aims of the creative geography class
* to lay a theoretical grounding in geography for activists, artists, and people of all fields; to create new ways of thinking about place & space in our work, whatever it may be
* to become familiar with interesting projects & avenues of thought that other radical geographers are engaged in
* to become more aware of what's (in)formed our notions of space and place
* to network a community of geographers that are interested in future collaborations & investigations
The Geography Is Dead School of Thought
Have globalization and modern technology have rendered distance and place irrelevant, or at least less relevant than before?
After all, we can feel like we’ve kept up with our friends on Facebook, despite our geographic distances; we can go to most cities in the world and expect relatively familiar landscapes: shopping arcades, restaurants, apartment buildings, motorways. We can earn a college degree at a distance, buy goods and books from around the world, work from home: we are liberated from geography, borders, physical constraints. If distance is a problem to be solved, we (with the help of fossil fuels) have solved it. Geography is obsolete in a flat world.
Another Vision
Opposing the “geography is dead” school of thought is the “geography matters” school, which observes that local culture, customs, and arrangements of space actually have a lot of power.
This story about the world being flat just doesn't hold up in reality.
Communities around the world are reengaging with activities that give them a “sense of place”, like buying local produce at farmer’s markets, and they’re also discovering the wonder in other places from around the world (cumbia music, Bollywood films, Japanese anime, Egyptian belly dance, Afghan kebobs...)
“Distance, as measured in an absolute sense, is indeed less important, but place, space, locality and relative distance between these things are not. ‘Global’ processes are really stretched ‘local to local processes, and they unfold in localities that have a unique history and character.” (Geographies of Globalization, Warwick Murray, 2006)
Why "Radical" Geography?
Geography is kind of hot right now. All kinds of people are interested in space and place – locally, I think of the current Futurefarmers Reverse Ark installation at the Contemporary in downtown Baltimore, with its DIY mapping projects, or the recent City from Below conference held in Baltimore, which engaged urban geographers, planners, and activists. Nationally, the mainstream media is full of cities engaging geographers in trying to figure out the magic formula to draw "cultural creatives" to their cities, while artists across the country engage in experimental geography, showcasing their projects with caravans and gallery exhibitions.
Why the increased interested in space in place? Perhaps because as a society, we've generally been ignoring space and place for awhile, and because
– we have an inner need for "sense of place," psychologically & spiritually. We’re getting bored of the blandscapes around us, and we want a connection to the land & to real living beings. Living without relation to place is hard on the soul.
– if we know something about the space around us, we're less likely to destroy the environment, or allow it to be destroyed.
– we need to be more aware of geography in order to address the inequalities and imbalances of our time. Six out of ten young Americans can’t identify Iraq on a map (in a 2005 study); fewer than three in 10 think it is important to know the locations of countries in the news.
We have to know something about the world that our lifestyles / choices / tax dollars are influencing, and understand that the world’s not economically or socially just, before we can improve the situation.
To summarize: the ecocrises (ecological & economic) making themselves apparent in this century can be viewed through a spatial lens. They have been caused in part by poor relationships to space, and they can be solved by reorganizing how we use space and reconnecting to space.
Radical geography strives to perceive the problems with the way we use space and considers active ways to solve these problems.
In the U.S., we no longer experience the world on the scale of a pedestrian (relative to our ancestors, anyway). As Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking: "The body is nothing more than a parcel in transit, a chess piece dropped on another square; it does not move but is moved."
What are the implications of this?
"Transported every which way from childhood through adolescence, young people lose their independence. They fail to expand their horizons, to see new surroundings, or to acquire independence and liberty on their own. The outside world dominated by the road bores, and television or computer games beckon. A study comparing ten-year-olds in a small, walkable Vermont town and youngsters in a new Orange County suburb showed a marked difference. The Vermont children had three times the mobility, i.e., the distance and places they could get to on their own, while those in Orange County watched four times as much television." — Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation
It's important to understand that technological change doesn't always have disastrous effects on our use of space. In the article "Riding the Wheel: Selling American Women Mobility and Geographic Knowledge," Christina E. Dando describes how the invention of the bicycle and the media surrounding it led to greater personal mobility and freedom for women, encouraging them to expand their "sphere" and learn how to read maps.
There are numerous examples of the changes in how we interact with space, changes for good or ill— let's just say, broadly, that
Our use of space shapes our culture, health, and psychology.
Therefore, all of us should think about space, not just geographers, architects, or planners— because we all are affected by the space around us and how we interact with it!
