RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY

An in-depth, revisionist plunge into the extraordinary world of maps.

Rankin, a Yale University historian, argues that it’s time to reimagine what a map can be and how it can be used. We now have non-geographic maps of everything from social networks to the human genome. “Any map is now just a representation of data, a special case of visualization.” Cartography becomes radical when “it embraces the inherent uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity of both our data and the world itself.” Rankin organizes his lavishly illustrated book around seven basic features of maps: boundaries, layers, people, projections, color, scale, and time. Using Chicago as an example, he describes how community area boundary maps from the 1930s provided valuable sociological data that could result in changes to benefit people’s daily lives. Rankin then discusses the work of Arthur Robinson, who transformed “cartography from a technical craft into an expansive social science of visual communication” from his position as chief of the Map Division during World War II, advancing the concept of layering in maps. Rankin also delves into Indigenous mapping and Lincoln’s “slave-map.” The author argues that, with maps, we “need to match the projection to the particular we of the map, knowing that there are many we that don’t include us at all.” He’s quite good at covering the politics of artificial and natural colors in maps, intentional and unintentional. He ponders whether scale comparisons are always colonial and objectifying. Lastly, he covers the dilemma of how maps can handle time, the rise of photographic cartography, photo-cinematic maps, and what Rankin calls “spatial memory,” maps that show a relationship between the past and the present. These values he proposes for radical cartography in maps—uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity—have the potential to be a “tool for change.”

A challenging but edifying read about the power of maps.