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CULTURAL CARTOGRAPHY : MAPS AND MAPPING IN CULTURAL

GEOGRAPHY

Denis Cosgrove

Armand Colin | Annales de géographie

2008/2 - n° 660-661
pages 159 à 178

ISSN 0003-4010

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Cosgrove Denis, « Cultural cartography : maps and mapping in cultural geography »,
Annales de géographie, 2008/2 n° 660-661, p. 159-178. DOI : 10.3917/ag.660.0159
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Cultural cartography: maps and mapping
in cultural geography
Les cartes et la cartographie en géographie culturelle

Denis Cosgrove
UCLA

Abstract Over the past three decades, significant shifts in both the theory and practice of
cartography and indeed in the definition of the map itself have transformed the
role of mapping within geography, while maps and map making have become
a focus for important contemporary connections between cultural geography
and various art practices. This essay reviews these developments, paying special
attention to Anglophone examples. The critique of cartography’s claims to sci-
ence and revisionist art historical scholarship are first discussed, followed by
comments on the changing relations between geography and cartography and
the impacts of new technology on map making and use as these have been
democratised through virtual cartographies. Growing artistic interest in
researching and documenting spatial and environmental questions that involve
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use of many of these mapping practices is set in its historical context and related

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to geography’s changing academic practices.

Résumé Au cours des trois dernières décennies, des tournants importants se sont produits
tant dans la pratique cartographique que dans les théories qui la concernent, et qui
ont transformé le rôle de la cartographie en géographie, alors même que la fabri-
cation des cartes faisait l’objet d’études qui font ressortir les liens actuels existant
entre la géographie culturelle et différentes pratiques artistiques. Le présent essai se
penche sur ces développements en portant une attention particulière au cas anglo-
phone. La critique de la prétention scientifique de la cartographique et l’approche
historique révisionniste de l’art seront d’abord discutées, suivront des remarques
sur les relations changeantes entre la géographie et la cartographie, ainsi que sur
l’impact des nouvelles technologies sur la fabrication et l’usage des cartes comme
on peut s’en rendre compte par la généralisation des cartographies virtuelles. La
dimension artistique de la recherche et de la documentation sur les questions spa-
tiales et environnementales qui ont recours à ces nouvelles cartographies, est
replacée dans son contexte historique et est mise en relation avec les changements
survenus récemment dans les pratiques géographiques.

Key-words Cultural geography, cartography, map, mapping, map art, site specific art, Land
Art, history of cartography.

Mots-clés Géographie culturelle, cartographie, carte, art et cartes, site d’art, art naturel,
histoire de la cartographie.

In November 2001 the American artist Laura Kurgan produced and


freely distributed to visitors at the site of the recently destroyed World
Trade Center in lower Manhattan a map plotting the events of 9/11, its
impacts on the surrounding streets and buildings, and the recovery acti-
vities then underway (fig. 1). The map was updated and again freely

Ann. Géo., n° 660-661, 2008, pages 159-178, © Armand Colin


160 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

distributed in March 2002. Initially produced within two months of the


catastrophe, when the site was still being actively cleared, human remains
being recovered and identified, and the city still deeply traumatized, the
map responded to a specific, practical need. High fences had been cons-
tructed around the destroyed area, leaving only a small number of viewing
stands from which it could be observed. Given the scale of the site and the
totality of destruction, most visitors could make little sense of what they
were seeing. Kurgan’s map was designed to help them do so. Color coded
to show the footprints of the variously destroyed and damaged buildings
and overlain by pictorial symbols, the maps mediate between the visible and
the absent while introducing a sense of the processes under way in front
of the map user and viewer.
The project was financed by local agencies and businesses, which also
helped supply the information recorded on the map. The fold-out image
used the vivid colours and design graphics of maps distributed to orientate
and guide visitors at tourist attractions such as theme parks or zoos. While
serving an obvious public need, Kurgan’s map raised a host of ethical and
political questions: did it merely service morbid voyeurism or meet the
needs of genuine witness? Did it cheapen and trivialise the significance of
the place by representing it in the graphic language of tourist cartography?
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Did it seek to control and direct the ways of seeing and experiencing a
place whose gravity and sacredness (as a mass graveyard) demanded a more
personal and private response?
I do not intend to answer these questions in this essay, although in
noting their salience we are alerted to cartography’s insistent ethical dimen-
sion. Rather, Kurgan’s mapping project serves here to introduce a broader
set of questions that bear upon the role and relations of cartography in the
context of contemporary cultural geography. While accurately documenting
and plotting spatial data, the Ground Zero map makes no claim to scientific
accuracy or objectivity; it is not professional cartography. Like a guide-book
or transit map, it was an ephemeral product, intended for immediate prac-
tical use, to be readily disposed of or destroyed in the process of use rather
than archived as documentary evidence of geographical data 1. It was also
an artistic project, a site specific and performative work intended as a direct
intervention into the everyday (if temporarily disrupted and uncanny) life of
the city, a way of “taking the measure” of the event 2. In her urban mapping,

1 Catherine Delano-Smith, “The map as a commodity”, in D. Woodward, C. Delano-Smith, Cordell


D.K. Yee (eds.), Approaches and challenges in a worldwide history of cartography (11è planteja-
ments I objectius d’una història universal de la cartografia), Barcelona, Institut Cartogràfic de
Catalunya, 2001, p. 91-110.
2 On the professionalization of cartography as a scientific and academic practice and its specifi-
cally 20th century characteristics, see Denis Wood, “Cartography is dead (thank God)”, Cartogra-
phic Perspectives, 45, 2003, p. 4-7. On the cultural and historical roles of mensuration in rela-
ting to geography and place, see Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale: geografia, persuasions,
identità, Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 2006.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 161
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Fig. 1 Laura Kurgan, Map of 9/11 site, 2001, detail.


