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CULTURAL CARTOGRAPHY : MAPS AND MAPPING IN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

Denis Cosgrove Armand Colin | Annales de gographie


2008/2 - n 660-661 pages 159 178

ISSN 0003-4010

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cosgrove Denis, Cultural cartography : maps and mapping in cultural geography , Annales de gographie, 2008/2 n 660-661, p. 159-178. DOI : 10.3917/ag.660.0159

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Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography


Les cartes et la cartographie en gographie culturelle
Denis Cosgrove
UCLA

Abstract

Rsum

Au cours des trois dernires dcennies, des tournants importants se sont produits tant dans la pratique cartographique que dans les thories qui la concernent, et qui ont transform le rle de la cartographie en gographie, alors mme que la fabrication des cartes faisait lobjet dtudes qui font ressortir les liens actuels existant entre la gographie culturelle et diffrentes pratiques artistiques. Le prsent essai se penche sur ces dveloppements en portant une attention particulire au cas anglophone. La critique de la prtention scientifique de la cartographique et lapproche historique rvisionniste de lart seront dabord discutes, suivront des remarques sur les relations changeantes entre la gographie et la cartographie, ainsi que sur limpact des nouvelles technologies sur la fabrication et lusage des cartes comme on peut sen rendre compte par la gnralisation des cartographies virtuelles. La dimension artistique de la recherche et de la documentation sur les questions spatiales et environnementales qui ont recours ces nouvelles cartographies, est replace dans son contexte historique et est mise en relation avec les changements survenus rcemment dans les pratiques gographiques. Cultural geography, cartography, map, mapping, map art, site specific art, Land Art, history of cartography. Gographie culturelle, cartographie, carte, art et cartes, site dart, art naturel, histoire de la cartographie.

Key-words Mots-cls

In November 2001 the American artist Laura Kurgan produced and freely distributed to visitors at the site of the recently destroyed World Trade Center in lower Manhattan a map plotting the events of 9/11, its impacts on the surrounding streets and buildings, and the recovery activities then underway (fig. 1). The map was updated and again freely

Ann. Go., n 660-661, 2008, pages 159-178, Armand Colin

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Over the past three decades, significant shifts in both the theory and practice of cartography and indeed in the definition of the map itself have transformed the role of mapping within geography, while maps and map making have become a focus for important contemporary connections between cultural geography and various art practices. This essay reviews these developments, paying special attention to Anglophone examples. The critique of cartographys claims to science and revisionist art historical scholarship are first discussed, followed by comments on the changing relations between geography and cartography and the impacts of new technology on map making and use as these have been democratised through virtual cartographies. Growing artistic interest in researching and documenting spatial and environmental questions that involve use of many of these mapping practices is set in its historical context and related to geographys changing academic practices.

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Catherine Delano-Smith, The map as a commodity, in D. Woodward, C. Delano-Smith, Cordell D.K. Yee (eds.), Approaches and challenges in a worldwide history of cartography (11 plantejaments I objectius duna histria universal de la cartografia), Barcelona, Institut Cartogrfic de Catalunya, 2001, p. 91-110. On the professionalization of cartography as a scientific and academic practice and its specifically 20th century characteristics, see Denis Wood, Cartography is dead (thank God), Cartographic Perspectives, 45, 2003, p. 4-7. On the cultural and historical roles of mensuration in relating to geography and place, see Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale: geografia, persuasions, identit, Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 2006.

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distributed in March 2002. Initially produced within two months of the catastrophe, when the site was still being actively cleared, human remains being recovered and identified, and the city still deeply traumatized, the map responded to a specific, practical need. High fences had been constructed around the destroyed area, leaving only a small number of viewing stands from which it could be observed. Given the scale of the site and the totality of destruction, most visitors could make little sense of what they were seeing. Kurgans map was designed to help them do so. Color coded to show the footprints of the variously destroyed and damaged buildings and overlain by pictorial symbols, the maps mediate between the visible and the absent while introducing a sense of the processes under way in front of the map user and viewer. The project was financed by local agencies and businesses, which also helped supply the information recorded on the map. The fold-out image used the vivid colours and design graphics of maps distributed to orientate and guide visitors at tourist attractions such as theme parks or zoos. While serving an obvious public need, Kurgans map raised a host of ethical and political questions: did it merely service morbid voyeurism or meet the needs of genuine witness? Did it cheapen and trivialise the significance of the place by representing it in the graphic language of tourist cartography? Did it seek to control and direct the ways of seeing and experiencing a place whose gravity and sacredness (as a mass graveyard) demanded a more personal and private response? I do not intend to answer these questions in this essay, although in noting their salience we are alerted to cartographys insistent ethical dimension. Rather, Kurgans mapping project serves here to introduce a broader set of questions that bear upon the role and relations of cartography in the context of contemporary cultural geography. While accurately documenting and plotting spatial data, the Ground Zero map makes no claim to scientific accuracy or objectivity; it is not professional cartography. Like a guide-book or transit map, it was an ephemeral product, intended for immediate practical use, to be readily disposed of or destroyed in the process of use rather than archived as documentary evidence of geographical data 1. It was also an artistic project, a site specific and performative work intended as a direct intervention into the everyday (if temporarily disrupted and uncanny) life of the city, a way of taking the measure of the event 2. In her urban mapping,

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Fig. 1

Laura Kurgan, Map of 9/11 site, 2001, detail. Laura Kurgan, Carte du site du 11 septembre 2001, dtails.

