Mapping and data visualization have become exuberantly present in shaping conversations about the urban in recent years. With that, an interest in counter-mapping has emerged, fueled by a retooling of cartography as access to digital mapping interfaces expands and a practice capable of challenging colonial, capitalist, and liberal topographies appears to be increasingly possible. The subliminal features that govern the map’s technical and political production, however, are not dismissed with a more open cartographic practice. GIS mapping –the poster child of a people’s cartography– tends to solidify classificatory systems already carved into the cannon of cartographic convention, and its aesthetics of dispassionate computation further reinforce traps of Euclidean geometry, scientific epistemology, and the blind ethics of accuracy. Before we even consider that accessibility is far from ubiquitous –that the digital divide consists of a flagrant disparity lag between social groups– how can we be critical of ‘critical cartography’? Scholars have addressed this question in notable ways (Ghose & Elwood, 2003), and some have proposed visualization experiments that, although folded under the larger term of critical mapping, are nuanced as authored mapping (Kim, 2015), narrative mapmaking (Maharawal & McElroy, 2018), or mapping otherwise (Awan, 2016). While such examples are mostly concerned with rendering visible certain practices and agencies of urban dwellers while driving representations of subjective territories and sites of resistance, they do not engage GIS technologies directly in their attempts to elaborate alternative mapping methodologies. This is not to say that there have not been recent explorations in digital GIS-based spatial representations that are mindful of the dangerous assumptions embedded in the tools used to carry them out (Kurgan, 2013). But in contexts plagued by the scarcity, secrecy, and neglect of data in both its raw and visualized forms, there is more to be said about the ‘countering’ role GIS can play in producing knowledge about the built and lived environment. While referring to multiple original research and mapping projects from Beirut, this paper will argue for the need to consider local contextual conditions, all while challenging the (un)representability of things in a global world saturated by data and information (Galloway, 2012). This discord is examined through multiple online geo-portals published by Beirut Urban Lab, as well as practice-based mappings that propose visualization approaches guided by a feminist praxis (D'Ignazio, 2015). These include mapping islands of security, territories of sectarian political governance, and the navigations of food delivery drivers.