Laura Kurgan, Carte du site du 11 septembre 2001, détails.

Kurgan could draw theoretically on a long tradition in Modern Art — from


early Surrealism, through Situationism, Conceptualism and site-specific art
practices — in which cartographies of everyday life have played a significant
role. As her earlier work using SPOT satellite images to map the sites of
mass graves revealing the evidence of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans
demonstrates very clearly, she is also acutely political in her mapping, aware
of the post-modern critiques of scientific mapping and of the map’s com-
plex relationships with power. She recognises the significance of the map as
162 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

a material object and an active agent in social relations. In this she shares
a burgeoning interest in the map-object and in the practices of mapping
not only with a large number of artists, but with many cultural geographers.
The two groups have found common concern in cartography as a cultural
practice and they draw increasingly on each other’s work and insights 3.
In what follows I review this shared body of theory, criticism and prac-
tice around maps and mapping with the intention of clarifying the chan-
ging relations between cartography, science cultural theory and artistic acti-
vity within geography. I explore the historical evolution of these relations
and connect them to broader developments in cultural study, principally
within the Anglophone world (although the developments I discuss are not
by any means confined to that sphere). I assess their implications in the
context of a digitized world in which the map as a tangible, finished object
and mapping as a specialised scientific activity seem to be giving way to a
virtual cartography in which the map image is avowedly provisional and
ephemeral, and mapping a creative, participatory activity no longer the pre-
serve of professional cartographers and geographers. Lastly, I explore the
recent convergence of interest between cultural geographers and artists in
questions of map making and cartography.
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1 A cultural history of cartography

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The so-called “cultural turn” that has revolutionized Anglophone cultural
geography since the 1980s has had a parallel impact on cartography and
on the place of the map within geography. In these pages, Paul Claval cites
feminism, subaltern studies and post-colonialism as significant aspects of
the cultural turn, together with a post-modern scepticism towards the uni-
versalist claims of modern science, a rapprochement with the humanities
and a focus on images. As a sophisticated icono-text 4, popularly and pro-
fessionally regarded as a uniquely geographical research tool and medium
of communication, the map could hardly escape the discipline’s cultural
revolution. Given cartography’s close association with positivist science
(that dates to the origins of statistical and thematic mapping in the early
19th century), the claims for the academic and scientific status of their work
made by American cartographers, especially in response to 1940s German
propaganda mapping 5, and the central role that cartography played in

3 Denis Cosgrove, “Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and cartography in the twentieth century”,
Imago Mundi, 57 (1), 2005, p. 35-54.
4 The term “iconotext” refers to representations that incorporate both text and graphic images (for
example comic books, cartoons and many virtual hypertexts). The map is one of the oldest
examples of the form.
5 See the discussion in Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, “Mapping global warfare: Los
Angeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owens’s pictorial cartography”, Annals, Association of Ame-
rican Geographers, 95(2), 2005, p. 373-390; and John Pickles, “Texts, hermeneutics and propa-
ganda maps”, in T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds.), Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor
in the representation of landscape, London and New York, Routledge, 1992.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 163

geographical exploration and colonial survey, settlement and administra-


tion, it is little wonder that the map has been among the most consistent
targets for post-modern deconstruction 6. This has simultaneously reduced
and enhanced cartography’s place within geography.
It has become conventional to attribute the beginnings of cartographic
critique within geography to the work of the British geographer J. Brian
Harley who, in a series of polemical papers in the 1980s alerted the tradi-
tionally conservative fraternity of map scholars (which included a large
number of his fellow historical geographers) to the inevitable imbrications
of cartography and power. Drawing on what now appears a somewhat inco-
herent reading of theorists, among whom Foucault and Derrida held pro-
minent places, Harley claimed that “far from holding up a simple mirror
of nature that is true or false, maps redescribe the world… in terms of rela-
tions of power and the cultural practices, preferences and priorities” 7. In a
series of substantive essays he considered the map’s “silences”, its opera-
tions within systems of knowledge and power, and the ways that so many
of the canonical maps of European “discovery” had simultaneously used
and erased the local and often non-representational forms of spatial
knowledge possessed by disadvantaged and colonised populations in furthe-
ring the interests of their oppressors 8. In fact, the pre-history of “new”
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cultural geography more generally, especially in its focus on epistemology,
had drawn heavily on map history and scepticism towards cartography’s
scientific claims, as is apparent in the mid-century writings of J.K. Wright
and David Lowenthal 9. Within academic cartography itself, the writer
Denis Wood launched a polemical critique of “scientific” map-making in
The power of maps (1990), and his continued attack on the scientific pre-
tensions of professional cartographers has been pursued by writers such as
David Koch, John Cloud and Mark Denil 10.