Kurgan could draw theoretically on a long tradition in Modern Art from early Surrealism, through Situationism, Conceptualism and site-specific art practices in which cartographies of everyday life have played a significant role. As her earlier work using SPOT satellite images to map the sites of mass graves revealing the evidence of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans demonstrates very clearly, she is also acutely political in her mapping, aware of the post-modern critiques of scientific mapping and of the maps complex relationships with power. She recognises the significance of the map as

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a material object and an active agent in social relations. In this she shares a burgeoning interest in the map-object and in the practices of mapping not only with a large number of artists, but with many cultural geographers. The two groups have found common concern in cartography as a cultural practice and they draw increasingly on each others work and insights 3. In what follows I review this shared body of theory, criticism and practice around maps and mapping with the intention of clarifying the changing relations between cartography, science cultural theory and artistic activity within geography. I explore the historical evolution of these relations and connect them to broader developments in cultural study, principally within the Anglophone world (although the developments I discuss are not by any means confined to that sphere). I assess their implications in the context of a digitized world in which the map as a tangible, finished object and mapping as a specialised scientific activity seem to be giving way to a virtual cartography in which the map image is avowedly provisional and ephemeral, and mapping a creative, participatory activity no longer the preserve of professional cartographers and geographers. Lastly, I explore the recent convergence of interest between cultural geographers and artists in questions of map making and cartography.
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A cultural history of cartography

The so-called cultural turn that has revolutionized Anglophone cultural geography since the 1980s has had a parallel impact on cartography and on the place of the map within geography. In these pages, Paul Claval cites feminism, subaltern studies and post-colonialism as significant aspects of the cultural turn, together with a post-modern scepticism towards the universalist claims of modern science, a rapprochement with the humanities and a focus on images. As a sophisticated icono-text 4, popularly and professionally regarded as a uniquely geographical research tool and medium of communication, the map could hardly escape the disciplines cultural revolution. Given cartographys close association with positivist science (that dates to the origins of statistical and thematic mapping in the early 19th century), the claims for the academic and scientific status of their work made by American cartographers, especially in response to 1940s German propaganda mapping 5, and the central role that cartography played in
3 4 Denis Cosgrove, Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and cartography in the twentieth century, Imago Mundi, 57 (1), 2005, p. 35-54. The term iconotext refers to representations that incorporate both text and graphic images (for example comic books, cartoons and many virtual hypertexts). The map is one of the oldest examples of the form. See the discussion in Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, Mapping global warfare: Los Angeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owenss pictorial cartography, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 95(2), 2005, p. 373-390; and John Pickles, Texts, hermeneutics and propaganda maps, in T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds.), Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape, London and New York, Routledge, 1992.

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D. Wood, Cartography is dead, 4; see also John Pickles, A history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping and the geocoded world, London, Routledge, 2004. 7 J. Brian Harley, The new nature of maps, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2001, quotation on 35. The most comprehensive discussion of Harleys ideas, their origin and evolution is Matthew H. Edney, The origins and development of J.B. Harleys cartographic theories, Cartographica, Monograph 54, 2005; Edneys comments on Harleys theoretical confusions are on 107. A detailed critique of Harleys use of French theorists is to be found in Barbara Belyea, Images of Power: Derrida, Foucault, Harley, Cartographica, 29, 2 1992, p. 1-9. 8 The essays are collected in The new nature of maps. Harleys work for the American bi-centennial exhibition of cartography and discovery revealed to him the extent of pre-Columbian indigenous geographical knowledge present but silenced in the maps produced by European discoverers. 9 I discuss this evolution of thought in Anglophone human geography in Epistemology, geography and cartography: Matthew Edney on Brian Harleys cartographic theories, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 97 (1), 2007, p. 202-209. 10 Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, An introduction to critical cartography, ACME An International E-Journal for critical geographies, 4(1), 2006, p. 11-33 [http://www.acme-journal.org/vol4/ JWCJK]; David Koch, Cartographies of disease: maps, mapping and medicine, Redlands CA., Esri Press, 2005; John Cloud, American cartographic transformations during the Cold War, Cartography and Geographical Information Science, 29, 2002, p. 261-282; Mark Denil, Cartographic design: rhetoric and persuasion, Cartographic Perspectives, 45, 2003, p. 8-67.

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geographical exploration and colonial survey, settlement and administration, it is little wonder that the map has been among the most consistent targets for post-modern deconstruction 6. This has simultaneously reduced and enhanced cartographys place within geography. It has become conventional to attribute the beginnings of cartographic critique within geography to the work of the British geographer J. Brian Harley who, in a series of polemical papers in the 1980s alerted the traditionally conservative fraternity of map scholars (which included a large number of his fellow historical geographers) to the inevitable imbrications of cartography and power. Drawing on what now appears a somewhat incoherent reading of theorists, among whom Foucault and Derrida held prominent places, Harley claimed that far from holding up a simple mirror of nature that is true or false, maps redescribe the world in terms of relations of power and the cultural practices, preferences and priorities 7. In a series of substantive essays he considered the maps silences, its operations within systems of knowledge and power, and the ways that so many of the canonical maps of European discovery had simultaneously used and erased the local and often non-representational forms of spatial knowledge possessed by disadvantaged and colonised populations in furthering the interests of their oppressors 8. In fact, the pre-history of new cultural geography more generally, especially in its focus on epistemology, had drawn heavily on map history and scepticism towards cartographys scientific claims, as is apparent in the mid-century writings of J.K. Wright and David Lowenthal 9. Within academic cartography itself, the writer Denis Wood launched a polemical critique of scientific map-making in The power of maps (1990), and his continued attack on the scientific pretensions of professional cartographers has been pursued by writers such as David Koch, John Cloud and Mark Denil 10.

