Some maps say no. Radical maps, which reveal and denounce, which protest. To understand these rebel maps - how they work, what they can do - this book undertakes a voyage of exploration into the heart of map-making. What exactly happens when we make a map, whether it is radical, experimental (one also speaks of critical cartography or counter-cartography) or conventional? What intentions preside over its making and its use?
The first function of maps is to help us find our bearings and move from one point to another. They let ships navigate and planes fly. With maps, wars are waged, and sometimes peace is made. They are also formidable dream machines, shaping our image of the world, fixing its memory and ending up manufacturing our reality. What motivates this very particular act of giving the world symbolic form, from Strabo to the anarchist Élisée Reclus, from the Benedictine Hildegard von Bingen to the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, from portolan charts to the general staff map? How much creative fancy is at work, how much Faustian fantasy of mastering our environment, how much scientific sincerity?
Between the emergence of the engineer Charles-Joseph Minard’s daring thematic cartography, or that of the information designers Otto and Marie Neurath, and Jacques Bertin’s conceptual semiological approach, lies a break with the conventions of cartographic representation. A liberating break, which opened up the field of experiment and made the democratisation of maps possible. Around 1900, the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and their team were inventing new graphic ways of representing statistical data on the situation of Black people in the United States. Some sixty years later, it was to denounce the same cultural and economic racism that a small geographical institute in Detroit, led by William Bunge and Gwendolyn Warren, gave shape to what would become radical geography: a committed geography.
At that point our relationship to the map as an object changes. An awareness emerges of how it is used and of what it can do. Radical cartography sets out to map economic and social data, to produce deliberately political maps that show and denounce inequalities of life and of rights, political and economic compromises, land grabs, the destruction of habitats by agro-industry, the pollution of the planet, and everything that mortgages, one way or another, the happiness and the future of humanity. Maps, which traditionally play power’s game, become tools of protest and instruments of political and social emancipation when civil society takes hold of them. Politics, art and science then enter into permanent dialogue, to offer an unconventional and free image of the world.
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