6 D. Wood, “Cartography is dead”, 4; see also John Pickles, A history of spaces: cartographic
reason, mapping and the geocoded world, London, Routledge, 2004.
7 J. Brian Harley, The new nature of maps, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2001, quotation on 35.
The most comprehensive discussion of Harley’s ideas, their origin and evolution is Matthew H.
Edney, “The origins and development of J.B. Harley’s cartographic theories”, Cartographica,
Monograph 54, 2005; Edney’s comments on Harley’s theoretical confusions are on 107. A
detailed critique of Harley’s use of French theorists is to be found in Barbara Belyea, “Images of
Power: Derrida, Foucault, Harley”, Cartographica, 29, 2 1992, p. 1-9.
8 The essays are collected in The new nature of maps. Harley’s work for the American bi-centennial
exhibition of cartography and discovery revealed to him the extent of pre-Columbian indigenous
geographical knowledge present but silenced in the maps produced by European “discoverers”.
9 I discuss this evolution of thought in Anglophone human geography in “Epistemology, geography
and cartography: Matthew Edney on Brian Harley’s cartographic theories”, Annals, Association
of American Geographers, 97 (1), 2007, p. 202-209.
10 Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An introduction to critical cartography”, ACME An Interna-
tional E-Journal for critical geographies, 4(1), 2006, p. 11-33 [http://www.acme-journal.org/vol4/
JWCJK]; David Koch, Cartographies of disease: maps, mapping and medicine, Redlands CA., Esri
Press, 2005; John Cloud, “American cartographic transformations during the Cold War”, Cartography
and Geographical Information Science, 29, 2002, p. 261-282; Mark Denil, “Cartographic design: rhe-
toric and persuasion”, Cartographic Perspectives, 45, 2003, p. 8-67.
164 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

Within art history a parallel focus on the map as an object of critical study
emerged in the 1980s as part of a revisionist interest in the cultural specificities
and historical contexts of Renaissance perspective and the late medieval science
of optics more generally. In a detailed examination of the technical and ico-
nographic complexities of Jacopo de’Barbari’s celebrated panoramic map of
VENETIA 1500, Juergen Schulz demonstrated the priority of its emblematic
and iconic significance over any role as a scientific instrument or practical
guide to the city 11. Close examination of the work of later 16th century Vene-
tian cartographers such as Giacomo Gastaldo and Cristoforo Sorte has dee-
pened our understanding of the close connections between optical science,
practical mathematical arts such as survey and engineering, and fine art 12.
These relations have been ably summarised by Martin Kemp 13. More theore-
tically, Svetlana Alpers’ examination of the inscriptive qualities of Dutch and
Flemish genre painting and map making connected them to a broader descrip-
tive imperative in Netherlandish culture that gives a scientific and technical
foundation to the long-noted art historical distinctions between Italian idea-
lism and Northern empiricism in early modern painting, and even perhaps to
the Italian distinction between disegno (the emphasis on concept) and colore
(a focus on technique) in art 14. Also in the 1980s, Samuel Edgerton sought
to establish a direct connection between 15th century Florentine studies of the
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newly translated Geography of Claudius Ptolemy on the one hand and Brunel-
leschi’s and Alberti’s demonstrations of linear perspective on the other 15.
Within geography itself Harley’s influence was (and continues to be)
seminal, although his work was by no means unique in the late 20th century
re-theorizing of cartography: for example the Italian geographer Franco Fari-
nelli, drawing upon semiotics and empirical studies of Renaissance urban
mapping (notably of Ferrara) made similar claims about the cultural com-
plexities of cartography’s relations to vision while avoiding Harley’s exclusive
concentration on power relations 16. Not only did Harley’s writings attract
the attention of scholars throughout the humanities, social sciences and spa-
tial disciplines such as planning and architecture, they have appealed also to
conceptual artists such as Ruth Watson and Kathy Prendergast whose work
I refer to below. Harley’s participation with the late David Woodward in the

11 Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized
Geography Before the Year 1500”, Art Bulletin, 60, 1978, p. 425-474.
12 Juergen Schulz, La cartografia tra scienza e arte: carte e cartografia nei Rinascimento Italiana,
Modena, Panini, 1990; Denis Cosgrove, The palladian landscape: Geographical change and its
cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy, State College, Penn State University Press, 1993.
13 Martin Kemp, The Science of Art, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990.
14 Svetlana Alpers, The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century, Chicago, Chicago
University Press, 1983.
15 Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective, New york, basic books,
1975. Edgerton’s claims about the theoretical and cultural correspondence between perspective
and Ptolemeic mapping have not held up to subsequent scrutiny.
16 Franco Farinelli, I segni del mondo. Immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in età moderna,
la Nuova Italia, 1992.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 165