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11 Juergen Schulz, Jacopo deBarbaris View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography Before the Year 1500, Art Bulletin, 60, 1978, p. 425-474. 12 Juergen Schulz, La cartografia tra scienza e arte: carte e cartografia nei Rinascimento Italiana, Modena, Panini, 1990; Denis Cosgrove, The palladian landscape: Geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy, State College, Penn State University Press, 1993. 13 Martin Kemp, The Science of Art, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990. 14 Svetlana Alpers, The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1983. 15 Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective, New york, basic books, 1975. Edgertons claims about the theoretical and cultural correspondence between perspective and Ptolemeic mapping have not held up to subsequent scrutiny. 16 Franco Farinelli, I segni del mondo. Immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in et moderna, la Nuova Italia, 1992.

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Within art history a parallel focus on the map as an object of critical study emerged in the 1980s as part of a revisionist interest in the cultural specificities and historical contexts of Renaissance perspective and the late medieval science of optics more generally. In a detailed examination of the technical and iconographic complexities of Jacopo deBarbaris celebrated panoramic map of VENETIA 1500, Juergen Schulz demonstrated the priority of its emblematic and iconic significance over any role as a scientific instrument or practical guide to the city 11. Close examination of the work of later 16th century Venetian cartographers such as Giacomo Gastaldo and Cristoforo Sorte has deepened our understanding of the close connections between optical science, practical mathematical arts such as survey and engineering, and fine art 12. These relations have been ably summarised by Martin Kemp 13. More theoretically, Svetlana Alpers examination of the inscriptive qualities of Dutch and Flemish genre painting and map making connected them to a broader descriptive imperative in Netherlandish culture that gives a scientific and technical foundation to the long-noted art historical distinctions between Italian idealism and Northern empiricism in early modern painting, and even perhaps to the Italian distinction between disegno (the emphasis on concept) and colore (a focus on technique) in art 14. Also in the 1980s, Samuel Edgerton sought to establish a direct connection between 15th century Florentine studies of the newly translated Geography of Claudius Ptolemy on the one hand and Brunelleschis and Albertis demonstrations of linear perspective on the other 15. Within geography itself Harleys influence was (and continues to be) seminal, although his work was by no means unique in the late 20th century re-theorizing of cartography: for example the Italian geographer Franco Farinelli, drawing upon semiotics and empirical studies of Renaissance urban mapping (notably of Ferrara) made similar claims about the cultural complexities of cartographys relations to vision while avoiding Harleys exclusive concentration on power relations 16. Not only did Harleys writings attract the attention of scholars throughout the humanities, social sciences and spatial disciplines such as planning and architecture, they have appealed also to conceptual artists such as Ruth Watson and Kathy Prendergast whose work I refer to below. Harleys participation with the late David Woodward in the

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17 David Woodward (ed), Art and cartography: six historical essays, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. 18 J.B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. I Cartography in prehistoric, ancient and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1987; vol. II, Bk.1 Cartography in the traditional Islamic and South Asian societies, 1994; vol. II. Bk.2 Cartography in the traditional east and southeast Asian societies, 1994; vol. II, Bk. 3 (David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis eds), Cartography in the traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific societies, 1998. 19 Denil, Cartographic design, 8. 20 The term immutable mobile comes from the writings of Bruno Latour and refers to those material scientific objects (such as printed books and treatises) that allow ideas and information to move physically over space. The printed map as a graphic representation of spatial information is a classic example of the kind of instrument Latour is referring to. Bruno Latour, Science in Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

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1980s in the still unfinished multi-volume History of Cartography published by the University of Chicago transformed the way that maps and the evolution of map making are understood. Both of the editors were trained geographers: Harley with a detailed archival knowledge of British topographical mapping, Woodward with specialised understanding of the paper-making, engraving and printing techniques that lay behind early-modern map making. Woodward himself edited an influential collection of essays Art and cartography in 1987 that brought together Alpers, Edgerton and other art historians then revising their own disciplines approach to mapping and progressive cartographic historians with the goal of revising the then prevailing historiography that map-making had passed from art to science over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries 17. The subsequent five volumes of the History challenged the conventionally Euro-centric narrative of cartographic progress from primitive and mythically informed representations to sophisticated and objective presentations of empirical spatial information. It paid close attention to non-European and non-literate traditions of spatial representation and extended the definition of what constituted a map to any representation, in whatever material medium, of spatial information, regardless of the empirical warranty of that information. Although three of the Historys volumes have yet to appear in print, those devoted to Classical and medieval European cartography, mapping among indigenous and traditional societies, and Asian cartography have completely transformed scholarship within the history of cartography, shifting it strongly away from a traditional focus on matters of technique, provenance and connoisseurship towards an emphasis on the cultural processes, context and criticism of mapping and map making, and the social and performative roles of the map as an object 18. Today maps are viewed as signs and collections of signs, laying out in graphical form indications of spatial relationships or placing into spatial other information with a locational attribute 19. They also attract interest as material objects, acting as immutable mobiles that play a significant role in the spatial transfer of knowledge and thus deploy various rhetorics in order to command trust 20. Maps take a wide variety of material forms

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21 Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A history of state fixations and fugitive landscapes, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2004; Laura Hostettler, Quing colonia enterprise: Ethnography and cartography in early modern China, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001. 22 Francesca Fiorani, The marvel of maps: Art. Cartography and politics in Renaissance Italy, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005; Bronwen Wilson, The world in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005; Anne Godlewska, Geography unbound: French geographical science from Cassini to Humboldt, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999; D. Graham Burnett, Masters of all they Surveyed: Exploration, Geography a British El Dorado, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000; Luciana de Lima Martins, Mapping tropical waters: British views and visions of Rio de Janeiro, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.) Mappings, London, Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 148-168. 23 Burnett, Masters; Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765_1843, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997. 24 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu, University of HawaiI Press, 1994.

