A History of Spaces Cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded world John Pickles I~ ~~O~!!~~i~~UP LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2004 by Routledge For Lynn, Leon and my parents, and for three teachers: 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Roger Downs, Peter Gonld and Joseph Kockelmans Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2004 John Pickles Typeset in Times by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pickles, John, 1960- A history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping, and the geo­ coded world! John Pickles. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cartography. L Title. GA105.3.P522004 526-dc21 2003008283 ISBN 0-415-14497-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-14498-1 (pbk) Contents One pylon marks the spot List of illustrations ix BBC News Monday, 15 October 200111:55GMT, Preface and acknowledgements http://news.bbc.co.uklhi/english/uk/england/newsid_160000011600225.stm xi A field in North Lincolnshire is the most featureless part of the UK, according to a new Ordnance Survey (OS) map. PART] Introdnction The square kilometre on the outskirts of the village of Ousefieet, near 1 Scunthorpe, has nothing in it except a single electricity pylon and some 1 Maps and worlds overhanging cable. Grid reference SE830220 on map 112 is as near as 3 cartographers can find to a completely blank square among the 320,000 in the widely-used Landranger map series, .. PART II The quest to find Britain's most boring place was set by a listener to John Deconstmcting the map Peel's Home Truths show on BBC Radio 4. 25 Philip Round from the OS said: 'We're not saying it's the dullest place in 2 Britain. It might be the most fascinating place on earth but on our Land­ What do m~ps represent? The crisis of representation ranger maps it has the least amount of information. No ditches, streams or and the cntIque of cartographic reason 27 buildings in it are shown on this particular scale of map. That's quite some 3 Situated pragmatics: maps and mapping as social going, considering the lOW-lying areas of East Anglia and remote parts of practIce Scotland.' 60 'Friendly community' PART III The land has been farmed by the Ella family for over 100 years. Tom and Avril, both in their 50s, grow wheat, barley and sugar beet on it. The over-coded world: a genealogy of modem mapping 73 'It's a lovely place to live,' Mrs Ella said. 'It's a small, friendly community 4 with a lovely church nearby.' The cartographic gaze, global visions and modalities of vIsual culture But the family is not impressed by the thought that map enthusiasts may 75 soon be flocking to the location. 5 Cada~tres and capitalisms: the emergence of a new map conSCIOusness 'If people want to come and look at a field, I don't mind, but they're 92 wasting their petrol.' 6 Mapping the geo-body: state, territory and nation 107 The OS has warned that the field's claim to fame could be threatened by 7 more detailed maps of the same area, 'Drainage ditches or dykes might be Commodity and control: technologies of the social body 124 shown up,' said Mr Round. viii Contents PART IV Investing bodies in deptb 143 Illustrations 8 Cyber-empires and the new cultural politics of digital spaces 145 PART V Conclusion 9 Counter-mappings: \(artographic reason in the age of intelligent machines and smart bombs Notes References Index x Figures and table 6.1 Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494 108 Preface and acknowledgements 6.2 Cecil Rhodes - From Cape to Cairo 109 6.3 Gridded lands: lines, landholdings, landscapes 110 6.4 Mount Chimborazo Flora, Topography and Altitude Mapping, Alexander von Humboldt 120 7.1 Bird's-eye view of Phoenix 128 7.2 Mapping the social life of London 132 7.3 Fire Insurance Map, Tombstone, Arizona 133 7.4 Award-winning map: map of the village of Buc, Versailles, at the scale of 1:2,000 produced from photographs in 1861 136 7.5 The diorama and mirror worlds ofjin de siecie Paris 137 Technology, globality, commodity 139 7.6 PREFACE 7.7 'Human Happiness - Food for the Asking in the Fourierist Utopia', Grandville, 1844 141 'What a wonderful world it would be' 147 This book began life with the working title of Mapping and Social Theory 8.1 as one in a Frontiers in Human Geography series with the express intent 8.2 'See the world in a whole new way' 148 'Desert Storm's satellites of war', cover New Scientist of synthesizing for students and general readers the rapidly emerging role 8.3 bemg played by social theories of one kind or another in reshaping and 27 July 1991 150 revisioning thematic areas of geographical thought and practice (see 'Cyber Empires' 151 8.4 Agnew 1998). The book still does this, but it has also mutated, as social 8.5 Virtual earth: layers and flows 162 'The Visible Human Project™ The National Library of theory itself has, into a much more immanent reading of the practices and 8.6 ideas of spatial thought, mapping and map-making. Throughout, I have Medicine' 165 drawn on a wide range of social theorists and theorists of maps and carto­ 'The Digital Earth' 166 8.7 graphy in an effort to flesh out some of the many ways in which we can Peter Gould's mappings 168 8.8 think of the ways in which cartographic reason has coded our world. 8.9 Vegetation Canopy Lidar Mission 169 Digital Earth: 'Everything that's out there can be found The title of the book captures precisely its content. 'A History of 8.10 Spaces' refers to Michel Foucault's (1986) suggestion that 'a whole history right here' 171 of spaces has still to be written'. I have not attempted to write a whole 'The art of prospecting for customers' 172 8.11 history of spaces or a comprehensive genealogy of maps and mapping. Such a task is beyond the reach of a single book or author. The history of Table maps and mapping itself is a massive topic, as the ambitious History of 1.1 Categories of representations of non-western spatial Cartography Project - now in six volumes in twelve books with about 7,000,000 words - amply demonstrates. Instead I have tried to write a thought and expression 16 history of spaces. I take my starting point with social theories from Hei­ degger to Adorno and beyond by putting in question all representational epistemologies and logics. In this task, 'mapping' is my central concern. I draw on maps and mapping as my point of entry into a consideration of the ways in which 'Cartographic Reason' can - as Gunnar Olsson, Franco Farinelli and Tom Conley have variously suggested be seen as the missing element in social theories of modernity. In using 'the Over-Coded Wodd' I explicitly associate my reading of the role of mapping in shaping SOCIal, spatIal and natural identities with Althusserian notions of over­ determination, Gibson-Graham's arguments against essentialism, and a Deleuzian and Guattarian project of immanent materialism. The book points, above all, to the ways in which our lives have been and are being xii Preface and acknowledgements Preface and acknowledgements xiii shaped and constituted through myriads of intersecting and overlapping over those years. Roger's fascination with the emergence and develo _ mappings in use every day. Over-coding thus points to the ways in which ment. of spatial imagination ~mong children and professionals alike h~s the formation of identities can be seen, in part, as a kind of spatialized ~ontnbuted substantIally to stretChing what counts as cartography to historical process of mapping occurring at many scales simultaneously. In mclude popular cartographies of one kind or another. The experience of this sense the book takes up Henri Lefebvre's (1991: 85) question: 'How reading Maps in Minds remains fresh today. many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to When I first travelled to the United States, I carried with me one book deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings to read on the aeroplane. It was Phenomenology, (1967) edited by Joseph and contents?'. He answers: 'It is doubtful whether a finite number can Kockelmans. At the time, It was a curiosity encountered in a bookstore in ever be given to this sort of question.' These multiple and overlapping Manchester and I had no idea that Kockelmans was a professor of philo­ inscriptions are also spaces of slippage in the process of identity creation, sophy at Penn State. The focus of the book and my subsequent eucounter signalling possibilities for other readings and practices of mapping. The With Joe h~s been vital in everything I have attempted since. Much of my book concludes with these slippages and the opportnnities for rereading w?rk m philosophy ~nd the humanities was supported through Interdisci­ maps and mapping they seem to provide.