1980s in the still unfinished multi-volume History of Cartography published


by the University of Chicago transformed the way that maps and the evolu-
tion of map making are understood. Both of the editors were trained geo-
graphers: Harley with a detailed archival knowledge of British topographical
mapping, Woodward with specialised understanding of the paper-making,
engraving and printing techniques that lay behind early-modern map making.
Woodward himself edited an influential collection of essays Art and carto-
graphy in 1987 that brought together Alpers, Edgerton and other art histo-
rians then revising their own discipline’s approach to mapping and progres-
sive cartographic historians with the goal of revising the then prevailing
historiography that map-making had passed from art to science over the
course of the 17th and 18th centuries 17. The subsequent five volumes of the
History challenged the conventionally Euro-centric narrative of cartographic
progress from “primitive” and mythically informed representations to sophis-
ticated and objective presentations of empirical spatial information. It paid
close attention to non-European and non-literate traditions of spatial repre-
sentation and extended the definition of what constituted a map to any
representation, in whatever material medium, of spatial information, regar-
dless of the empirical warranty of that information. Although three of the
History’s volumes have yet to appear in print, those devoted to Classical and
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medieval European cartography, mapping among indigenous and traditional
societies, and Asian cartography have completely transformed scholarship
within the history of cartography, shifting it strongly away from a traditional
focus on matters of technique, provenance and connoisseurship towards an
emphasis on the cultural processes, context and criticism of mapping and
map making, and the social and performative roles of the map as an object 18.
Today maps are viewed as “signs and collections of signs, laying out in
graphical form indications of spatial relationships or placing into spatial
other information with a locational attribute” 19. They also attract interest
as material objects, acting as “immutable mobiles” that play a significant
role in the spatial transfer of knowledge and thus deploy various rhetorics
in order to command trust 20. Maps take a wide variety of material forms

17 David Woodward (ed), Art and cartography: six historical essays, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1987.
18 J.B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. I “Cartography in pre-
historic, ancient and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean”, Chicago and London, The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987; vol. II, Bk.1 “Cartography in the traditional Islamic and South
Asian societies”, 1994; vol. II. Bk.2 “Cartography in the traditional east and southeast Asian
societies”, 1994; vol. II, Bk. 3 (David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis eds), “Cartography in the
traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific societies”, 1998.
19 Denil, “Cartographic design”, 8.
20 The term “immutable mobile” comes from the writings of Bruno Latour and refers to those mate-
rial scientific objects (such as printed books and treatises) that allow ideas and information to
move physically over space. The printed map as a graphic representation of spatial information is
a classic example of the kind of instrument Latour is referring to. Bruno Latour, Science in Action,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
166 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

and thus fall within the remit of both the cultural history of representation
and of things. They cannot be understood or interpreted outside the
cultural context in which they are produced, circulate and are used. The
influence of this cultural turn in the approach to mapping is apparent in
many fields of study and, along with geography’s intensive re-conceptuali-
sation of space, accounts for much of the current cross-disciplinary interest
in geographical scholarship. Historians for example, long sceptical of non-
textual sources, are paying increasing attention to the role of survey and
mapping as active practices in the overseas expansion of early-modern
Europe, re-examining the way that maps acted as a medium through which
knowledge of unknown places was constructed in a dialogue between
(often fantastic) European expectations and imaginings on the one hand,
and autochthonous experience on the other 21. They have begun to reco-
gnise the early-modern map as much more than a way-finding device or a
record of discovery, but a representational machine for archiving and clas-
sifying a wide range of geographic and ethnographic material and a rheto-
rical medium for establishing various claims to truth and authority. 16th
century painted map cycles in Florence and Rome were attached to cabinets
of curiosity; the great 17th-century Dutch and French cosmographic wall
maps acted as Gemankunstwerken, collecting, collating, classifying and dis-
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playing the marvels of creation; 18th and 19th-century “plain-style” maps

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archived Enlightenment sciences such as geology, meteorology and botany
as well as exploration of the Pacific Ocean and the continental interiors 22.
Other studies have revealed the intimacy of cartographic activity with
colonial dispossession of native territory: the US Rectangular Survey system
for example, or the great colonial surveys conducted by British, French,
Dutch and other European powers during the imperial era 23. Early works,
which regarded the map as a unidirectional exercise of colonial authority
have given way to more nuanced and dialogic understanding, as in Siam’s
use of European topographical survey to delimit the kingdom’s territories
and thus defend them against the Western imperial predation 24. Benedict
Anderson has argued that the map played a key role in shaping decolonised