But it's interesting to think about how other cultures experience space. Consider: in Western culture, mountains are symbols of power to be climbed and conquered (think of all the English guys climbing the Himalayas back in the day, etc.) However,
"In Japan mountains have been imagined as the centers of vast mandalas spreading across the landscape like, in one scholar's words, 'overlapping flowers,' and approaching the center of the mandala means approaching the source of spiritual power—but the approach may be indirect. In a labyrinth one can be farthest from the destination when one is closest; on a mountain ... the mountain itself changes shape again and again as one ascends." (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust)
How we interpret a landscape depends on our culture.
So: our use of space changes our culture, and our culture shapes our use of space... it's beginning to seem like an endless cycle.
We might ask— where does this "culture" come from? Religious views inform our cosmology, to some extent, as in the Japanese pilgrims that used to walk around mountains, believing it was sacrilegious to ascend to the summits.
But how we interpret our environments is also informed by the existing economic system.
"Imagine the countryside as a vast body. Ownership pictures it divided into economic units like internal organs, or like a cow divided into cuts of meat, and certainly such division is one way to organized a food-producing landscape, but it doesn't explain why moors, mountains, and forests should be similarly fenced and divided. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land." (Solnit, Wanderlust, 162)
Can we consciously decide how we want to experience space?
I think we can, with some effort. Those of us who are cultural workers (educators, artists, journalists, etc.) can also revise our culture, or engineer it, to interpret landscapes in ways that are better for human health & happiness.
One major, upcoming challenge for the spatially aware to solve deals with energy & climate change, since a large part of carbon emissions are caused by how we transport ourselves & our goods.
Premise: the geography-is-dead and space-is-irrelevant worldview is a delusion that we fell under during the dawn of the twenty-first century, but we’re going to wake up with a bit of a sheepish hangover from it, once we realise how much of that delusion was enabled by cheap access to fossil fuels. With scarce or expensive oil, we’re going to have to rediscover space—on a psychological/mental level, and on a practical level, as we reorganize how we use space.
This project is massive and isn’t confined to geographers, planners, or politicians: everyone is involved. On a basic level, we need infrastructure that’s not autocentric, but we also need a cultural shift to build enthusiasm for that new infrastructure. It’s artists, activists, journalists, and everyone working in the cultural sphere that are responsible for helping initiate our new relationship to space and place.
A Brief History of the Discipline
When did people start studying geography as a distinct subject? What's the state of the discipline now? What shape does it take?
Geography is characteristically difficult to define.
Geographers look at the world spatially.
Basically, everything can be studied geographically.
This is why it's an awesome field to study.
- a few millennia ago, geography (like any field) was basically about discovery: think Erasthothenes discovering the Earth was round & calculating the circumference, Chinese fleets charting coasts, etc.
- during the Middle Ages, Islamic scholars like Ibn Battuta traveled & charted the world
- after the Renaissance geography(in the West) generally became about exploration & cartography
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in Europe, German, French, and British schools of geography that emerged reflected /supported / justified expansionism, colonialism, Nazism: think lebensraum, the idea that states needed living-room or breathing-room
In modern geography—
- influence of Carl Sauer and the "landscape school" in the 1930s, which put forth the idea that a society's ways of life would be written on the earth as a cultural landscape that can be analysed spatially
- idea of environmental determinism: that people's behavior / traits are linked to their environment. This idea came under serious criticism, because people made racist hypotheses out of it (e.g. "people who live in the tropics are lazy"); it still continues to be a problematic idea to this day. Jeffrey Sachs, 2000 lecture: "Virtually all of the rich countries of the world are outside the tropics, and virtually all of the poor countries are within them ... climate, then, accounts for quite a significant proportion of the cross-national and cross-regional disparities of world income." (What about colonialism? Exploitation? Etc.)
- regional geography: geographers studied specific places
- quantitative turn: 1950s post-Sputnik turn in academia in general, where there was a renewed interest in science. Geographers used a lot of numbers and statistics to support hypotheses; laid the groundwork for GIS
- much more recently, critical geography — as a response to the quantitative turn & showing the influence of postmodernism — feminist geography, Marxist geography, a focus on people's sense of & relationship with places
* Major topics in the discipline: we have physical geography and human geography
physical geography is stuff like geomorphology (the evolution of landscape), biogeography, climate, etc., but we won't discuss that here; within human geography we have
- economic geography
- political geography
- cultural geography (language geography, religion geography...)
- development geography
- health geography
- historical geography
- urban geography
* Current thinking in geography:
spaces of places vs. spaces of flows
geography as relational study (studying relationships between places vs. studying places themselves)
Topic of discussion: we'll think about the state of geographical awareness/education in the US and what can be done to improve it. ("Social studies" in public schools vs. geography...)
Questions of scale: how do we think about global & local issues?
We don't have to consider one at the expense of the other; rather, we can consider them both at the same time.