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and thus fall within the remit of both the cultural history of representation and of things. They cannot be understood or interpreted outside the cultural context in which they are produced, circulate and are used. The influence of this cultural turn in the approach to mapping is apparent in many fields of study and, along with geographys intensive re-conceptualisation of space, accounts for much of the current cross-disciplinary interest in geographical scholarship. Historians for example, long sceptical of nontextual sources, are paying increasing attention to the role of survey and mapping as active practices in the overseas expansion of early-modern Europe, re-examining the way that maps acted as a medium through which knowledge of unknown places was constructed in a dialogue between (often fantastic) European expectations and imaginings on the one hand, and autochthonous experience on the other 21. They have begun to recognise the early-modern map as much more than a way-finding device or a record of discovery, but a representational machine for archiving and classifying a wide range of geographic and ethnographic material and a rhetorical medium for establishing various claims to truth and authority. 16th century painted map cycles in Florence and Rome were attached to cabinets of curiosity; the great 17th-century Dutch and French cosmographic wall maps acted as Gemankunstwerken, collecting, collating, classifying and displaying the marvels of creation; 18th and 19th-century plain-style maps archived Enlightenment sciences such as geology, meteorology and botany as well as exploration of the Pacific Ocean and the continental interiors 22. Other studies have revealed the intimacy of cartographic activity with colonial dispossession of native territory: the US Rectangular Survey system for example, or the great colonial surveys conducted by British, French, Dutch and other European powers during the imperial era 23. Early works, which regarded the map as a unidirectional exercise of colonial authority have given way to more nuanced and dialogic understanding, as in Siams use of European topographical survey to delimit the kingdoms territories and thus defend them against the Western imperial predation 24. Benedict Anderson has argued that the map played a key role in shaping decolonised

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25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Cambridge, Verso, 1983. 26 Martins, Mapping tropical waters. 27 Paul Carter, The road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London, Faber, 1987. 28 Quoted on p. 4 of Denis Cosgrove, Introduction, Mappings, p. 1-23. Christian Jacob, Lempire des cartes, Paris, Albin Michel, 1993.

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territories into the imagined communities of nation states, and in recent years Australian and Canadian first peoples have used cartography to challenge colonial-era claims to their lands and to reassert native territorial claims 25. Others have related the uncertainties of actual practices of seeing and recoding spatial data in the colonial and exploration period 26. Responding to these insights, the Irish artist, Kathy Prendergast has produced works in her Atlas of Emotions series that include cartographic images of North America that appear at first glance to be standard topographical maps but which on closer examination exclude all place names but those containing the word lost (fig. 2). She counters the conventional postcolonial reading that the European explorer/colonizer was master of all I survey, suggesting rather an uncertain and anxious encounter in which the lines of power/knowledge are fractured and unpredictable, a theme explored in Paul Carters studies of British colonial exploration and mapping 27. While the nexus of knowledge and power represented by the map has been the principal focus of the new cultural history of cartography, it has not been the only concern. Literary and art-historical scholarship has concentrated more on cartographic semiotics. Among the most influential writers in this respect has been the French Classical philologist Christian Jacob whose Lempire des cartes applied to the long sweep of European mapping. Jacobs belief that cartographic interpretation should shift from a transparent view of the map as a neutral, informative transfer of external information into the simplified classificatory frame of the map sheet, conducted with the intention of achieving an ideal correspondence of the world and its image, to an opaque view of the map which takes account of the selections, omissions, additions and inescapable contextual influences which shape the outcome of such transfers 28. Mapping is a process which involves both a complex architecture of signs: graphic elements with internal forms and logics capable of theoretical disconnection from any geographical reference, and a visual architecture through which the worlds they construct are selected, translated, organised and shaped. Jacobs somewhat analytical semiotics has been extended into broader iconographic studies of specific maps and cartographic practices. The Italian scholar Giorgio Manganis studies have focused on the moral and emblematic significance of maps, with a detailed historical investigation of how the cordiform (heart-shaped) projection first popularized by Oronce Fine in the 1520s became entangled in the religious struggles and practices of

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Fig. 2

Kathy Prendergast: Lost, 2001, detail. Kathy Prendergast: Quelque part, 2001, dtails.