21 Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A history of state fixations and fugitive landscapes,
Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2004; Laura Hostettler, Quing colonia enterprise: Eth-
nography and cartography in early modern China, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
22 Francesca Fiorani, The marvel of maps: Art. Cartography and politics in Renaissance Italy, New
Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005; Bronwen Wilson, The world in Venice: Print, the
City, and Early Modern Identity, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005; Anne Godlewska,
Geography unbound: French geographical science from Cassini to Humboldt, Chicago, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1999; D. Graham Burnett, Masters of all they Surveyed: Exploration, Geo-
graphy — a British El Dorado, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000; Luciana de Lima
Martins, “Mapping tropical waters: British views and visions of Rio de Janeiro”, in Denis Cos-
grove (ed.) Mappings, London, Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 148-168.
23 Burnett, Masters; Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British
India, 1765_1843, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
24 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu, Univer-
sity of Hawai’I Press, 1994.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 167

territories into the “imagined communities” of nation states, and in recent


years Australian and Canadian first peoples have used cartography to chal-
lenge colonial-era claims to their lands and to reassert native territorial
claims 25. Others have related the uncertainties of actual practices of seeing
and recoding spatial data in the colonial and exploration period 26. Respon-
ding to these insights, the Irish artist, Kathy Prendergast has produced
works in her Atlas of Emotions series that include cartographic images of
North America that appear at first glance to be standard topographical
maps but which on closer examination exclude all place names but those
containing the word “lost” (fig. 2). She counters the conventional post-
colonial reading that the European explorer/colonizer was “master of all I
survey”, suggesting rather an uncertain and anxious encounter in which the
lines of power/knowledge are fractured and unpredictable, a theme
explored in Paul Carter’s studies of British colonial exploration and
mapping 27.
While the nexus of knowledge and power represented by the map has
been the principal focus of the new cultural history of cartography, it has
not been the only concern. Literary and art-historical scholarship has
concentrated more on cartographic semiotics. Among the most influential
writers in this respect has been the French Classical philologist Christian
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Jacob whose L’empire des cartes applied to the long sweep of European
mapping. Jacob’s belief that cartographic interpretation should shift from a
“transparent” view of the map as a neutral, informative transfer of external
information into the simplified classificatory frame of the map sheet,
conducted with the intention of achieving “an ideal correspondence of the
world and its image”, to an “opaque” view of the map which takes account
of the selections, omissions, additions and inescapable contextual influences
which shape the outcome of such transfers 28. Mapping is a process which
involves both a “complex architecture of signs”: graphic elements with
internal forms and logics capable of theoretical disconnection from any
geographical reference, and a “visual architecture” through which the
worlds they construct are selected, translated, organised and shaped.
Jacob’s somewhat analytical semiotics has been extended into broader ico-
nographic studies of specific maps and cartographic practices. The Italian
scholar Giorgio Mangani’s studies have focused on the moral and emble-
matic significance of maps, with a detailed historical investigation of how
the cordiform (heart-shaped) projection first popularized by Oronce Fine
in the 1520s became entangled in the religious struggles and practices of

25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism,
Cambridge, Verso, 1983.
26 Martins, “Mapping tropical waters”.
27 Paul Carter, The road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London, Faber, 1987.
28 Quoted on p. 4 of Denis Cosgrove, “Introduction”, Mappings, p. 1-23. Christian Jacob, L’empire
des cartes, Paris, Albin Michel, 1993.
168 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008
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Fig. 2 Kathy Prendergast: Lost, 2001, detail.
Kathy Prendergast: Quelque part, 2001, détails.

Reformation Europe 29. The theological significance of maps and mapping


in medieval and early modern theological discourse is also emphasized by
studies of Renaissance cosmography by Frank Lestringant and Jean-Marc
Besse in which the moral ambiguities of the god-like perspective assumed
in global mapping are explored and by Alessandro Scafi’s brilliantly detailed
history of the theology and cartography of the terrestrial paradise 30.
Mangani’s study of the cordiform projection has attracted the attention of
the New Zealand artist Ruth Watson who has produced a wide range of

29 Giorgio Mangani, Il “mondo” di Abramo Ortelio: mysticismo, geografia e collezionismo nel


rinascimento dei Paesi Bassi, Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 1998.
30 Frank Lestringant, L’Atelier du cosmographe ou l’image du mond a la Renaissance, Paris, Albin
Michel, 1991 ; Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la terre essai sur les transformations du savoir
géographique au seizième siècle, Lille, ANRT, Université de Lille III, 2000; Alessandro Scafi,
Mapping the terrestrial paradise, London, British Library Publications, 2006.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 169

heart-shaped world maps (with the south cardinal point at the top of the
map) as installations, using diverse media such as salt, red-beaded glass pins
and growing/dying grass to exploit the nuances of relating the world map
to the human heart 31.
The significance of the map and the globe in emblemata, and in early-
modern European literature, poetry, painting and engraving reveals a close
connection between cartography as a scientific and technical discourse and
as a subject of artistic reflection and practice that anticipates in some
respects the contemporary relationships I discuss below. In his most recent
writing Giorgio Mangani has pressed his argument for the moral rhetorics
of maps across a broad historical span of Western cartography. His
argument serves to dissolve the distinctions not only between “modern”
and pre-modern mapping in the West (for example between the medieval
mappa mundi with their explicit mapping of the terrestrial paradise, and
Abraham Ortelius’ Typus orbis terrarum, 1570), but between European and
non-Western mapping such as Chinese, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Islamic
traditions in which the religious and moral dimensions of mapping and
maps has long been acknowledged, and finally between the roles of art and
science in cartography 32.
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2 Contemporary mapping

