MAPPING TERRITORIES


Carto-City by Denis Cosgrove

Gazetteer G: Territory Maps

Signal Failure by Paul Elliman

Cerebral Cities by Tom Vanderbilt

Perils of Precision by Rebecca Ross

Gazetteer H: Territory Maps

Mapping the Homunculus, by Steve Dietz

Images/Matter, Peter Hall talks to Mike Silver

Map Quest by Peter Walsh

Contested Terrain, Steven Zacks talks to Eyal Weizman

World in Motion & The Other Final by Cathy Lang Ho

The Sirens of Venice by Paul Elliman

Carto-City
Never innocent guides, city maps have always shaped the experience of urban space, serving both as scientific instruments and aesthetic representations of the city.
Denis Cosgrove traces the history of urban cartography and its techniques, from the grid to the aerial perspective to contemporary digital mapping technologies.

The goal of rendering legible the complex, dynamic and living entity that is a city remains an urgent one. But today's acute awareness that cartographic images can never be innocent vehicles of information dissolves neat distinctions between celebratory and regulatory urban maps. Urban space and cartographic space remain inseparable; as each is transformed their relationship alters.


Signal Failure
The London Underground “diagram”--designed amid the capital’s electrification and expansion in the 1930s--established an archetype for network and transportation maps worldwide. Paul Elliman compares the image of the city as an efficient machine projected by Beck’s map, with the reality of public transport in London today.

Fritz Lang's Metropolis might seem a more relevant depiction of life beneath the city to current users of the London Underground...from the impressive scale and expertise of its ageing engineering, to its over-crowded and under-funded stations and trains...

The city-as-machine metaphor has been superseded by the city-as-computer-network. And yet, as any regular commuter knows, if the city is a machine (even a computerized one) it remains the most vulnerable kind--a web of intricate parts, liable to break down at any moment. In spite of this, official graphic representations continue to portray the modern city as a technology of the highest efficiency...



Cerebral Cities
“Memory lane” is not just a turn of phrase. Tom Vanderbilt scans recent brain imaging research--including a landmark study of London taxi drivers who have mastered "The Knowledge"-–and finds that by memorizing urban routes, we carve pathways in our heads.

Perils of Precision
The power of the map has long been aligned with its presumed accuracy. Rebecca Ross compares current and post-war planning models of New York with a fuzzy, digital map of Amsterdam collaboratively-created by its residents and asks: which is more accurate?

This map corresponds automatically with life in the city as its residents simultaneously create and experience it. One participant, training for the marathon, continuously looped the same path, reinforcing his accumulated miles by thickening the lines that define his route as a place on the map. Others wandered more freely about lesser known streets and alleyways, their movement collected as more delicate lines.The form of the map is reclaimed by the same basic paradoxes and gesures that define the city...


What would it mean to say that a map is more human-made because it incorporates the participation of many people? Might it even increase its claim to accuracy?


Mapping the Homunculous
Recent art projects conjure alternative images of the city, with dynamic interfaces that allow collective expression of individual urban experiences. Steve Dietz explores how models of mental maps and emergent systems theory inform work by artists who use digital media to record new psychogeographies.

Images/Matter
LIDAR scanning allows objects, buildings and potentially whole cities to be captured in 3D at high resolution. Will this new mode of mapping make traditional architectural processes obsolete? Architect Mike Silver tells Peter Hall about the implications and innovative uses of lidar in the designed environment.

Mapquest
Why wasn’t America named after Columbus rather than Vespucci? Peter Walsh unpacks five centuries of debate surrounding the first map to show America as an independent continent-- a map that changed the contemporary view of the world, one surviving copy of which sold at auction in London in 2005 for $1m.

At Saint-Die, ...Waldseemuller was part of a small intellectual community in touch with the latest ideas and technologies. Its central treasure was a printing press, then a new and thrilling invention. The printed map was a major step in the development of modern cartography, making possible wide distribution of multiple, identical copies of maps, no longer subject to the errors copyists intoduced into hand-drawn images.


Contested Terrain
In May 2002, a map appeared on the website of B’tselem, the Israeli human rights group, showing the precise contours of Israel’s West Bank settlements and plans for their future expansion. The ensuing controversy placed the map at the center of a global debate on the relationship between architecture and politics. Stephen Zacks discusses the origins and impact of the map with its designer, Israeli architect Eyal Weizman.
We needed to analyze the organization of the settlements as a regional network, and look at its effects on daily life. There's a different perspective when you move from a political critique to a human rights one, and the shift requreed a new tool.. But drawing the map, we could work backwards from the form to answer some questions: why the space is organized the way it is, how the work of architects and planners causes the material damage that is apparent...

A map is not absolute: the power it represents can never be perfect. It can be constantly subverted and challenged.


World in Motion
The first and certainly most comprehensive example of globalization is not Coke or McDonald’s, but soccer--known in most parts of the world as football. Cathy Lang Ho maps the international dissemination of the beautiful game, and shows how the spread of this sport parallels global industrial development.

The Sirens of Venice
Venice two years from today. The island city has introduced a sophisticated orientation system guided by a mysterious multilingual voice. But who and where is this so-called Salvatore? And what does an automated electronic voice network mean for a city whose own vernacular voices seem to be fading away? Paul Elliman listens in.