Glocalization: a two-way relationship between the global and the local. ‘Such a term helps us to appreciate the interrelatedness of the geographical scales and, in particular, the idea that while the “local” exists within the “global” the “global” also exists within the “local.” (1)
Why spend time talking about global vs. local scales in a radical geography class? Because they form a binary which, in the dominant order, privileges the global as an all-powerful force that local projects are in competition with (but are truly hopeless against – "do you really think your fair-trade crafts will make a difference when there are so many sweatshop jobs? etc"). Activists, on the other hand, sometimes attempt to adjust this balance by championing everything local and casting the global in a particularly sinister light.
Can we deconstruct this binary and form entirely new narratives of what "global" and "local" signify? I've included this (massive, complex) topic because I think any radical geography will have to deal with it at some point.
For an excellent challenge to the global/local binary, by two economic geographers who were studying local economics, see Beyond Global Vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame by J.K. Gibson-Graham – two excerpts follow:
We are all familiar with the denigration of the local as small and relatively powerless, defined and confined by the global: the global is a force, the local is its field of play; the global is penetrating, the local penetrated and transformed. Globalism is synonymous with abstract space, the frictionless movement of money and commodities, the expansiveness and inventiveness of capitalism and the market. But its Other, localism, is coded as place, community, defensiveness, bounded identity, in situ labor, non-capitalism, the traditional.*
In our related action research projects in different parts of the world we have employed a vision of diverse community economies as a way of conversing about alternative development pathways that do not conform to the new global (capitalist) “order.” We are eager not to have these projects sequestered in a second-class domain—seen as worthy and interesting, perhaps, but as failing to challenge the power of global forces. Yet our language repeatedly exposes us to familiar difficulties and dangers. “Community” is often associated with place, with the local, and also with the confined and constrained. And “diversity” conjures images of a fragmentary politics of identity—the very enemy of the “collective resistance” that is the only hope of many anti-globalization theorists. We are treading on treacherous ground here, fractured by the fault line of global versus local.
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The diagram on the left shows some ways of thinking about relational flows rather than specific places. But a really interesting topic in geography, and one of growing interest, is the idea of "sense of place." What is "place", anyway? “Place is qualitatively different from terms such as landscape, space, and region in that it involves being known and knowing others.
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"Sense of Place" is something people are increasingly interested in preserving... e.g. the Quebec Declaration on Spirit of Place, Common Ground's Rules for Local Distinctiveness, etc.
What gives you a sense of place?
Who or what is behind those qualities that comprise your sense of place?
Sense of place can be political – Basque activists invoke sense of place & the shape of the Basque Country in this anti-Coke poster
The French government tries to support sense of place by putting up visual road-signs along the autoroute
Even GW Bush has a sense of place (his childhood home has a state of him riding his tricycle outside)
of course, this is also a bit of geographic mythmaking on the part of Odessa, Texas, which is our next topic.
Geographic Mythmaking and Metageography
We'll also explore questions of geographic mythmaking and metageography (i.e. how we talk about space, the spatial structures that we use to order the world).
* World regions: Is there really such a thing as the "Middle East", or does it exist only in relation to Europe? Is it better to call that region "Southwest Asia"? Etc. See Lewis & Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography
* States and non-states: the fictional properties of states, the narratives they use, unrecognized states (Transdniestria, South Ossetia, etc.)
Examples of geographic mythmaking – And questions: who profits from the myths & narratives about these places?
* Pacific Rim more prophetic than descriptive (Alexander Woodside)
* cities making images for themselves – from NYC to Auroville – advertising, symbols, imagery that create a sense of place
place is tied to power in this geographic metaphor : New York City as a chessboard where the Real Players play
Why study geographic mythmaking? Here's a rather long excerpt from an excellent lecture by geographer Doreen Massey, which I'm compelled to include for its eloquence:
The crumpling of space – the vastly increased connectedness that undoubtedly has happened – has given us an illusion of knowledge – a presumption that can be both dangerous, I would suggest, and potentially imperial.Well I would argue that one reason is that this is the world of, and the geographical imagination of, the global free marketeers, of a global elite.
This is an elite that thinks of itself as global and it constantly moves between the luxurious locations of the world. These are the investors, the leaders of markets, the billionaires of technology.
And bits of the world are being made the same – yes – they are being made in their image in a sense, as governments and local authorities everywhere desperately try to attract them.
There are the huge hi-tech developments outside of Hyderabad, stretching for miles into the incredible pink hills outside that city. A spacious western, so-called international, development in total contrast to the old city.
There are science parks in some of the poorest places around the world – with watered lawns and private schools
There is the westernised gentrification of city-centres around the planet.
