Corner-The Agency of Mapping PDF

Chapter 1.12 The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention James Corner Editors’ overview mapping practices (Wood 1992; Monmonier 1991; Pickles...

Chapter 1.12 The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention James Corner Editors’ overview mapping practices (Wood 1992; Monmonier 1991; Pickles 1992; Scott 1998; Hall 1992). These revisions situate map- Corner’s writing evokes the emancipatory potential of mapping, at ping as a collective enabling enterprise, a project that both a time when it was much more usual to demonise it as a form of reveals and realises hidden potential. Hence, in describing elite discourse, facilitating governance by the powerful. Corner the ‘agency’ of mapping, I do not mean to invoke agendas of draws instead on the creative potential of the medium, deploying imperialist technocracy and control but rather to suggest the figures of Gille Deleuze and F
elix Guattari to demonstrate the ways in which mapping acts may emancipate potentials, constructive agency that can be enacted through cartographic enrich experiences and diversify worlds. We have been practice in the fields of architecture, landscape and urban plan- ning. He explores four ways in which new practices of mapping are adequately cautioned about mapping as a means of project- emerging in contemporary design and planning, which he terms ing power knowledge, but what about mapping as a pro- as: ‘drift’, ‘layering’, ‘game-board’ and ‘rhizome’. Corner concludes ductive and liberating instrument, a world-enriching agent, that mapping is not endless data accumulation but is rather better especially in the design and planning arts? seen as a practice of relational reasoning that intelligently As a creative practice, mapping precipitates its most pro- unfolds new realities out of existing constraints. ductive effects through a finding that is also a founding; its agency lies in neither reproduction nor imposition but rather Originally published in 1999: Chapter 10 in Mappings (ed. Denis in uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, Cosgrove), Reaktion, London, pp. 213–252. even across seemingly exhausted grounds. Thus, mapping unfolds potential; it re-makes territory over and over again, Introduction each time with new and diverse consequences. Not all maps accomplish this, however; some simply reproduce what is Mapping is a fantastic cultural project, creating and building already known. These are more ‘tracings’ than maps, delin- the world as much as measuring and describing it. Long eating patterns but revealing nothing new. In describing affiliated with the planning and design of cities, landscapes and advocating more open-ended forms of creativity, and buildings, mapping is particularly instrumental in the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and F
elix Guattari (1987: 12) construing and constructing of lived space. In this active declare: ‘Make a map not a tracing!’ They continue: sense, the function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is live. While there are countless examples of authoritarian, entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with simplistic, erroneous and coercive acts of mapping, with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed reductive effects upon both individuals and environments, in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters I focus in this essay upon more optimistic revisions of connections between fields, the removal of blockages on The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation, First Edition. Edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-470-74283-9  90 CHAPTER 1.12 THE AGENCY OF MAPPING: SPECULATION, CRITIQUE AND INVENTION bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies a kind of benign neutrality. By contrast, the other side of this without organs onto a plane of consistency... The map has analogous characteristic is the inevitable abstractness of maps, to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves the result of selection, omission, isolation, distance and an ‘alleged competence.’ codification. Map devices, such as frame, scale, orientation, The distinction here is between mapping as equal to what projection, indexing and naming, reveal artificial geographies is (‘tracing’) and mapping as equal to what is and to what is that remain unavailable to human eyes. Maps present only not yet. In other words, the unfolding agency of mapping is one version of the earth’s surface, an eidetic fiction con- most effective when its capacity for description also sets the structed from factual observation. As both analogue and conditions for new eidetic and physical worlds to emerge. abstraction, then, the surface of the map functions like an Unlike tracings, which propagate redundancies, mappings operating table, a staging ground or a theatre of operations discover new worlds within past and present ones; they upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, inaugurate new grounds upon the hidden traces of a living masks, relates and generally explores. These surfaces are context. The capacity to reformulate what already exists is massive collection, sorting and transfer sites, great fields the important step. And what already exists is more than just upon which real material conditions are isolated, indexed the physical attributes of terrain (topography, rivers, roads, and placed within an assortment of relational structures. buildings) but includes also the various hidden forces that The analogous-abstract character of the map surface underlie the workings of a given place. These include natural means that it is doubly projective: it both captures the processes, such as wind and sun; historical events and local projected elements off the ground and projects back a variety stories; economic and legislative conditions; even political of effects through use. The strategic use of this double interests, regulatory mechanisms and programmatic struc- function has, of course, a long alliance with the history of tures. Through rendering visible multiple and sometimes mapping, and not only militaristically (reconnaissances mili- disparate field conditions, mapping allows for an under- taires) but also ideologically (Harley 1988). Surprisingly, standing of terrain as only the surface expression of a however, the strategic, constitutive and inventive capacities complex and dynamic imbroglio of social and natural of mapping are not widely recognised in the urban design processes. In