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I have focussed so far on the ways that conceptual and historical studies of
maps and mapping have been affected by the cultural turn. Contemporary
shifts in the nature and techniques of mapping practices and map use have
also served to emphasize cartography’s cultural and artistic dimensions. It
has been observed that the word “cartography” itself is a fairly recent neo-
logism, coined in 1839 by the Portuguese scholar Viscount de Santarem.
Its appeal over the more mundane “map-making” is explained by the pro-
fessionalization of map production in an era when European states were
developing topographical map series for the purposes of defining and
defending the national territory, and using statistical mapping as a bureau-
cratic, regulatory and planning device. Collating spatially referenced data,
designing and drafting its cartographic presentation, rectifying the distor-
tions of map projection and scale and, with aerial photography, developing
methods of photogrammetry, are all specialised skills, initially taught and
learned through apprenticeship, but increasingly given scientific status
within the academy, initially as a discipline aligned to geography. Between
1920 and 1960, the number of specialised university programs in America
devoted to cartography rose from two to over one hundred. The first

31 Ruth E. Watson, “The Decorated Hearts of Orance Fine: The 1531 Double Cordiform Map of the
World”, The Portolan, 65, 2006.
32 Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale; Scafi, Mapping Paradise; Woodward, History of carto-
graphy; Cosgrove, Mappings.
170 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

academic text on map-making in English appeared in the 1920s. Erwin


Raisz, who established cartography in Harvard University’s geography pro-
gramme, published General Cartography in 1939, to be superseded by
Arthur Robinson’s Elements of Cartography in 1952. These two texts have
been the pillars of cartography as an academic study in America 33. While
Raisz, whose own physiographic maps corresponded closely to the synoptic
and synthetic geographical vision of early geographical morphologists such
as W.M. Davis, laid considerable emphasis on the artistic and cultural
dimensions of conceptualising and making maps, Robinson’s work stressed
cartography’s scientific credentials, reducing its artistic aspects to design
questions alone. Robinson’s book was republished regularly into the 1970s,
by which time it was accompanied by a range of cartographic teaching texts
as the number of university cartography programs continued to expand 34.
This expansion came to an abrupt end in the 1990’s, since when there
has been a sharp and steep decline in the number of specialised teaching
programs in cartography. That decline has paralleled the unprecedented
expansion of map-making and map-using that has come with the easy
availability of increasing volumes of remote sensed data, spatially-referenced
statistics, the microprocessor and the Web. Packaged computer programs
allow instantaneous interchange of map projections and scales, rapid over-
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laying of spatial data sets within Geographic Information Systems, a vast

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range of design opportunities in Photoshop and other graphic programs, as
well as instantaneous access to diverse data sources. Hand drafting of maps
has virtually ceased, while anyone with medium-level technological skills
and a home computer connected to the Internet can create maps with equi-
valent informational content and design qualities to those of professional
cartographers. Further, the availability of maps and related carto-graphics
such as remote sensed images and aerial photographs through the Web
vastly outstrips that of printed cartography, and exceeds in many respects
the practical value of the latter, for example in avoiding the problems of
centring information in relation to a predetermined sheet size and borders.
In removing maps and their making from the narrow guild of profes-
sional cartographers, and map use from the professional confines of geo-
graphers, planners, and bureaucrats, information technologies have demo-
cratised mapping: a cultural shift that is still underway and whose broader
consequences are not yet fully apparent. John Noble Wilford has claimed
that the democratization of Geographic Information Systems has produced
a new generation of “user cartographers” who are not formally trained in
cartography and who work often collectively. The storage capacity of
modern computers means that data bases are separate from actual maps
that display the data they hold, allowing the latter to be customised in

33 Erwin Raisz, General cartography, New York & London, McGraw-Hill, 1938; Arthur H.
Robinson, Elements of cartography, New York & London, 1953.
34 Cosgrove, “Epistemology, geography and cartography”.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 171

content and design, so that, “unburdened by archival responsibility, indivi-


dual maps can be more pictorial” 35. There is no question that more inclu-
sive definitions of the map and map-making, and greater flexibility in such
matters as scale, legend, north-point etc. are already widely accepted among
geographers, while the huge success of such programs as Google Earth that
offer the conceit of flying through virtual space to any location on the
planet and viewing its surface topography at flexible scales and resolutions
by means of digital and photographic images is dramatically affecting
popular geographic culture. It may not be too far-fetched to claim that very
soon all printed cartography will be historical cartography. We live today
in the most cartographically rich culture in history: the map is ubiquitous
in daily life, and increasingly comes within the capacity of its user to mani-
pulate and transform.
Geography’s traditional role in relation to maps has been less in their
design and making than their use and interpretation. Cultural geography
traditionally relied heavily on the map as a research tool and a medium for
displaying its findings. For Vidal de la Blache and Albert Demangeon’s use
of the IGN 1.50,000 and 1:100,000 topographic sheets was critical both
to framing and illustrating their studies of the French pays. British geogra-
phers drew heavily on Patrick Geddes’ cartographically focused ideas of
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survey to develop a university curriculum in their discipline and regarded
the maps of the mid-20th century National Land Use Survey as one of the
discipline’s signal contributions to public policy. Mapping the distribution
and diffusion of material culture and cultural practices was central to mid-
century Berkeley cultural geography. Distributional maps and mapping
practices are much less common features of contemporary cultural geo-
graphy, which is heavily textual 36. But the map reappears as an object of
study in itself within cultural geography’s broader focus on images and
representations, as we have seen. The growing salience of maps and map-
ping activities within social life increases the significance of such geo-
graphical studies, and also the importance of geographical education into
the complexities of meaning in maps and into the cultural implications of
mapping.