And I would suggest that it is out of this world – a kind of global necklace of islands of luxury and self-assurance - “enclaves, actually” - that comes the thesis and the celebration of “the world is now flat”.
This is also a world that can almost rework the way we think about differences between places.
But I would argue anyway that this particular version of the shrinking world is not just a description of the world as it is, however correct or incorrect. It is actually part of a project. It is geographical mythmaking, to convince us of globalisation in its current form. It is a description that is promulgated precisely to help make itself come true.
Now that argument implies something else – that the ways we imagine the world (our geographical imaginations) matter: they have effects.
The whole variegated and unequal geography of the world is being reorganised into a historical queue.
Geography is being turned into history, space is being turned into time.
What’s more, there is only one historical queue - one model of development.
And it is one defined by those “in the lead”, the most powerful voices (the ones who designed the queue in the first place).
Again, I think, this is a kind of geographical mythmaking. And it has serious effects.
First, it makes it more difficult for those who are defined as “behind” in this queue (and who have less powerful voices) to carve out a path of their own. Their future is foretold. Effectively they will be like us.
Cartography and the Cold War Legacy
"The Second World War marked an epochal change in the relation of geographers to war and the military. The military had long utilised the skills of geographers, but from World War II the relation changed at least in the United States, and the military began less drawing upon existing geographical knowledge than directing a new kind that was increasingly formal, instrumental, and model driven. ... From World War II onwards, ideas, techniques, machines, academic subjects, and institutions were brought together in combinations that never existed before,
undermining old boundaries, creating new hybrids. Central to this re-jigging was mathematical modelling, as well as
the machine that made its widespread practice possible. " (—Trevor Barnes, "Geography's Underworld" — basically this is an excellent paper you should read, but I'll summarize main points below)
Mathematical modeling has left its mark on many disciplines, and is now a relatively unquestioned part of how science works. As Barnes quotes economist Paul Krugman as saying, "To be taken seriously an idea has to be something you can model."
-- classical "received view" philosophy of science: models are superfluous; they don't add to axioms, laws, and theories (the goal of science) because they possess the same deductive structure as the theory to which they correspond. "Models did not add to explanation, but were merely parasitic upon existing axioms, laws and theories."
-- Another view says that models don't just describe or help explain the world, but they also intervene, changing it (the rational choice model justified Jeffrey Sachs's shock therapy for Russia, structural adjustment policies in the third world, etc.)
-- it wasn't only the bomb that was constructed / a whole assemblage is required, which includes not only mathematical modeling across the social sciences too -- "After the bomb is built, and even dropped, the assemblage remains. War continues."
Basically, this whole assemblage that was constructed during the cold war "has one goal: to beat an enemy."
When you start using this statistical modeling paradigm and applying it to economics— well, maybe it doesn't work so well. People have criticized economic modeling as being one reason why the economic crisis wasn't predicted. Is the trend toward mathematical models in economics part of this enemy-focused assemblage? In economics, the enemy turned out to be ourselves.
In June 2009, I saw climate scientist James Lovelock speak in Washington D.C.; much of what he talked about was the (over)reliance of climate science on models. Because models are cheaper to fund than actual fieldwork, and neater, they have replaced a lot of actual observation— with devastating effects, he said, because evidence of global warming on the ground was accumulating faster than the models had predicted, and so the IPCC predictions for the first few reports on climate change had been underestimating the problem.
But back to geography: geographers began building models that were directly Cold War-related (modeling a new highway system to get people out of Seattle if the Russians dropped nukes on it) and beyond (models to study the spatial organisation of land use, differences in urban rent, predict demand for transportation at urban sites, etc.) (Barnes, 2008). I bring up this influence of the military-industrial complex on how we do geography today, because it bears on our forthcoming discussions of critical cartography.
"Under what circumstances is a map authored?" (Jeremy Crampton)
"Maps are active; they actively construct knowledge, they exercise power and they can be a powerful means of promoting social change." (Crampton & Krygier, in "An Introduction to Critical Cartography", 2006)
Are all maps political? Can there be such a thing as a neutral map?
Maps create as well as describe. As explained in a long sentence by Wood & Krygier:
In effect, the map is actually a system of propositions (a proposition is a statement affirming or denying the existence of something), an argument about existence; and if it started with paddy fields and long fields and manor lands and with the states these made up and the world these states composed, or wanted to imagine, wanted ‘everyone’ to imagine they composed, the map has gone on to a long career rich in the affirmation of the existence of a bewildering variety of things, some whose existence we continue to affirm (e.g., all the nation-states we have mentioned), some we have come to deny (the island-continent of California, the Northwest Passage, the open polar sea, etc.), but, in any case, things very hard to imagine without the creative intercession of the map (geologic strata, frontal weather systems, the hole in the ozone, etc.). (forthcoming article, 2009)
In an article called "Power of Maps: (Counter) Mapping for Conservation" (2006), Leila Harris & Helen Hazen draw from the geographer Brian Harley to explain that "to catalogue the world is to appropriate it, so that all these technical [cartographical] processes represent acts of control over its image which extend beyond the professed uses of cartography."