visualising these interrelationships and inter- and planning arts, even though cartography and planning actions, mapping itself participates in any future unfoldings. have enjoyed a long and mutually influential relationship Thus, given the increased complexity and contentiousness since the fifteenth century (Buisseret 1998; S€ oderstr€ om that surrounds landscape and urbanism today, creative 1996). Throughout the twentieth century, mapping in advances in mapping promise designers and planners design and planning has been undertaken conventionally greater efficacy in intervening in spatial and social processes. as a quantitative and analytical survey of existing conditions Avoiding the failure of universalist approaches toward made prior to the making of a new project. These survey master planning and the imposition of state controlled maps are both spatial and statistical, inventorying a range of schemes, the unfolding agency of mapping may allow social, economic, ecological and aesthetic conditions. As designers and planners not only to see certain possibilities expertly produced, measured representations, such maps are in the complexity and contradiction of what already exists conventionally taken to be stable, accurate, indisputable but also to actualise that potential. This instrumental func- mirrors of reality providing the logical basis for future tion is particularly important in a world where it is becoming decision making, as well as the means for later projecting increasingly difficult to both imagine and actually to create a designed plan back onto the ground. It is generally anything outside of the normative. assumed that if the survey is quantitative, objective and rational, it is also true and neutral, thereby helping to legitimise and enact future plans and decisions (Giddens The agency of mapping 1994; Porter 1995). Thus, mapping typically precedes plan- ning because it is assumed that the map will objectively Mappings have agency because of the double-sided charac- identify and make visible the terms around which a planning teristic of all maps. Firstly, their surfaces are directly analogous project may then be rationally developed, evaluated and to actual ground conditions, as horizontal planes, they record built (Scott 1988; S€oderstr€om 1996). the surface of the earth as direct impressions. As in the casting What remains overlooked in this sequence, however, is of shadows, walks and sightings across land may be literally the fact that maps are highly artificial and fallible con- projected onto paper through a geometrical graticule of points structions, virtual abstractions that possess great force in and lines drawn by ruler and pen. Conversely, one can put terms of how people see and act. One of the reasons for this one’s finger on a map and trace out a particular route or oversight derives from a prevalent tendency to view maps itinerary, the map projecting a mental image into the spatial in terms of what they represent rather than what they do. imagination. Because of this directness, maps are taken to be [...] [M]ost designers and planners consider mapping a ‘true’ and ‘objective’ measures of the world, and are accorded rather unimaginative, analytical practice, at least compared  JAMES CORNER 91 to the presumed ‘inventiveness’ of the designing activities island is in fact greater than three times the land area of the that occur after all the relevant maps have been made (often northern. Needless to say, this view has well suited the self- with the contents of the maps ignored or forgotten). image of Europeans and North Americans in an era of This indifference towards mapping is particularly puzzling Western political hegemony. By contrast, Fuller’s Dymax- when one considers that the very basis upon which projects ion Airocean World Map of 1943 cuts the earth into are imagined and realised derives precisely from how maps triangular facets that are then unfolded as a flat polyhedron are made. The conditions around which a project develops (Figure 1.12.1). Both the north and south poles are pre- originate with what is selected and prioritised in the map, sented frontally and equally with little distortion, although what is subsequently left aside or ignored, how the chosen the typical viewer is at first likely to be disoriented by this material is schematised, indexed and framed, and how the unusual, polydirectional arrangement of countries. Only synthesis of the graphic field invokes semantic, symbolic and the graphic graticule of latitude and longitude allows the instrumental content. Thus, the various cartographic pro- reader to comprehend the relative orientation of any one cedures of selection, schematisation and synthesis make location (Marks and Buckminster Fuller 1973). the map already a project in the making (Arnheim 1970; [...] Robinson and Petchenik 1976). This is why mapping is never Unlike the scientific objectivism that guides most mod- neutral, passive or without consequence; on the contrary, ern cartographers, artists have been more conscious of the mapping is perhaps the most formative and creative act of essentially fictional status of maps and the power they any design process, firstly disclosing and then staging the possess for construing and constructing worlds conditions for the emergence of new realities. (Storr 1994). In the same year as Fuller’s projection, the In what follows, I discuss mapping as an active agent of Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia drew the Inverted cultural intervention. Because my interests lie in the var- Map of South America with a very distinct ‘S’ at the top of ious processes and effects of mapping, I am less concerned the drawing (Figure 1.12.2). This remarkable image with what mapping means than with what it actually does. reminds us of the ways in which habitual conventions Thus, I am less interested in maps as finished artifacts than I (in this case the unquestioned domination of north on am in mapping as a creative activity. It is in this partici- top) condition spatial hierarchies and power relations. The patory sense that I believe new and speculative techniques convention of orienting the map to the north first arose of mapping may generate new practices of creativity prac- early in the global and economic expansion of Northern tices that are expressed not in the invention of novel form Europe and in response to practices of navigation. But but in the productive reformulation of what is already there are many instances of other societies at different