3 Modernist and post-modernist art, mapping


and cultural geography

A striking indication of the map’s contemporary cultural significance and


the democratisation brought about by information technology is its role in
contemporary art. Denis Wood has recently compiled a catalogue of 218

35 John Noble Wilford, The mapmakers, New York, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 417.
36 Peter Jackson’s Maps of meaning (London, Hutchinson, 1989) one of the seminal texts of the
“new” cultural geography, uses the term “map” entirely metaphorically; cartography is of little
significance in the work.
172 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

“map artists”, that is artists active over the past half century whose work
has significantly engaged with one or more aspects of cartography 37. Many
of these artists have attracted the attention of geographers and numerous
examples of mutual interest between geographers and artists have emerged
as art practices themselves have moved away from a focus on aesthetic mat-
ters and towards the documentary and research roles of art practices 38.
Early “cartographic” artists, such as Italian Alighiero e Boetti, a member
of the influential Arte Povera movement, whose world map composed of
national flags has been widely reproduced, or the American Jasper Johns
who reproduced the map of the United States in encaustic and collage
(1963) reworked familiar cartographic icons for the purposes of alerting
their audience to the politics of the national map. Others such as the
conceptual artists Sol de Witt who made systematic incisions into aerial
photographs of New York, or Douglas Huebler who mailed letters to and
from locations along the 42nd parallel, have used the idea of mapping as
the springboard for artistic interventions, engaging more with the concepts
and practices of map making than the map itself. It is not possible to survey
this large and growing artistic corpus, nor meaningful to classify it syste-
matically. But in many cases the concerns of artists parallel those of con-
temporary cultural geographers and in recent years there has been an iden-
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tifiable trend towards both groups to collaborate on common projects that
often involve maps, so that it is valuable for geographers to be aware of
the evolution of modern art’s interests in cartography and of the principal
streams within the artistic avant-garde that have engaged with maps and
mapping.
Late 19th century cultural geographers shared with landscape artists a
common interest in questions of culture, rootedness and the appearance of
the land. This continued among traditional painters into the early 20th cen-
tury, as 1930s German Kunstgeographie indicates 39. But as the artistic
avant-garde moved away from representational concerns to conceptual
questions of space, structure and surface so their conversation with geo-
graphy and cartography waned. The grid, which so fascinated modern
artists because it expressed “the absolute autonomy of art — anti-natural,
anti-mimetic, anti-real”, was abstract rather than topographic, and as such
would only enter geography’s theoretical scope with the development of
spatial science at mid-century, at a moment when the discipline’s cultural

37 Denis Wood, “Catalogue of map artists”, Cartographic Perspectives, 52, 2006, p. 61-67.
38 This development was clearly visible in the themes and presentations of the Association of Ame-
rican Geographers sponsored Geography and the Humanities Symposium held at the University
of Virginia, June, 2007 [www.aag.org/humanities/index.cfm].
39 Kunstgeographie was an early 20th century German sub-discipline of art history that attempted to
relate the artistic achievements of a cultural group to their regional geography. Its intellectual
connections with cultural geography of the same period were close, the institutional ones less so.
See Thomas da Costa Kaufmann, Towards a geography of art, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 2004.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 173

focus had given way to a positivist paradigm that largely ignored cultural
questions. Only in the 1980s when geographers such as Gunnar Olsson,
David Harvey and Alan Pred began to examine the cultural geographies of
Modernism through the concept of relative space did the geographical
significance of early modern movements such as Cubism and Futurism (in
understanding the early 20th century city for example) become apparent.
It is important to acknowledge the influence of Henri Lefebvre’s La pro-
duction de l’espace on these Anglophone geographers’ writings about space.
Lefebvre was himself closely tied to the French artistic avant-garde and
especially Surrealism, whose Situationist strand, discussed below, made
extensive, if subversive use of maps and mapping practices. The Surrealist
Map of the World (1929) does not today appear a revolutionary image
(fig. 3). Yet in its sketchy outline, erasures and distortions of geographic
areas and territories, and arbitrary labeling, it challenged the stabilities of
the early-20th century European geographical imagination and its self-satis-
fied image of a wholly discovered world. Surrealists were among the groups
most engaged with geographical representation, in large measure because
of their concerns with everyday life. Thus Marcel Duchamp’s readymades
reference various Parisian landmarks and, according to Housefield, mapped
out the French capital when collected and displayed in Duchamp’s New
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York studio 40.

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Fig. 3 Surrealist map of the World 1929.


Carte surréaliste du monde en 1929.