Reformation Europe 29. The theological significance of maps and mapping in medieval and early modern theological discourse is also emphasized by studies of Renaissance cosmography by Frank Lestringant and Jean-Marc Besse in which the moral ambiguities of the god-like perspective assumed in global mapping are explored and by Alessandro Scafis brilliantly detailed history of the theology and cartography of the terrestrial paradise 30. Manganis study of the cordiform projection has attracted the attention of the New Zealand artist Ruth Watson who has produced a wide range of
29 Giorgio Mangani, Il mondo di Abramo Ortelio: mysticismo, geografia e collezionismo nel rinascimento dei Paesi Bassi, Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 1998. 30 Frank Lestringant, LAtelier du cosmographe ou limage du mond a la Renaissance, Paris, Albin Michel, 1991 ; Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la terre essai sur les transformations du savoir gographique au seizime sicle, Lille, ANRT, Universit de Lille III, 2000; Alessandro Scafi, Mapping the terrestrial paradise, London, British Library Publications, 2006.

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heart-shaped world maps (with the south cardinal point at the top of the map) as installations, using diverse media such as salt, red-beaded glass pins and growing/dying grass to exploit the nuances of relating the world map to the human heart 31. The significance of the map and the globe in emblemata, and in earlymodern European literature, poetry, painting and engraving reveals a close connection between cartography as a scientific and technical discourse and as a subject of artistic reflection and practice that anticipates in some respects the contemporary relationships I discuss below. In his most recent writing Giorgio Mangani has pressed his argument for the moral rhetorics of maps across a broad historical span of Western cartography. His argument serves to dissolve the distinctions not only between modern and pre-modern mapping in the West (for example between the medieval mappa mundi with their explicit mapping of the terrestrial paradise, and Abraham Ortelius Typus orbis terrarum, 1570), but between European and non-Western mapping such as Chinese, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Islamic traditions in which the religious and moral dimensions of mapping and maps has long been acknowledged, and finally between the roles of art and science in cartography 32.
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Contemporary mapping

I have focussed so far on the ways that conceptual and historical studies of maps and mapping have been affected by the cultural turn. Contemporary shifts in the nature and techniques of mapping practices and map use have also served to emphasize cartographys cultural and artistic dimensions. It has been observed that the word cartography itself is a fairly recent neologism, coined in 1839 by the Portuguese scholar Viscount de Santarem. Its appeal over the more mundane map-making is explained by the professionalization of map production in an era when European states were developing topographical map series for the purposes of defining and defending the national territory, and using statistical mapping as a bureaucratic, regulatory and planning device. Collating spatially referenced data, designing and drafting its cartographic presentation, rectifying the distortions of map projection and scale and, with aerial photography, developing methods of photogrammetry, are all specialised skills, initially taught and learned through apprenticeship, but increasingly given scientific status within the academy, initially as a discipline aligned to geography. Between 1920 and 1960, the number of specialised university programs in America devoted to cartography rose from two to over one hundred. The first
31 Ruth E. Watson, The Decorated Hearts of Orance Fine: The 1531 Double Cordiform Map of the World, The Portolan, 65, 2006. 32 Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale; Scafi, Mapping Paradise; Woodward, History of cartography; Cosgrove, Mappings.

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33 Erwin Raisz, General cartography, New York & London, McGraw-Hill, 1938; Arthur H. Robinson, Elements of cartography, New York & London, 1953. 34 Cosgrove, Epistemology, geography and cartography.

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academic text on map-making in English appeared in the 1920s. Erwin Raisz, who established cartography in Harvard Universitys geography programme, published General Cartography in 1939, to be superseded by Arthur Robinsons Elements of Cartography in 1952. These two texts have been the pillars of cartography as an academic study in America 33. While Raisz, whose own physiographic maps corresponded closely to the synoptic and synthetic geographical vision of early geographical morphologists such as W.M. Davis, laid considerable emphasis on the artistic and cultural dimensions of conceptualising and making maps, Robinsons work stressed cartographys scientific credentials, reducing its artistic aspects to design questions alone. Robinsons book was republished regularly into the 1970s, by which time it was accompanied by a range of cartographic teaching texts as the number of university cartography programs continued to expand 34. This expansion came to an abrupt end in the 1990s, since when there has been a sharp and steep decline in the number of specialised teaching programs in cartography. That decline has paralleled the unprecedented expansion of map-making and map-using that has come with the easy availability of increasing volumes of remote sensed data, spatially-referenced statistics, the microprocessor and the Web. Packaged computer programs allow instantaneous interchange of map projections and scales, rapid overlaying of spatial data sets within Geographic Information Systems, a vast range of design opportunities in Photoshop and other graphic programs, as well as instantaneous access to diverse data sources. Hand drafting of maps has virtually ceased, while anyone with medium-level technological skills and a home computer connected to the Internet can create maps with equivalent informational content and design qualities to those of professional cartographers. Further, the availability of maps and related carto-graphics such as remote sensed images and aerial photographs through the Web vastly outstrips that of printed cartography, and exceeds in many respects the practical value of the latter, for example in avoiding the problems of centring information in relation to a predetermined sheet size and borders. In removing maps and their making from the narrow guild of professional cartographers, and map use from the professional confines of geographers, planners, and bureaucrats, information technologies have democratised mapping: a cultural shift that is still underway and whose broader consequences are not yet fully apparent. John Noble Wilford has claimed that the democratization of Geographic Information Systems has produced a new generation of user cartographers who are not formally trained in cartography and who work often collectively. The storage capacity of modern computers means that data bases are separate from actual maps that display the data they hold, allowing the latter to be customised in

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Modernist and post-modernist art, mapping and cultural geography

A striking indication of the maps contemporary cultural significance and the democratisation brought about by information technology is its role in contemporary art. Denis Wood has recently compiled a catalogue of 218
35 John Noble Wilford, The mapmakers, New York, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 417. 36 Peter Jacksons Maps of meaning (London, Hutchinson, 1989) one of the seminal texts of the new cultural geography, uses the term map entirely metaphorically; cartography is of little significance in the work.

