A History of Spaces provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live. The book begins by asking a seemingly very simple question: what does it mean to draw a line? It answers this question with the seemingly simple answer: to create a boundary, to define a space, and to shape an identity. The book builds on this foundation by exploring how historically maps have reached deep into social imaginaries to code the modern world. Going beyond the focus of traditional cartography the book draws on examples of the use of maps from the sixteenth century to the present, including their role in projects of the national and colonial state, emergent capitalism and the planetary consciousness of the natural sciences. It also considers the use of maps for military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health, disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and the transparent earth. The final chapters of the book turn to the rapid pace of change in mapping technologies, the forms of visualization and representation that are now possible, and what the author refers to as the possibilities for post-representational cartographies.
By:
John Pickles
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 13mm
Weight: 470g
ISBN: 9780415144988
ISBN 10: 0415144981
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 09 October 2003
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
,
A / AS level
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Part1. Introduction 1. Maps and Worlds Part 2. Deconstructing the Map 2. What Do Maps Represent? The Crisis of Representation and the Critique of Cartographic Reason 3. Situated pragmatics: Maps and Mapping as Social Practice Part 3. The Over-Coded World: A Genealogy of Modern Mapping 4. The Cartographic Gaze, Global Visions, and Modalities of Visual Culture 5. Cadasters and Capitalism: The Emergence of a New Map Consciousness 6. Mapping the Geo-Body: State, Territory, and Nation 7. Commodity and Control: Technologies of the Social Body Part 4. Investing Bodies in Depth 8. Cyber-Empires: Cartographic Reason and the Technological Sublime in a Digital Age Part 5. Conclusion 9. Counter-Mappings: Cartographic Reason in the Age of Intelligent Machines and Smart Bombs
John Pickles is Earl N. Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies and Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Reviews for A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World
'[This book] brings something unquestionably new in the way geographers study maps and the processes of map-making and map-using.' - http: //EspacesTemps.net 'This is thought provoking spacial analysis at its very best.' - Massey University, 2005