times given. By showing the world in new ways, unexpected orienting their maps towards one of the other cardinal solutions and effects may emerge. However, given the points, or making them circular without top and bottom importance of representational technique in the creative (the Dymaxion map is perhaps one of the few modern process, it is surprising that whilst there has been no instances where singular orientation is not a prerequisite). shortage of new ideas and theories in design and planning Maps of this sort are still legible and ‘correct’ in their there has been so little advancement and invention of those depiction of spatial relationship, but the reader must first specific tools and techniques – including mapping – that learn the relevant mapping codes and conventions. are so crucial for the effective construal and construction of Another instance of critique and invention of the modern new worlds (Corner 1999a, 1992). map is Waltercio Caldas’s Jap~ao, of 1972 (Storr 1994). Here, the artist is mapping a territory that is foreign, or ‘unimaginable’ for many in the West. Rather than colonising The efficacy of technique this territory through survey and inventory, typically Western techniques of power knowledge, Caldas simply marks an A comparison between Mercator’s projection of the earth’s otherwise empty map surface with very small inscriptions and surface and Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection numbers. These are contained by a very prominent, classical reveals radically different spatial and socio-political struc- cartographic frame. There are no other outlines, shapes or tures. The same planet, the same places, and yet signifi- forms, just small type and a few scribbles. There is no scale, no cantly dissimilar relationships are revealed or, more identifiable marks, no graticule of orientation, just a square precisely, constructed. The Mercator map stretches the ink frame. In this stark, minimal cartographic field, Caldas surface of the globe without excision onto a flat surface, presents an elusive geography, an open and indeterminate oriented ‘upwards’ to the north. The compass directions field of figures that returns terra incognita to an otherwise are made parallel, leading to gross distortions of land area excessively mapped planet. The image is also a commentary and shape, especially as one moves towards the poles. The on the cage-like power of the imperialising frame: the graphic northern hemisphere dominates, with Greenland more square surrounds, captures and holds its quarry, but at the than twice the size of Australia, even though the southern same time its contents remain foreign, evasive and  92 CHAPTER 1.12 THE AGENCY OF MAPPING: SPECULATION, CRITIQUE AND INVENTION Figure 1.12.1 R. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao. (Source: Dymaxion Airocean World Map 1954.) autonomous. This blank, non-figured space raises both anx- Polo S iety and a certain promise – promise because its potential efficacy lies in the emancipation of its contents. The auton- omous, abstract structure suggests how mystery and desire might be returned to a world of places and things that have been otherwise excessively classified and structured. In Caldas’s image, such places are liberated through precisely the same measures that first captured them. Whereas certain artists have engaged creatively with cartographic techniques, planners and designers have S. 34¼ 41′ been less ambitious (Harrison and Turnbull 1996). Tech- niques of aerial-oblique and zenithal views – planimetry, W. 56¼ 9′ ichnography and triangulation – were most developed during the early sixteenth century, and have since become the primary tools with which cities and landscapes are analysed, planned and constructed. Quantitative and the- matic mapping techniques originated with the Enlighten- ment enthusiasm for rational progress and social reform, and these were later complemented by various statistical, Ecuador. comparative and ‘zoning’ techniques during the late nine- JIG 43 teenth and early twentieth centuries (Hall 1988). Some advances in these techniques have occurred over the past 30 years with the rise of satellite and remote sensing capabilities, together with new computer technologies Figure 1.12.2 Joaqu
ın Torres-Garc
ıa. (Source: Inverted Map such as Geographic Information Systems, but in principle of South America 1943.) they remain unchanged. [...] With only a handful of  JAMES CORNER 93 exceptions, the relationship of maps to world-making is values, cultural codes, places, cognitive schemata, events surprisingly under-thought. and maps. As the philosopher of science Jacob Bronowski [...] pointedly observes, ‘there are no appearances to be photo- graphed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re- Maps and reality creation of her’ (1965). [...] The application of judgement, subjectively constituted, is precisely what makes a map Jorge Luis Borges’s tale of a fully detailed and life-sized map more a project than a ‘mere’ empirical description. that eventually tore and weathered to shreds across the [...] actual territory it covered is frequently quoted in essays on For the landscape architect and urban planner, maps are mapping (Borges 1933). Not only does the tale beautifully sites for the imaging and projecting of alternative worlds. capture the cartographic imagination, it goes to the heart of [...] The map ‘gathers’ and ‘shows’ things presently (and a tension between reality and representation, between the always) invisible, things which may appear incongruous or territory and the map. Equally referenced is Lewis Carroll’s untimely but which may also harbour enormous potential tale in Sylvie and Bruno, also of a life-sized map, in this case for the unfolding of alternative events. In this regard, maps folded, thus preventing it being unfolded for practical have very little to do with representation as depiction. After application. The map was useless, allowing Carroll’s char- all, maps look nothing like their subject, not only because of acter Mein Herr to conclude, ‘so now we use the country their vantage point but also because they present all parts at itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as once, with an immediacy unavailable to the grounded well’. In these two fables, not only is the map an inferior, individual. But more than this, the function of maps is secondary representation of territory but the more detailed not to depict but to enable, to precipitate a set of effects in and life-like the map strives to be, the more redundant or time. Thus, mappings do not represent geographies or ideas; unnecessary it becomes. Unlike paintings or photographs, rather they effect their actualisation. which have the capacity to bear a direct resemblance to the Mapping is neither secondary nor representational but things they depict, maps must by necessity be abstract if doubly operative: digging, finding and exposing on the one they are to sustain meaning and utility. And such abstrac- hand, and relating, connecting and structuring on the tion, the bane of untrained map readers, is not at all a other. Through visual disclosure, mapping both sets up failing of maps but rather their virtue. and puts into effect complex sets of relationship that Jean Baudrillard (1983: 2) reverses Borges’s tale to make remain to be more fully actualised. another point: [...] Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyper-real. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is Space and time today the map that precedes the territory. A creative view of mapping in the context of architectural, Arguably, of course, the map always precedes the terri- landscape and urban production is rendered all the more tory, in that space only becomes territory through acts of relevant by the changing nature of spatial and temporal bounding and making visible, which are primary functions structures in today’s world. Events occur with such speed of mapping. But Baudrillard is going one step further here, and complexity that nothing remains certain. Large num- claiming that late twentieth century communication and bers live in a world where local economies and cultures are information technologies have produced such a blurring of tightly bound into global ones, through which effects ripple what is real and what is a representation that the two can no with enormous velocity and consequence. Surrounded by longer be distinguished. He inverts Borges’s fable to pro- media images and an excess of communication that makes claim that ‘it is the real and not the map whose vestiges the far seem near and the shocking merely normal, local subsist here and there’ (Baudrillard 1983). Here, Baudril- cultures have become fully networked around the world. lard is careful to explain that this reversal does not mean Air travel and other modes of rapid transportation have that the world is scarcely more than a vast simulacrum, but become so accessible that localities can be more closely rather that the act of differentiating between the real and connected to sites thousands of miles away than to their the representation is no longer meaningful. immediate surroundings. Today, structures of community [...] life are shifting from spatial stability towards shifting, Reality, then, as in concepts such as ‘landscape’ or temporal coordination. Public life is now scheduled and ‘space’, is not something external and ‘given’ for our allocated more by time than centred according to place, apprehension; rather it is constituted, or ‘formed’, through while the circulation of capital demands an ever-more our participation with things: material objects, images, mobile and migratory workforce. [...]  94 CHAPTER 1.12 THE AGENCY OF MAPPING: SPECULATION, CRITIQUE AND INVENTION Mapping and contemporary spatial design techniques by contrast, discloses, stages and even adds potential for later more generally have yet to find adequate ways to engage acts and events to unfold. Whereas the plan leads to an end, creatively with the dynamic and promiscuous character of the map provides a generative means, a suggestive vehicle time and space today. Most design and planning operations that ‘points’ but does not overly determine. appear somewhat outmoded, overwhelmed or incongruent A particularly important aspect of mapping in this in comparison to the rapidly metabolising processes of regard is the acknowledgement of the maker’s own par- urbanisation and communication. ticipation and engagement with the cartographic process. [...] [...] Through such urbanists as Reyner Banham, Edward [M]apping precedes the map, to the degree that it cannot Soja, David Harvey, Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi, properly anticipate its final form. Robinson and Petchenik anthropologists such as Marc Auge, or philosophers such as (1976: 74) claim that ‘in mapping, one objective is to Henri Lefebvre or Gilles Deleuze, it is becoming clearer to discover (by seeing) meaningful physical and intellectual architects and planners that ‘space’ is more complex and shape organisations in the milieu, structures that are likely dynamic than previous formal models allowed. Ideas about to remain hidden until they have been mapped... plotting spatiality are moving away from physical objects and forms out or mapping is a method for searching for such mean- towards the variety of territorial, political and psycholog- ingful designs’. In other words, there are some phenomena ical social processes that flow through space. The inter- that can only achieve visibility through representation relationships amongst things in space, as well as the effects rather than through direct experience. Furthermore, map- that are produced through such dynamic interactions, are ping engenders new and meaningful relationships amongst becoming of greater significance for intervening in urban otherwise disparate parts. The resultant relational structure landscapes than the solely compositional arrangement of is not something already ‘out there’, but rather something objects and surfaces. constructed, bodied forth through the act of mapping. As The experiences of space cannot be separated from the the philosopher Brand Blanshard (1948: 525) observes, events that happen in it; space is situated, contingent and ‘space is simply a relation of systematised outsideness, differentiated. It is remade continuously every time it is by itself neither sensible nor imaginable’; it is created in encountered by different people, every time it is repre- the process of mapping. sented through another medium, every time its surround- ings change, every time new affiliations are forged. [...] Thus, the emphasis shifts from static object–space to the Mapping operations space–time of relational systems. And, it is here, in this complex and shifty milieu, that maps, not plans, achieve a The operational structure of mapping might be schema- new instrumental significance. tised as consisting of ‘fields’, ‘extracts’ and ‘plottings’. The field is the continuous surface, the flat bed, the paper or the table