serendipityoucity

I am in the process of co-authoring a paper on cartographic heritage with some colleagues. Fortunately I decided to leap out of my usual pragmatic reading of technological and institutional reports on the topic of data archiving and leaped into the realm of historical cartography and archival history. What a delight! Today, I read the following paper:

Churchill, Robert R., 2004, Urban Cartography and the Mapping of Chicago, The Geographical Review, 94 Vol. 1, January, pp. 1-22.

And extracted some great quotes:

Maps often are made not on the basis of the territory itself but on some preconceived sense or vision of the territory. Informed by these maps, subsequent actions move the territory toward the vision(Churchill, 2004:11)

and eventually changing the maps themselves.

Maps can inspire great change, William Stead, a muckraking journalist in Chicago created a map of the state of an immigrant neighbourhood and published it as a frontispiece. These maps inspired the creation of the Hull-House Maps and and Papers which included demographic information of wages and nationalities. These maps were used to

inform and reform (Churchill, 2004:13).

Shortly thereafter, an urban planner informed by these early demographic maps created his own urban plans

And until the Great Depression, Burham’s views – expressed most lucidly in maps and views – changed the map of the city (Churchill, 2004:13).

The expense of continually updating maps was too great, and therefore many map were updated with neighbourhood modifications pasted onto the old sheets. This was particularly the case in Chicago after the great fire and the creation of the Sandborn Maps:

the mottling, wavy lines, and occasional offset in lines on this map bear evidence to several layers of correction sheets applied sequentially to the original. Over an extended period of time, these maps became quite weighty pamlimpsets of urban development in the most literal sense (Churchill, 2004:16).

Finally, on the importance of maps a narrators of place”

the kinds of maps produced, their subject, their purpose, and their audience change systematically through time, yet in this sequence maps are more than static representations of the city at any particular moment, more than artifacts of an evolving technology, more even than icons of the city as a dynamic entity. Maps are proactive agents in shaping the city – both cause and effect (Churchill, 2004:20).