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content and design, so that, unburdened by archival responsibility, individual maps can be more pictorial 35. There is no question that more inclusive definitions of the map and map-making, and greater flexibility in such matters as scale, legend, north-point etc. are already widely accepted among geographers, while the huge success of such programs as Google Earth that offer the conceit of flying through virtual space to any location on the planet and viewing its surface topography at flexible scales and resolutions by means of digital and photographic images is dramatically affecting popular geographic culture. It may not be too far-fetched to claim that very soon all printed cartography will be historical cartography. We live today in the most cartographically rich culture in history: the map is ubiquitous in daily life, and increasingly comes within the capacity of its user to manipulate and transform. Geographys traditional role in relation to maps has been less in their design and making than their use and interpretation. Cultural geography traditionally relied heavily on the map as a research tool and a medium for displaying its findings. For Vidal de la Blache and Albert Demangeons use of the IGN 1.50,000 and 1:100,000 topographic sheets was critical both to framing and illustrating their studies of the French pays. British geographers drew heavily on Patrick Geddes cartographically focused ideas of survey to develop a university curriculum in their discipline and regarded the maps of the mid-20th century National Land Use Survey as one of the disciplines signal contributions to public policy. Mapping the distribution and diffusion of material culture and cultural practices was central to midcentury Berkeley cultural geography. Distributional maps and mapping practices are much less common features of contemporary cultural geography, which is heavily textual 36. But the map reappears as an object of study in itself within cultural geographys broader focus on images and representations, as we have seen. The growing salience of maps and mapping activities within social life increases the significance of such geographical studies, and also the importance of geographical education into the complexities of meaning in maps and into the cultural implications of mapping.

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37 Denis Wood, Catalogue of map artists, Cartographic Perspectives, 52, 2006, p. 61-67. 38 This development was clearly visible in the themes and presentations of the Association of American Geographers sponsored Geography and the Humanities Symposium held at the University of Virginia, June, 2007 [www.aag.org/humanities/index.cfm]. 39 Kunstgeographie was an early 20th century German sub-discipline of art history that attempted to relate the artistic achievements of a cultural group to their regional geography. Its intellectual connections with cultural geography of the same period were close, the institutional ones less so. See Thomas da Costa Kaufmann, Towards a geography of art, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.

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map artists, that is artists active over the past half century whose work has significantly engaged with one or more aspects of cartography 37. Many of these artists have attracted the attention of geographers and numerous examples of mutual interest between geographers and artists have emerged as art practices themselves have moved away from a focus on aesthetic matters and towards the documentary and research roles of art practices 38. Early cartographic artists, such as Italian Alighiero e Boetti, a member of the influential Arte Povera movement, whose world map composed of national flags has been widely reproduced, or the American Jasper Johns who reproduced the map of the United States in encaustic and collage (1963) reworked familiar cartographic icons for the purposes of alerting their audience to the politics of the national map. Others such as the conceptual artists Sol de Witt who made systematic incisions into aerial photographs of New York, or Douglas Huebler who mailed letters to and from locations along the 42nd parallel, have used the idea of mapping as the springboard for artistic interventions, engaging more with the concepts and practices of map making than the map itself. It is not possible to survey this large and growing artistic corpus, nor meaningful to classify it systematically. But in many cases the concerns of artists parallel those of contemporary cultural geographers and in recent years there has been an identifiable trend towards both groups to collaborate on common projects that often involve maps, so that it is valuable for geographers to be aware of the evolution of modern arts interests in cartography and of the principal streams within the artistic avant-garde that have engaged with maps and mapping. Late 19th century cultural geographers shared with landscape artists a common interest in questions of culture, rootedness and the appearance of the land. This continued among traditional painters into the early 20th century, as 1930s German Kunstgeographie indicates 39. But as the artistic avant-garde moved away from representational concerns to conceptual questions of space, structure and surface so their conversation with geography and cartography waned. The grid, which so fascinated modern artists because it expressed the absolute autonomy of art anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real, was abstract rather than topographic, and as such would only enter geographys theoretical scope with the development of spatial science at mid-century, at a moment when the disciplines cultural

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Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography 173

Fig. 3

Surrealist map of the World 1929. Carte surraliste du monde en 1929.

40 James Housefield, Marcel Duchamps art and the geography of modern Paris, The Geographical Review, 4 1992, p. 478.

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focus had given way to a positivist paradigm that largely ignored cultural questions. Only in the 1980s when geographers such as Gunnar Olsson, David Harvey and Alan Pred began to examine the cultural geographies of Modernism through the concept of relative space did the geographical significance of early modern movements such as Cubism and Futurism (in understanding the early 20th century city for example) become apparent. It is important to acknowledge the influence of Henri Lefebvres La production de lespace on these Anglophone geographers writings about space. Lefebvre was himself closely tied to the French artistic avant-garde and especially Surrealism, whose Situationist strand, discussed below, made extensive, if subversive use of maps and mapping practices. The Surrealist Map of the World (1929) does not today appear a revolutionary image (fig. 3). Yet in its sketchy outline, erasures and distortions of geographic areas and territories, and arbitrary labeling, it challenged the stabilities of the early-20th century European geographical imagination and its self-satisfied image of a wholly discovered world. Surrealists were among the groups most engaged with geographical representation, in large measure because of their concerns with everyday life. Thus Marcel Duchamps readymades reference various Parisian landmarks and, according to Housefield, mapped out the French capital when collected and displayed in Duchamps New York studio 40.