itself, schematically the analogical equivalent to Mapping the actual ground, albeit flat and scaled. The field is also the graphic system within which the extracts will later be ‘To plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real organised. The system includes the frame, orientation, and to make that way of thinking effective,’ writes the coordinates, scale, units of measure and the graphic pro- philosopher of the everyday Michel de Certeau (1984: 94) jection (oblique, zenithal, isometric, anamorphic, folded, ‘it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it.’ etc). The design and set-up of the field is perhaps one of the Mapping is key here for it entails processes of gathering, most creative acts in mapping, for as a prior system of working, reworking, assembling, relating, revealing, sifting organisation it will inevitably condition how and what and speculating. In turn, these activities enable the inclusion observations are made and presented. Enlarging the of massive amounts of information that, when articulated, frame, reducing the scale, shifting the projection or com- allow certain sets of possibility to become actual. In contain- bining one system with another are all actions that signif- ing multiple modes of spatio-temporal description, map- icantly affect what is seen and how these findings are ping precipitates fresh insights and enables effective actions organised. Obviously, a field that has multiple frameworks to be taken. Thus mapping differs from ‘planning’ in that it and entryways is likely to be more inclusive than a singular, entails searching, finding and unfolding complex and latent closed system. Also, a field that breaks with convention is forces in the existing milieu rather than imposing a more-or- more likely to precipitate new findings than one that less idealised project from on high. Moreover, the synoptic is more habitual and routine. And thirdly, a field that imposition of the ‘plan’ implies a consumption (or extin- is designed to be as non-hierarchical and inclusive as guishing) of contextual potential, wherein all that is avail- possible – more ‘neutral’ – is likely to bring a greater able is subsumed into the making of the project. Mapping, range of conditions into play than a field of restrictive scope.  JAMES CORNER 95 Extracts are the things that are then observed within a perceptions and practices of space. I label these techniques given milieu and drawn onto the graphic field. We call them ‘drift’, ‘layering’, ‘game-board’ and ‘rhizome’. extracts because they are always selected, isolated and pulled out from their original seamlessness with other Drift things; they are effectively ‘de-territorialised’. They include objects but also other informational data: quantities, veloc- The Situationists were a European group of artists and ities, forces, trajectories. Once detached they may be stud- activists in the 1950s and 1960s. [...] Guy Debord, a key ied, manipulated and networked with other figures in the Situationist theorist, made a series of maps, or ‘psycho- field. As described above, different field systems will lead to geographic guides’, of Paris. These were made after Debord different arrangements of the extracts, revealing alternative had walked aimlessly around the streets and alleys of the patterns and possibilities. city, turning here and there wherever the fancy took him. Plotting entails the ‘drawing out’ of new and latent [...] More a form of cognitive mapping than mimetic relationships that can be seen amongst the various extracts description of the cityscape, Debord’s maps located his within the field. There are, of course, an infinite number of own play and representation within the recessive nooks and relationships that can be drawn depending upon one’s crannies of everyday life. Such activity became known as criteria or agenda. Richard Long, for example, who has the d
e rive, or the dream-like drift through the city, map- made an art form of walking, may plot a line upon a map to ping alternative itineraries and subverting dominant read- connect the highest to the lowest summit in sequential ings and authoritarian regimes (Figure 1.12.3). order, for example, revealing a latent structural line across a What is interesting about the d
e rive is the way in which given terrain. Upon the same map, however, it is possible to the contingent, the ephemeral, the vague, fugitive event- plot a line that connects all south-facing aspects in sequen- fulness of spatial experience becomes foregrounded in tial order from large to small areas, or to find a range of wet place of the dominant, ocular gaze. [...] conditions that can then be set into relationship by plotting It is important to understand that the primacy of [...] a comparative index of water characteristics. In addition the Situationist’s use of maps belongs to the their perfor- to geometrical and spatial plotting, taxonomic and gene- mative aspects, that is to the way in which mapping directs alogical procedures of relating, indexing and naming can and enacts a particular set of events, events that derive from often be extremely productive in revealing latent structures. a given milieu. But, of course, there are the recordings that Such techniques may produce insights that have both come after the proceedings, and these are neither passive utility and metaphoricity. In either case, plotting entails nor neutral in their effects either. [...] an active and creative interpretation of the map to reveal, These various practices of ‘drift’ use maps as instruments construct and engender latent sets of possibility. Plotting is for establishing and aligning otherwise disparate, repressed not simply the indiscriminate listing and inventorying of or unavailable topographies; they are ‘set-ups’ that both conditions, as in a tracing, a table or a chart, but rather a derive from and precipitate a series of interpretative and strategic and imaginative drawing out of relational struc- participatory acts. Their highly personal and constructive tures. To plot is to track, to trace, to set in relation, to find agency make them quite unlike the detached work of and to found. In this sense, plotting produces a conventional mapmakers. They are openly cognitive, men- ‘re-territorialisation’ of sites. tal maps, rendering new images of space and relationship. Thus we can identify three essential operations in map- Moreover, the drift permits a critique of contemporary ping; firstly, the creation of a field, the setting of rules and circumstances, not from outside