They suggest that critical geographers should start from the premise that maps are rooted in and essential to power and knowledge ... with the understanding that mapmaking acts to “codify, to legitimate, and to promote the world views which are prevalent in different periods and places”
They continue by posing some questions for maps:
What actors, resources, or social relations enabled a particular map to be produced? What relations does a particular map enable the reader to see? Or, otherwise stated, what relations of power and partiality does the map itself produce? Applied to conservation, these insights open several critical avenues for exploration. For instance, how does mapping suggest that certain spaces can, or should, be protected for conservation? How does the relative ‘mappability’ of different areas or landscapes encourage the protection of certain features over others? How do maps allow readers to imagine certain spaces as uninhabited and appropriate for protection, or already successfully ‘protected’?
These questions are posed within the context of conservation mapping, but I believe they can be applied to think critically about any map.
For every map we encounter, we could ask:
What does this map do?
Who created it? Why? How?
Who does it serve?
Basically, critique means asking these kinds of questions, and more.
“Critique” is not a simplistic rejection of concepts or practices, nor do “critical cartographers” seek to invalidate maps. Instead, critique is characterized by a careful interrogation of taken-for-granted categories and assumptions with the hopes of better understanding the inherent situatedness of maps or any other form of knowledge. (Leila Harris & Mark Harrower, "Critical Interventions and Lingering Concerns: Critical Cartography", 2006)
(Critical cartography / GIS / geography uses the same kind of thinking you find in general "critical theory", just applied to maps or geographic practices and technologies: examining the biases and assumptions in which we for granted to be "knowledge", with an eye toward changing society.)
Let's take a look at the example of map projections.
So, it's impossible to accurately project a round 3-D earth onto a flat, 2-D piece of paper. You're going to have some distortions somewhere.
People have created all kinds of projections throughout the ages— radical cartography has an excellent chart displaying them.
One of the most common was the Mercator projection, which makes polar regions appear larger and equatorial regions appear smaller. Another It has the effect of making northern countries larger and countries in the Global South smaller. In the 1970s, Arno Peters released a different map that he thought more accurately represented the world (apparently it is used by UNESCO and aid agencies in developing countries, because as an equal-area map, it represents their sizes better). This provoked great controversy, as Crampton & Krygier explain (2006):
After getting his doctorate in history Peters felt that global maps such as the Mercator were racist: it was “a fully false picture, particularly regarding the non-white-peopled lands...it over-values the white man and distorts the picture of the world to the advantage of the colonial masters of the time” (Morris 1973: 15).
Robinson led the response: "cleverly contrived, cunningly deceptive attack against the “outmoded theories” and “myths” of cartography [it] misrepresents, is illogical and erroneous, and one’s initial reaction is simply to dismiss it as being worthless...[Peters is a] skillful merchandiser, and his self- serving campaign can do the image of cartography great harm (Robinson 1985: 103).
The politics of representation and ideologies behind maps are something that are not always discussed— though with the recent interest in critical cartography, they are much more discussed in recent times.
If maps are a technology of power, what can mapmakers do to question or subvert prevailing assumptions?
Countermapping is a term that implies "using mapping to overcome predominant power hierarchies, interspecies injustices, and other power effects." (Harris & Hazen, 2006)
That is to say: mapping can be used to challenge the dominant order.
We understand counter-mapping as any effort that fundamentally questions the assumptions or biases of cartographic conventions, that challenges predominant power effects of mapping, or that engages in mapping in ways that upset power relations. (Harris & Hazen, 2006)
For example, if fishermen are using maps in ways that help them overharvest fish— well, one could also create maps that would be used to identify where fish should be protected, and help with fish conservation.
Countermapping is also used to help identify indigenous boundaries...
“More indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns. This assertion has its corollary: more indigenous territory can be reclaimed and defended by maps than by guns. Whereas maps like guns must be accurate, they have the additional advantages that they are inexpensive, don't require a permit, can be openly carried and used, internationally neutralize the invader's one-sided legalistic claims, and can be duplicated and transmitted electronically which defies all borders, all pretexts, and all occupations.” Bernard Nietschmann (1995
There are real questions about whether you can use the master's mapping tools to re-map the master's house, so-to-speak. Keeping in mind what we've already read about the Cold War influence on quantitative geography, let's take a brief look at the common technologies in modern map-making.