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41 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1960. 42 David Pinder, Visions of the city: Utopianism, power and politics in twentieth-century Uurbanism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, and New York, Routledge, 2005; David Pinder, Subverting cartography: the situationists and maps of the city, Environment and Planning A, 28, 1996, p. 405-427. 43 Peter Wollen, Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists, in Michael Newman and John Bird (eds.), Rewriting Conceptual Art, London, Reaktion, 1999; Denis Wood, Map art, Cartographic Perspectives, 53, Winter 2006, p. 5-14. 44 Guy Debord, quoted in Wollen, Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists, p. 30.

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Surrealisms psychological interests in the image paralleled mid-century advances in cognitive psychology in challenging conventional assumptions about the transparency of representational images and emphasizing the importance of individual and social perceptions. Its engagement with everyday life would find echoes in the scientific concept of cognitive mapping that developed in the late 1950s and would prove an important foundation for the epistemological concerns of subsequent cultural geographers 41. Ability to recognize and understand map images was found to be learned and cultural rather than a function of the maps scientific objectivity and design clarity. In the late 1950s too, Situationism, a second-generation Surrealist movement, developed intense interest in the map as a communicative device and in the subversive potentials of mapping practices 42. Situationisms conscious move beyond the art world of studios and galleries into the spaces of everyday life brought artists into the same field of operations as geographers, reinforcing artistic concern with mapping as a means of engaging graphically with material spaces, a move that was reinforced from the 1960s in by conceptual and site-specific artists 43. While in the 1960s many members of the Situationist International rejected art altogether in favor of radical activism on city streets, Guy Debord used his filmic interest in spectacle and space to connect art practice directly to the physical and cultural geography of the city. His concept of psychogeography was part of a radical response to the rationalist and functionalist urban planning, heavily reliant on scientific mapping practices, that he believed was destroying the social and psychological well being of urban communities. Psychogeography was the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals 44. The connected practice of the urban drive or drift, intended to generate chance encounters and provocative interactions with other individuals, involved a kind of subversive survey of urban space that both stimulated and recorded transient passage through varied ambiances. Thought of cartographically, the drive was a conscious challenge to the apparently omniscient, disembodied and totalizing urban map that had become the principal instrument for urban planning and comprehensive redevelopment across the West during the postwar years. The drive was intimately connected to Debords third concept of unitary urbanism: the combined use of the arts and techniques for the

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45 Ibid., p. 30. 46 Ibid., p. 32. 47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988.

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construction or preservation of environments in which the drive and psychogeographical experiments would prosper 45. To illustrate these experiments, between 1955 and 1959, Debord and his Danish colleague, Asger Jorn, produced various collage works bringing together map fragments, images and texts that captured urban space and experience in Paris and Copenhagen. These have a strongly cartographic appearance due to the dribbled lines of coloured ink which link the pictorial fragments, as canals or a river might link landmarks within a city 46. Like Duchamp, Debords psychogeographical street maps of the Paris drew upon popular pictorial maps. Debord explicitly used G. Peltiers 1956 Vue de Paris vol doiseau and the 1951 Guide Tirade de Paris. Such pictorial maps perfectly captured the distanciated spatial vision of Modernist planning that Michel de Certeau, heir to the Situationist critique, would dissect in his The practice of everyday life 47. The Situationists response to the urban vision represented by such cartography was to cut the map of Paris or Amsterdam into islands of urban space joined only by thick red arrows or blacked ribbons that evoke the emotional and passional connections made within and between such locales by the artist/map-maker himself. Paralleling Situationism within the 1960s avant-garde in opening of a common interest with geography were site-specific art and Land Art. The terms cover a wide range of artists and practices and followed divergent pathways in Europe and the United States, but conceptually both sought to escape the confines of the gallery, and also of painting, to engage directly with site and in the case of Earth or Land Art, the natural environment. Robert Smithsons work, starting with studies of Passaic New Jersey and culminating in his now-iconic Spiral Jetty developed the terms site and non-site to challenge the conventional relationships between art and specific spaces notably the gallery. His 1963 Artforum essay A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects is regarded as the manifesto for Land Art, a practice that Smithson acknowledged has deep affinities with the picturesque tradition of landscape and garden design. The deserts of the American West became a favored location for these practices, perhaps best exemplified by Michael Heizers Double Negative and more recent City works (fig. 4), that have sought to transform space and create places, often using maps and geographical studies to research and document their artworks. In Europe the movement has adopted a softer, more environmentally sensitive approach, for example in the work of Richard Long in Britain and in Germany Joseph Beuys whose land art works are smaller in scale and more intimate engagements with places, topography and maps. An indication of the significance of this geographically

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related art is the fact that Londons principal modern art collection, Tate Modern at Bankside, devotes a major gallery to the theme environment and place that displays the work of these artists.