and above (as a master the establishment of a system; secondly, the extraction, plan) but from participation within the very contours and isolation or ‘de-territorialisation’ of parts and data; and, fabric of political and institutional reality. [...] thirdly, the plotting, the drawing out, the setting up of relationships, or the ‘re-territorialisation’ of the parts. At Layering each stage, choices and judgements are made, with the construing and constructing of the map alternating A relatively new development in the design of large-scale between processes of accumulation, disassembly and reas- urban and landscape fabrics has been ‘layering’. This sembly. By virtue of the mapmaker’s awareness of the involves the superimposition of various independent innately rhetorical nature of the map’s construction as layers one upon the other to produce a heterogeneous well as of personal authorship and intent, these operations and ‘thickened’ surface. Architects Bernard Tschumi and differ from the mute, empirical documentation of terrain Rem Koolhaas were amongst the first to develop layering so often assumed by cartographers. strategies in design and planning in their respective We may now identify four thematic ways in which new proposals for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, 1983 practices of mapping are emerging in contemporary design (Tschumi 1987; Koolhaas and Man 1995). Generally, and planning, each producing certain effects upon these projects dismantle the programmatic and logistical  96 CHAPTER 1.12 THE AGENCY OF MAPPING: SPECULATION, CRITIQUE AND INVENTION Figure 1.12.3 Guy Debord, Discours sur les Passions de l’amour 1957. aspects of the park into a series of layers, each of which is Game-board then considered independently from the other layers. There is an internal logic, content and system of orga- A third thematic development of mapping in contempo- nisation to each layer, depending on its function or rary design practice, and one related to the notions of intended purpose. The layers are not mappings of an performance mentioned above, has been the projection of existing site or context, but of the complexity of the ‘game-board’ map structures. These are conceived as intended programme for the site. [...] When these shared working surfaces upon which various competing separate layers are overlaid together, a stratified amal- constituencies are invited to meet to work out their differ- gam of relationships amongst parts appears. The result- ences. As a representation of contested territory the map ing structure is a complex fabric, without centre, assumes an enabling or facilitating status for otherwise hierarchy or single organising principle (Figure 1.12.4). adversarial groups to try and find common ground while The composite field is instead one of multiple parts and ‘playing out’ various scenarios. [...] elements, cohesive at one layer but disjunct in relation to Raoul Bunschoten is a London-based architect who has others. Such richness and complexity cannot be gained engaged with a number of complex and contentious urban by the limited scope of the single master plan or the regions in Europe, and has developed a number of inno- zoning plan, both of which group, hierarchicalise and vative mapping techniques for working with such sites. For isolate their component parts. Bunschoten (1996, 1997, 1998), cities are dynamic and [...] multiple; they comprise a vast range of ‘players’ and ‘agents’  JAMES CORNER 97 Figure 1.12.4 Rem Koolhaas layer diagrams for the Parc de la Villette (Office for Metropolitan Architecture 1983). whose ‘effects’ flow through the system, continually rework- who anchor conditions into specific institutions or places, ing the variety of urban spaces in any given field. His ‘actors’ who participate with stated desires and ‘agents’ approach is aimed first towards identifying and then redir- who have the power and capacity to make things happen. ecting the temporal play of these various forces. Conse- Each frame permits the play of certain thematic conditions quently, urban design is practised less as spatial composition (preservation, ecology economic development or cultural and more as orchestrating the conditions around which memory for instance), whilst the composite overlay of all of processes in the city may be brought into relationship and the frames more accurately conveys the plural and inter- ‘put into effect’. Bunschoten calls this ‘stirring’. acting nature of the urban theatre. [...] [...] In order to employ and operationalise these various The graphic map provides the game-board for playing conditions, they must first be made visible. Bunschoten out a range of urban futures. Identified players and actors accomplishes this by setting up a number of map frames, are brought together to try to work out complex urban within which certain processes or conditions are graphi- issues within an open-ended generative structure. Diverse cally identified (Figure 1.12.5). He is careful to link the forms of negotiation are promoted as the survival strategies various cultural aspirations of each group to a physical of each player unfold and become interwoven with others space or territory distinguishing amongst ‘local authorities’ in reaction to changing interests and situations. Thus the  98 CHAPTER 1.12 THE AGENCY OF MAPPING: SPECULATION, CRITIQUE AND INVENTION Figure 1.12.5 Raoul Bunschoten/CHORA, Four Planning Fields for Bucharest, 1996. maps themselves are evolving structures, drawn and Rhizome redrawn by the urban planner so as to permit the game to continue while also generating the necessary conditions Open-ended and indeterminate characteristics can be lik- for the emergence of an enterprising urbanity. ened to the process-form of the rhizome. ‘Unlike trees or [...] their roots,’ write Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 6), ‘the  JAMES CORNER 99 rhizome connects any point to any other point... It has [M]appings construct ‘planes of consistency’ that present neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) analytical information while also allowing for suggestive from which it grows and overspills, [constituting] linear readings/projections. They ‘draw out’ of common maps and mulitiplicities.’ In contrast to centric or tree-like, hierar- landscapes certain figural and processual relationships that chical systems, the rhizome is acentred, non-hierarchical might occasion new landscapes. Admittedly, these mappings and continually expanding across multiplicitous terrains. are not as open or rhizomatic as they might be, owing to their [...] thematic focus, but their inclusion and incorporation (syn- Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 6) draw an important dis- thesis) of diverse kinds of information and possibility as well tinction between ‘maps’ and ‘tracings’, describing the for- as their utilisation and subversion of dominant conventions, mer as open, connectable, ‘experimentations with the real’, illustrates two important ways in which mapping might and the latter as repetitive redundancies that ‘always come move towards more polymorphous and creative ends. They back to “the same”’. Hence, tracings belong to hierarchical are also suggestive of how temporal, systemic, performance systems of order that ultimately limit any hope of innovation networks can be rendered distinct from traditional carto- – ‘all of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction’ graphic concerns with static space. (Deleuze 1987: 12). By contrast, the infinitely open, rhizo- [T]he experience of spatial life today is as much imma- matic nature of mapping affords many diverse entryways, terial as it is physical, as much bound into time and exits and ‘lines of flight’, each of which allows for a plurality relational connections as it is to traditional notions of of readings, uses and effects. enclosure and ‘place.’ By extension, the principle of rhizo- The significance of the rhizome for mapping is encap- matic planes of consistency – together with the above- sulated in Deleuze and Guattari’s belief that ‘the book’ (and mentioned and closely allied themes of drift, d
e rive, layer- we might equally say the map, the city or the landscape) ing, scaling, milieu and game-board structures – provides a ‘has no object. As an assemblage [it] has only itself, in useful model for mapping as a creative form of spatio- connection with other assemblages and in relation to temporal practice in urban planning and design. In this other bodies without organs.’ Thus, Deleuze and Guattari way, we move away from urbanistic projects as authorita- (1987: 4) conclude: tive master plans, concerned solely with the composition and order of static parts, toward practices of self-reflexive We will never ask what a book means, as signifier or organisation. [...] Instead of designing relatively closed signified; we will not look for anything to understand in systems of order, rhizomatic mappings provide an infinite it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with series of connections, switches, relays and circuits for what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in activating matter and information. Hence mapping, as which other multiplicities its own are inserted and meta- an open and inclusive process of disclosure and enable- morphosed, and with what other bodies it makes its own ment, comes to replace the reduction of planning. converge. This viewpoint privileges actions and effects over repre- sentation and meaning; the concern is for how things work Conclusion and what they do. Moreover, there is an explicit interest here for new kinds of affiliative relationship and intercon- [...] nection. The argument emphasises probing practices of If maps are essentially subjective, interpretative and interpretation that extend previous products of culture fictional constructs of facts, constructs that influence deci- (maps and landscapes, for instance) towards more diverse sions, actions and cultural values generally, then why not and interconnected fields of possibility their ‘becoming’ embrace the profound efficacy of mapping in exploring and bodied-forth through various acts of mapping and relating. shaping new realities? Why not embrace the fact that the One especially important principle with regard to map- potentially infinite capacity of mapping to find and found ping as a rhizomatic (burrowing and extending) activity is new conditions might enable more socially engaging modes what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘plane of con- of exchange within larger milieux? The notion that map- sistency’. While this assumes a rich and complex array of ping should be restricted to empirical data sorting and meanings for the authors, I shall summarise plane of array diminishes the profound social and orienting sway of consistency here as a surface that is both inclusive (even the cartographic enterprise. And yet the power of ‘objective of things that may not normally fit or ‘belong’ to any given analysis’ in building consensus and representing collective scheme, including arbitrary ‘debris’) and structuring of new responsibility is not something to be abandoned for a free- and open-ended series of relationships. Obviously if such a form ‘subjectivity’; this would be both naive and ineffec- surface is both inclusive and structuring, the techniques and tive. The power of maps resides in their facticity. The modes of representation must be both multiple and flexible. analytical measure of factual objectivity (and the credibility [...] that it brings to collective discourse) is a characteristic of  100 CHAPTER 1.12 THE AGENCY OF MAPPING: SPECULATION, CRITIQUE AND INVENTION mapping that ought to be embraced, co-opted and used as Borges, J.L. (1933) Of exactitude in science, reprinted in A the means by which critical projects can be realised (Corner Universal History of Infamy, Penguin, London. and MacLean 1996). After all, it is the apparent rigour of Bronowski, J. (1965) Science and Human Values, Harper objective analysis and logical argument that possesses the Torch, New York. greatest efficacy in a pluralistic, democratic society Ana- Buisseret, D. (1998) Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban lytical research through mapping enables the designer to Cartography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. construct an argument, to embed it within the dominant Bunschoten, R. (1996) Proto-urban conditions and urban practices of a rational culture, and ultimately to turn those change, in Beyond the Revolution: The Architecture of Eastern practices towards more productive and collective ends. In Europe: Architectural Design Profile 119 (ed. T. Toy), this sense, mapping is not the indiscriminate, blinkered London Architectural Design, London, pp. 17–21. accumulation and endless array of data, but rather an Bunschoten, R. (1997) Black Sea: Bucharest stepping stone, in extremely shrewd and tactical enterprise, a practice of Architecture After Geometry: Architectural Design Profile 127 relational reasoning that intelligently unfolds new realities (eds P. Davidson and D. Bates), Academy Additions, out of existing constraints, quantities, facts and conditions London, pp. 82–91. (Allen 1998; Beck 1994; Corner 1999a; Koolhaas and Man Bunschoten, R. (1998) Urban Flotsam, Chora Publishers, 1994).