Technology: Critical GPS and Critical GIS
GPS — Global Positioning System — is a global network of between 24 and 32 satellites that was created by the US Department of Defense. The network is used by anyone with a GPS receiver that wants to obtain precise coordinates of a given location. It's used in airplanes, ships, military uses, civilian navigation, land surveying, mobile phones, etc. Although it was developed as military technology, Reagan made it available for civilian use in the early 1990s. It used to be that the highest quality of signal was available just to the military, and civilian use was degraded, but this "Selective availability" was turned off in 2000, which increased the precision from about 100m to about 20m. Future satellites will not have this "selective ability" quality (the military has figured out how to jam GPS signals to "hostile forces" anyway).
China is planning a global system called Compass with 35 satellites; the EU & European Space Agency is well underway with its civilian use GPS project called Galileo; and Russia has a kind of run-down satellite network called GLONASS which India is helping bring up-to-date.
GPS technology has the obvious potential for surveillance. In "Critical GPS: Toward a New Politics of Location," Amy Propen describes how in 2001, a man sued a local car rental company in New Haven, CT, after it used GPS technology to track him, and then fined him $450 for speeding three times. While describing why "tracking every move by satellite" is problematic, she invokes Foucault's description of "Panopticism":
[I]n order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert. (Foucault, 1979)
GPS can be kind of creepy, kind of useful, especially when GPS data is compiled into databases (Geographic Information Systems, or GIS). These descriptive databases are used to store / analyze / display spatial information in all kinds of ways (resource management, medical geography, urban planning, archaeology, marketing...)
Is GIS a value-neutral technology?
As pointed out by Johnson, Louis, & Pramano in "Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Cartographic Literacies In Indigenous Communities":
While many define GIS/computer cartography as ‘tools’, we recognize that ‘tools’ implies something which can be put away and no longer have consequence in ones life until they are needed again. These mapping systems are technologies, something that we may choose to engage with but even if we decided to turn them off and go about our daily routine they will continue to have influence over our lives (Fox et al., 2005b). Specifically, we define these technologies as a ‘techno-science’, a discipline where technology has become the embodiment of science (see Turnbull, 2000). These technologies modify and transform the worlds that are revealed through them, delivering apparent ‘realities’.
Amy Propen expresses concerns about GIS used as a surveillance system:
I]t is now possible to make educated guesses about any household’s political and religious views, as well as its shopping preferences. ... Indeed, what is most disturbing about this surveillance system— beyond the fact that it is largely unregulated—is that it presumes a notion of closure, a view wherein there is a population of individuals, and where it is possible to obtain measurable knowledge about each. It implies a truly closed society. (Curry, 1995, 80)
The implications of a "closed society" are beyond the scope of this website, but consider the example of geodemographic data used for marketing. Try going to claritas.com and enter your zip code. You'll get a parcel of information about the people who live near you. Apparently I live near the "Movers & Shakers, Second City Elite, Up-and-Comers, and Upward Bound." The Up-and-Comers, for example, are "a stopover for younger, upper-mid singles before they marry, have families, and establish more deskbound lifestyles. Found in second-tier cities, these mobile twentysomethings include a disproportionate number of recent college graduates who are into athletic activities, the latest technology, and nightlife entertainment." They are known to travel internationally, go in-line skating, read Maxim, and drive VW Rabbits.
Closed, neatly ordered society.
Cartographic Renaissance: Power to the People
In the last few years cartography has been slipping from the control of the powerful elites that have exercised dominance over it for several hundred years. These elites—the great map houses of the west, the state, and to a lesser extent academics—have been challenged by two important developments. First, the actual business of mapmaking, of collecting spatial data and mapping it out, is passing out of the hands of the experts. The ability to make a map, even a stunning interactive 3D map, is now available to anyone with a home computer and an internet connection. (Jeremy Crampton & John Krygier)
Whether you term it "neogeography" or "volunteered cartographic information", one thing is sure: maps are not only made by geographical "experts" anymore. New technology has enabled vast numbers of people to create or collaborate in mapmaking.
examples of empowering uses of GIS:
* the Baltimore Green Map shows "green" things in B-more
* Baltimorphosis lets you design & model 3D plans of how Baltimore could look
* Detention Watch Network has a map of immigration detention centers in the USA
Breaking Out of Grid-Consciousness
"Events are fluvia." — Deleuze
Everything we've mentioned above — GPS, GIS, modern cartography & modeling — contains the basic assumption of Euclidean space. One dataset is commensurate to another. You can layer datasets upon this grid and get a description of space.