Fig. 4
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Michael Heizer, City (under construction). Michael Heizer, Cit (en construction).
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While both Situationism and Land Art were movements of the 1960s and 70s, they have attracted renewed attention among young artists in the early 2000s. The Situationist drive has been the stimulus to a wide variety of informal and non-conventional site specific artistic engagements with the city, many with activist agendas connected to community development, or explicitly challenging the politics of new technologies that document, record and regulate urban space such as Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and GIS itself 48. For example, the American artist kanarinkas various engagements with the psychogeography of Boston include a project entitled It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston in which she documents twenty-six runs following officially recommended emergency evacuation routes out of the city, monitoring her physiological responses with various instruments attached to her body and documenting the resulting statistics though maps and charts in order to traverse new geographies of insecurity 49. Site-specific artists today share many of the conceptual concerns of earlier land and environmental artists. More conventionally geographic, a 1998 British project titled Artranspennine commissioned thirty individual artists and artistic groups to undertake projects that articulated the idea of a distinctive trans-Pennine region in
48 See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 2002. 49 http://www.ikatun.com/evacuateboston/about.

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Northern England, stretching from the River Mersey to the Humber estuary. The initiatives declared aim was explicitly cultural and geographic: to explore the richness of the region through the creativity of contemporary art and help forge a cultural identity and exemplify and project the quality and diversity of our region to resident communities and visitors. Thirty projects were exhibited or performed across the region during the year and documented in a book: Leaving Tracks 50. While site specific and community art projects may not always incorporate cartography in its conventional sense, they all involve mapping in the expanded sense in which cultural geographers now use it: organizing, documenting and representing spatial knowledge in graphic form. Artistic goals closely parallel those of many contemporary cultural geographers, as scholar and scientist converge in the aftermath of deconstruction, which has been as effective in reshaping what constitutes art as in reshaping science. One consequence has been a growing number of collaborative projects between artists and cultural geographers, including artists in residence in university geography departments, shared community arts projects in urban areas, collaboration on GIS-based art projects, and curatorial activities among cultural geographers. There is every indication that such collaboration will increase in the coming years 51.

Conclusion
Laura Kurgans 9/11 map with which I opened this discussion is thus not an aberrant incursion of the artist into the field of geography and cartography, but an example of a much broader and significant outcome of the cultural turn in geographic, cartographic, artistic and spatial practice. As the geographic discipline has become more self-critical about its traditional claims to document at determined scales and with scientific objectivity patterns and processes on the earths surface, especially for the social world, a significant opening towards the roles of creativity and imagination in making and communicating geographical knowledge has developed. At the same time a greatly expanded number of practicing artists have moved away from the conventional confines of aesthetic production, visual media and gallery display to engage directly with the world, with the intention of researching, documenting and representing in challenging ways its environmental and social conditions. Advances in information technology that have democratized the gathering, storage, manipulation and display of spatially referenced data have afforded innovative opportunities for artists to fulfil
50 The project and its various artistic productions are documented in Nick Barley (ed.), Leaving Tracks: Artranspennine 98 An international contemporary visual art exhibition recorded, Manchester, August Media, 1999. 51 A number of research projects evaluating the goals and achievements of site specific and local or community art projects are currently being undertaken in British university geography departments (eg Open University, Exeter University).

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these goals. The traditionally separate disciplinary projects of geography and art thus overlap and converge in exciting ways, and nowhere is this more directly expressed than in map work. As I have sought to demonstrate, late 20th century theoretical and historical critiques of cartography, and the continuing revolution in cartographic techniques and practices have provided the conceptual and technical foundations for these shared practical developments, so that, contrary to a sometimes expressed concern among geographers that the cultural turn might lead into an epistemological cul-de-sac, new concepts of cartography and new mapping practices are generating an active and intensely practical engagement with everyday cultural life.
UCLA, Department of Geography 1255 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles CA 90095-1254, USA

Denis Cosgrove est mort le 21 mars 2008 lge de 59 ans, dun cancer contre lequel il se battait depuis deux ans. N Liverpool, Denis Cosgrove fit ses tudes Oxford et Toronto. Il enseigna dabord Loughborough University puis Royal Holloway College, avant daccepter en 2000 un poste de Professeur au dpartement de gographie de lUniversit de Californie Los Angeles (UCLA), dont il tait venait dtre nomm directeur. Ses travaux sur le paysage notamment italien, limage notamment artistique et la carte ont rencontr un large cho, au-del de la gographie culturelle et historique dont il tait un des spcialistes les plus reconnus. Cofondateur de la revue Ecume, devenue Cultural Geography, il a particip au renouvellement de la discipline dans son ensemble. Toute son uvre invite questionner les liens complexes entre le Monde et les reprsentations que nous nous en faisons, quil a magistralement travaill dnouer, des paysages palladiens aux photographies de la Mission Apollo. Plusieurs de ses recherches sont en cours de publication. Geography and Vision : Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World, qui vient de sortir, offre un brillant panorama de son travail. Les publications posthumes laissent un sentiment ambivalent ceux qui ont personnellement connu lauteur, notamment ceux qui ont travaill avec lui loccasion de celles-ci. Frustration de navoir pu mener avec lui le projet son terme, tristesse de devoir inscrire cette croix aprs son nom. Bonheur davoir encore profit de son intelligence et chang avec lui ; fiert de prsenter aux lecteurs son texte et davoir suscit son laboration. Vanit de ntre plus avec lui que par la trace de ses mots. Nous tions reconnaissants Denis davoir rpondu notre invitation prendre part ce numro, dont nous savions combien il lenrichirait. Sa participation atteste de lattention dun gographe gnreux de son temps et de ses efforts, trs ouvert sur les mondes acadmiques qui ntaient pas les siens ; elle montre aussi le courage et la volont dun homme face la maladie. Merci lui.

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