cost only if it stays alive. Published as an open dataset or a public map, it becomes infrastructure other people build on; filed as a PDF appendix to a plan, it starts going stale the day it's delivered.