[...] Rotterdam. [...] Corner, J. (1992) Representation and landscape. Word & Instances of drift, strata, game-board and rhizome rep- Image, 8 (3), 243–275. resent only a handful of techniques that mapping practices Corner, J. (1999a) Landscape and ecology as agents of crea- might assume if they are to play more creative roles in tivity, in Ecological Design and Planning (eds G.F. Thomp- design and planning, and in culture more generally. These son and R.F. Steiner), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, techniques presuppose any number of variations and pp. 80–108. enhancements as issues of framing, scaling, orientation, Corner, J. (1999b) Operational eidetics in forging new land- projection, indexing and coding become more flexible and scapes, in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary open-ended, especially in the context of powerful new Landscape Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, digital and animation media. As we are freed from the Princeton, NJ. old limits of frame and boundary – preconditions for the Corner, J. and MacLean, A. (1996) Taking Measures Across the survey and ‘colonisation’ of wilderness areas – the role of American Landscape, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. mapping will become less one of tracing and re-tracing de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, University already known worlds, and more one of inaugurating new of California Press, Berkeley, CA. worlds out of old. Instead of mapping as a means of Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: appropriation, we might begin to see it as a means of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota emancipation and enablement, liberating phenomena and Press, Minneapolis, MN. potential from the encasements of convention and habit. Giddens, A. (1994) Living in a post-traditional society, in What remains unseen and unrealised across seemingly Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics exhausted grounds becomes actualised anew with the in the Modern Social Order (eds U. Beck, A. Giddens and liberating efficacy of creatively aligned cartographic pro- S. Lasch), Polity Press, Cambridge. cedures. Mapping may thus retain its original entrepre- Hall, P. (1988) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of neurial and exploratory character, actualising within its Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Black- virtual spaces new territories and prospects out of pervasive well, Oxford. yet dormant conditions. Hall, S. (1992) Mapping the Next Millennium, Random House, New York. Harley, J.B. (1988) Maps, knowledge, and power, in The Iconography of Landscape (eds D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels), References Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 277–312. Allen, S. (1998) Artificial ecologies. El Croquis, 86, 26–33. Harrison, J. and Turnbull, D. (1996) Games of Architecture: Arnheim, R. (1970) Visual Thinking, University of California Architectural Design Profile 121, Academy Editions, Press, Berkeley, CA. London. Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations, Semiotext(e), New York. Koolhaas, R. and Man, B. (1995) S,M,L,XL, Monacelli Press, Beck, U. (1994) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition New York. and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Polity Press, Marks, R. and Buckminster Fuller, R. (1973) The Dymaxion Cambridge. World of Buckminster Fuller, Doubleday & Co, New York. Blanshard, B. (1948) The Nature of Thought, Allen & Unwin, Monmonier, M. (1991) How to Lie with Maps, University of London. Chicago Press, Chicago.  JAMES CORNER 101 Pickles, J. (1992) Texts, hermeneutics and propaganda maps, the world, including many examples of work inspired by in Writing Worlds (eds T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan), Deleuzian ideas.] Routledge, London, pp. 193–230. Grasseni, C. (2004) Skilled landscapes: mapping practices on Porter, T.M. (1995) Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objec- locality. Environment and Planning, D 22, 699–717. [An tivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton University Press, interesting example of the practical application of Corner’s ideas in an Italian community mapping initiative.] Princeton, NJ. Pickles, J. (2004) A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Robinson, A.H. and Petchenik, B.B. (1976) The Nature of Mapping, and the Geo-coded World, Routledge, London. [A Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. largely Foucauldian exploration of the constitutive power of Scott, J. (1998) Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to mapping: social chapters informed by Corner’s work.] Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven CT. S€ oderstr€om, O. (1996) Paper cities: visual thinking in urban planning. Ecumene, 11 (3), 249–281. See also Storr, R. (1994) Mapping, Harry N Abrams, New York.. Chapter 1.7: Design on Signs / Myth and Meaning in Maps Tschumi, B. (1987) Cinegramme Folie: le Parc de la Villette,. Chapter 1.8: Deconstructing the Map Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.. Chapter 1.9: Drawing Things Together. Chapter 1.10: Cartography Without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting Wood, D. (1992) The Power of Maps, Guildford, New York. the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking. Chapter 1.13: Beyond the ‘Binaries’: A Methodological Intervention for Interrogating Maps as Representational Further reading Practices. Chapter 1.14: Rethinking Maps Abrams, J. and Hall, P. (2006) Else/Where: Mapping New. Chapter 3.9: Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Cartographies of Networks and Territories, University of Minnesota Design Institute, Minneapolis, MN. [An inven- Twentieth Century tive edited collection that demonstrates the creative and. Chapter 3.10: Affective Geovisualisations artistic potential for mapping.]. Chapter 4.5: The Map as Biography Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. (2010) Non-Representational. Chapter 4.6: Reading Maps Theories and Geography, Ashgate, London. [The useful. Chapter 4.8: Refiguring Geography: Parish Maps of Common introduction to non-representational ways of approaching Ground