An Atlas of Radical Cartography

by Avery Gordon, Trevor Paglen, Heather Rogers

An Atlas of Radical Cartography makes an important contribution to a growing cultural movement that traverses the boundaries between art, cartography, geography and activism. It pairs writers with artists, architects, designers and collectives to address the role of the map as political agent (rather than neutral document). Ten mapping projects dealing with social and political issues such as migration, incarceration, globalization, housing rights, garbage and energy issues are complemented by 10 critical essays and dialogues responding to each map. The maps themselves are printed as posters, unbound for leisurely perusal. Among the contributors are artists Trevor Paglen, John Emerson, Ashley Hunt and Pedro Lasch and essayists Avery Gordon, Heather Rogers, Alejandro De Acosta and Jenny Price. An Atlas of Radical Cartography also serves as a catalogue to the exhibition An Atlas , which has been touring the United States and internationally since July of 2007.

Genres: Cartography, Maps, Nonfiction, Politics, Geography, Art, Essays

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2008

Reviews

[Alexis Bhagat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is my baby. I can't review it. My love is unconditional.

[Travis Wagner · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is ambitious in what it seemed to want to do and the ideas are there, but nothing is committed to in any of the potential directions and it comes off as half-realized when it could have truly been something of the radical nature the title implies.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting series of essays on various counter mapping projects -- counter mapping, if you're not familiar with the term, being mapmaking repurposed for usually political or activist agenda, the idea behind it being that maps are ordinarily subjective documents with agendas, usually made by those in positions of power, that masquerade as objective fact. Much of the content is preaching to the choir, but it's all about how the information is presented, and a lot of that is very interesting. Sometimes if feels like so much really useful activism is stuck in a closed circuit, and this collaboration with artists, designers, and cartographers jogs a lot of the polemic -- about immigration, land use, poverty, and civic issues -- out of its existing ruts. Some neat stuff, short and sharp.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays about something I know little about -- radical cartography, or map-making that serves to illuminate the silenced, erased, oppressed, hidden -- or art that is maps that is towards showing what we do not look at -- all these things. There are ten maps, and a book that has an essay for each map, and some of the maps are quite recognisably maps, and others are more towards art. It was a very interesting thing to read and look at, but I cannot review it better than that because I just do not know enough.

[Nic Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Motivated me to develop an exhibition of maps that people have made to reflect how communities have used the democratization of data to help tell the multiple sides of the story of the human condition in a geographic context.

[DoctorM · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing introduction to cartography-as-activism and the 'radical cartography' movement. The Atlas comes as two boxed items: a collection of essays and ten accompanying maps. Each map is done to illustrate a particular point, and the quality varies. (And, yes, the lack of proofreading/spell-checking in the maps is annoying) The maps demonstrate some particular political issue--- clusters of surveillance cameras in Manhattan, CIA 'rendition' flights, 'unauthorised' settlements in the Calcutta suburbs, EU detention centers for illegal migrants. Radical cartography argues that maps, in depicting the world, have political messages embedded in them, and radical cartography hopes to use maps to depict those political assumptions and make viewers aware of political and social realities obscured by those in power. There's an element of play and theatre here, as with the CCTV map of New York, or the mash-up map that shows San Francisco folded into map outlines of the Panama Canal and the various locations around the world which trade with or send raw materials to SF. But there are serious points to be made, too: the sheer density of networks supporting CIA flights or EU detention centers is eye-opening.

The essays can be far too jargon-ridden, but some, like the one addressing the Calcutta map, are excellent guides to both the map and the issues. 'Unauthorised' settlements in Calcutta in the 1980s-90s contained hundreds of thousands of dwellers who simply...didn't officially exist, who were off the map--- people who lacked addresses or official neighbourhoods and were cut off from voting, mail, ration cards, or services. The maps of those settlements were a first step into giving those people some visibility and a voice.

The Atlas of Radical Cartography is maybe a bit concept-lite, but it's a very good introduction to a serious project, and worth following up on through the bibliographies and notes in the essays.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Radical" or "subversive" cartography is a niche field that I got interested in during grad school and wrote one paper on. This is a pretty good intro to several threads of discussion in the area. The problem I would highlight is that "radical cartography" is of marginal use as a field unto itself. Mapping is powerful in different fields for different reasons: in literary studies, it is an alternative critical method; in history, it is a useful way to look at power relations; in urban planning and architecture is can be a powerful activist tool. The fact that these practices are linked by mapping isn't, in my opinion, that much more significant than the fact they are all about giving more power to marginalized viewpoints.

What that boils down to is that the urban planning work is politically powerful; the "concept" mapping is just design work with a lot of extra rhetoric.

[finn seedpony · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant and beautiful.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really wanted to like it, but found most of the featured projects not too interesting. Love the design and packaging (although the slip cover fits too tight).

[Jennifer Df · Rating 2 out of 5]

snore

[Johanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

very interesting essays, nowhere near enough pictures.