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What are the implications of dividing the world into a grid? Is it a neutral act? Does it change how we perceive reality? — "grid-consciousness"? It supports the idea of an ordered, mathematically understood, positivistic universe. |
Is there a radically different way to experience space beyond this Euclidean grid?
("Inhabited space transcends geometric space," writes Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, and perhaps the best way to experience space beyond the grid is simply to inhabit it.)
Perhaps we should ask: What makes a good map?
We have been taught that good maps are scientific, objective, accurate, etc.— because of binaries like those of art / science, objective / subjective, and scientific / ideological
What could a postmodern cartography look like?
Post-structuralist geographer Marcus Doel asks us to imagine a cartography that shimmers...
"What we need is 'a delirious cartography of thousands of plateaus, each one a shifting ice flow' (Fuller, 1992). Post-structuralist geography is a driftwork, a wanton abandonment, an active nihilism."
"Streaming. Braiding. Becoming. Schizophrenia. Deterritorialization. This is indeed a beautiful milieu for geographers, engendering remarkable events for those prepared to launch themselves into the flux. Learning to let go, to become alert to difference and differentiation, is the task of critical human geography." (Doel, Post-structuralist Geographies)
No-one really seems to know what a non-Cartesian cartography would actually look like;
though two theorists who have thought about the issue at length are Henri Lefebvre (see Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, and The Production of Space) and Gilles Deleuze. While these French philosophers weren't geographers per se, they've heavily influenced geographers.
David Harvey was kind of like, don't get too crazy with all this theory about flow and flux and fluvia and breaking down the grid:
While I accept the general argument that process, flux, and flow should be given a certain ontological priority in understanding the world, I also want to insist that this is precisely the reason why we should pay so much more careful attention to ... the 'permanences' that surround us and which we also construct to help solidify and give meaning to our lives. (Harvey, 1996)
The people who seem most adept at imagining postmodern cartographies are those who were doing cartography before the modern came to dominate: indigenous cartographers.
“There is an Indigenous Geography in the making – a new approach to land consciousness involving map reading and map-making that is leading to the establishment of an encompassing, innovative and pragmatic new discipline.” —José Barreiro (2004), qtd. by Johnson, Lewis, & Pramono
Did indigenous people make maps? Krygier & Wood make an extremely salient point that maps actually didn't exist much in the ancient world; people rarely made what we would think of as maps before 500 years ago, though they did make cosmological models; they caution against postulating "‘mapmaking’ traditions where instead there were probably traditions of ‘cosmological speculation’, traditions of ‘property control’, traditions of ‘centralized management’, traditions of ‘military mapping’, and perhaps others, including, for instance, the discourse function fulfilled by ‘geomantic site location’; but none precipitating ‘the idea of the map’, that is, for most readers of this book, so ‘self-evidently’ common to them all."
Human societies did not need maps and got on handily without them for hundreds of thousands of years. But during the last two or three millennia BC, larger, more complicated societies including Babylonia, Egypt, perhaps the Indic societies centered on Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and China began to articulate, sporadically and apparently independently, but among and continuous with other indigenous textual productions – memorial inscriptions, memory aids, almanacs, genealogies, inventories, histories, and descriptions of routes and territory (in mixtures of sculptural, pictorial, pictographic, syllabic, ductions on this ground. ... While it is not ‘wrong’ to refer to these early graphic notation systems as maps, it is anachronistic. It is critical to accept, as already intimated, that these graphics were not emitted ‘as maps’ by those who made them. To imagine this would be to see them through the conceptual filter created by modern mapmaking.Until modern times no society distinguished – or made – such maps as distinct from religious icons, mandalas, landscape painting, construction drawings, itineraries, and so on; and current scholarship stresses the continuity between religious iconography and that which materialized on the earliest maps. (forthcoming article, 2009)
It can be argued that "maps" didn't exist before the modern state: you can extrapolate a lot from that. (Should we even make maps? Do they interfere with our experience of space?)
Anyway, part of opening the map to non-Western cartographies lies in opening the standard definition of "map." Crampton & Krygier explain that emphasizing the role of maps in human experience, rather than the look or form of them, open the door to many non-tradition and non-western mapping traditions; they site a definition that “maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world” (Harley and Woodward, 1987).
Should indigenous communities engage Western cartographic traditions, or not? Many academics & NGO workers believe that Indigenous communities must engage in Western cartographic endeavors or face the “the alternative futures, of not being on the map, as it were, being obscured from view and having local claims obscured” (Johnson et al, quoting Fox & Peluso).
However, as Johnson et al explain:
What we are labeling here as ‘Western cartography’ is not only founded within a Cartesian-Newtonian epistemology but is also connected with and has been informed/transformed within both historical and current ‘contact zones’(Pratt, 1992) of the colonial projects of the West. To engage the technologies of Western cartography is to involve our communities and their knowledge systems with a science implicated in the European colonial endeavor (Harley, 1992b) and is a decision which should be made only after examining not only our past experiences
of colonial mapping/surveying but also the long history of Western cartographic traditions.
They continue to list the dangers of adopting Western cartographic techniques uncritically:
-- putting indigenous knowledge into a GIS may diminish it, because it is no longer contextually defined
-- storing information with a GIS makes it easier to be used beyond its original intent & context
-- the source & recipient of info. is disconnected in space and time, so it is more difficult to impose moral restraint on its use
For some examples of maps from North American native peoples, see this article on kunstpedia.com.
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art, practice, and experience: doing geography How are people encouraging a cultural re-imagining of space? "Experimental geography": “a blend of art and geography, the area is characterized primarily by its interdisciplinary nature, an openness to exploration by artists who reference multiple physical and conceptual sources, from the fields, for example, of science, history, economics, politics, culture, and even art, in thinking about the human use of land. These investigation take the form of maps and charts, both actual and virtual; bus tours; and physical intervention in the urban landscape or in nature.”
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Psychogeography:
Straight from John Krygier's "Mapping Weird Stuff" class:
PsychoGeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
PsychoGeography is…
* diverse activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around you
* attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to place and environment
* serious fun
* often political and critical of the status quoDerive: aimless, random drifting through a place, guided by whim and an awareness of how different spaces draw you in or repel you.
examples of creative mappings & projects:
* Bio-mapping charts people's emotions through a city (see work by Christian Nold)
* Lee Walton calculated & celebrated the "Average Point of Interest" in San Francisco
* Kanarinka's project to map the evacuation route of Boston in the number of human breaths it took: "an attempt to measure our post-9/11 collective fear in the individual breaths that it takes to traverse these new geographies of insecurity."
* Kanarinka's Drift Relay: "a collaborative psychogeographic experience in the form of a 24 hour exploration of San Jose. Participants drifted through new and familiar city spaces with a Glowlab coach and a mobile kit of recording tools, contributing to a collective journey of endurance and discovery with images from camera phones, audio from voice calls, and location via geocoded addresses sent by SMS."
from Unitary Urbanism by Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem (IS no. 6, 1961):
All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops - the geometry. True urbanism will start by causing the occupying forces to disappear from a small number of places. That will be the beginning of what we mean by construction. The concept of the ‘positive void’ coined by modern physics might prove illuminating. Gaining our freedom is, in the first place, ripping off a few acres from the face of a domesticated planet.
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from The Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey:
The second generating force behind the TAZ springs from the historical development I call "the closure of the map." The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance--not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of "territorial gangsterism." Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed...in theory.
The "map" is a political abstract grid, a gigantic con enforced by the carrot/stick conditioning of the "Expert" State, until for most of us the map becomes the territory- -no longer "Turtle Island," but "the USA." And yet because the map is an abstraction it cannot cover Earth with 1:1 accuracy. Within the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod. The map is not accurate; the map cannot be accurate. ...
And--the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open. Metaphorically it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of Control. And here we should introduce the concept of psychotopology (and -topography) as an alternative "science" to that of the State's surveying and mapmaking and "psychic imperialism." Only psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot "control" its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features. We are looking for "spaces" (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones--and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.
As far as the active taking-of-space goes... we actually do this already. I don't think it needs to be violent. I can name several spaces in Baltimore that function as independent theaters for action; temporary autonomous zones.
In some ways, this kind of revolutionary speech seems to belong to the last century. In this century, it seems that the map is less closed than we thought. The world is too big, or at least too fragmented & complex, for any one empire / paradigm to control. Nation-states reveal themselves as flawed fictions. Monolithic central planning and concrete apartment blocks and sprawlscapes are revealed as bad ideas. Shopping malls across the land are dropping dead. It seems that new uses for space are not only possible, but welcomed. What do you think?
Draw an imaginary map.Put a goal mark where you want to go.
Go walking on an actual street according to your map.
If there is no street where it should be according to your map, make one by putting obstacles aside.
When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet.
—Yoko Ono, "Map Piece"
presentations
these are power-point presentations that go along with the material...
confession: a lot of them have uncited images in them, but email me if you want the citations :)
two: history of the discipline
three: global, local, & sense of place
five: critical GIS & critical cartography
six: breaking out of grid-consciousness
seven: art, experimental geography, and activist practice
journals & magazines & books
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographers
Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography
An Atlas of Radical Cartography
websites / blogs
activist social networks / social & art projects
Center for Land Use Interpretation
notes
(1) Dicken, 2000, qtd in Geographies of Globalization, Warwick Murray, 2006).