40 James Housefield, “Marcel Duchamp’s art and the geography of modern Paris”, The Geogra-
phical Review, 4 1992, p. 478.
174 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

Surrealism’s psychological interests in the image paralleled mid-century


advances in cognitive psychology in challenging conventional assumptions
about the transparency of representational images and emphasizing the
importance of individual and social perceptions. Its engagement with eve-
ryday life would find echoes in the scientific concept of cognitive mapping
that developed in the late 1950s and would prove an important foundation
for the epistemological concerns of subsequent cultural geographers 41.
Ability to recognize and understand map images was found to be learned
and cultural rather than a function of the map’s scientific objectivity and
design clarity. In the late 1950s too, Situationism, a second-generation
Surrealist movement, developed intense interest in the map as a communi-
cative device and in the subversive potentials of mapping practices 42. Situa-
tionism’s conscious move beyond the art world of studios and galleries into
the spaces of everyday life brought artists into the same “field” of opera-
tions as geographers, reinforcing artistic concern with mapping as a means
of engaging graphically with material spaces, a move that was reinforced
from the 1960s in by conceptual and site-specific artists 43.
While in the 1960s many members of the Situationist International
rejected art altogether in favor of radical activism on city streets, Guy
Debord used his filmic interest in spectacle and space to connect art prac-
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tice directly to the physical and cultural geography of the city. His concept
of psychogeography was part of a radical response to the rationalist and func-
tionalist urban planning, heavily reliant on “scientific” mapping practices,
that he believed was destroying the social and psychological well being of
urban communities. Psychogeography was “the study of the specific effects
of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the
emotions and behavior of individuals” 44. The connected practice of the
urban dérive or drift, intended to generate chance encounters and provo-
cative interactions with other individuals, involved a kind of subversive
survey of urban space that both stimulated and recorded “transient passage
through varied ambiances”. Thought of cartographically, the dérive was a
conscious challenge to the apparently omniscient, disembodied and totali-
zing urban map that had become the principal instrument for urban plan-
ning and “comprehensive redevelopment” across the West during the post-
war years. The dérive was intimately connected to Debord’s third concept
of unitary urbanism: “the combined use of the arts and techniques for the

41 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1960.
42 David Pinder, Visions of the city: Utopianism, power and politics in twentieth-century Uurba-
nism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, and New York, Routledge, 2005; David Pinder,
“Subverting cartography: the situationists and maps of the city”, Environment and Planning A, 28,
1996, p. 405-427.
43 Peter Wollen, “Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists”, in Michael Newman and John
Bird (eds.), Rewriting Conceptual Art, London, Reaktion, 1999; Denis Wood, “Map art”, Carto-
graphic Perspectives, 53, Winter 2006, p. 5-14.
44 Guy Debord, quoted in Wollen, “Mappings. Situationists and/or conceptualists”, p. 30.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 175

construction — or preservation — of environments in which the dérive and


psychogeographical experiments would prosper” 45.
To illustrate these experiments, between 1955 and 1959, Debord and
his Danish colleague, Asger Jorn, produced various collage works bringing
together map fragments, images and texts that captured urban space and
experience in Paris and Copenhagen. These “have a strongly cartographic
appearance due to the dribbled lines of coloured ink which link the picto-
rial fragments, as canals or a river might link landmarks within a city” 46.
Like Duchamp, Debord’s psychogeographical street maps of the Paris drew
upon popular pictorial maps. Debord explicitly used G. Peltier’s 1956 Vue
de Paris à vol d’oiseau and the 1951 Guide Tirade de Paris. Such pictorial
maps perfectly captured the distanciated spatial vision of Modernist plan-
ning that Michel de Certeau, heir to the Situationist critique, would dissect
in his The practice of everyday life 47. The Situationists’ response to the
urban vision represented by such cartography was to cut the map of Paris
or Amsterdam into “islands” of urban space joined only by thick red arrows
or blacked ribbons that evoke the emotional and passional connections
made within and between such locales by the artist/map-maker himself.
Paralleling Situationism within the 1960s avant-garde in opening of a
common interest with geography were site-specific art and Land Art. The
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terms cover a wide range of artists and practices and followed divergent
pathways in Europe and the United States, but conceptually both sought
to escape the confines of the gallery, and also of painting, to engage
directly with site and in the case of Earth or Land Art, the natural envi-
ronment. Robert Smithson’s work, starting with studies of Passaic New
Jersey and culminating in his now-iconic Spiral Jetty developed the terms
“site” and “non-site” to challenge the conventional relationships between
art and specific spaces — notably the gallery. His 1963 Artforum essay “A
Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” is regarded as the manifesto
for Land Art, a practice that Smithson acknowledged has deep affinities
with the picturesque tradition of landscape and garden design. The deserts
of the American West became a favored location for these practices,
perhaps best exemplified by Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and more
recent City works (fig. 4), that have sought to transform space and create
places, often using maps and geographical studies to research and
document their artworks. In Europe the movement has adopted a softer,
more environmentally sensitive approach, for example in the work of
Richard Long in Britain and in Germany Joseph Beuys whose land art
works are smaller in scale and more intimate engagements with places,
topography and maps. An indication of the significance of this geographically

45 Ibid., p. 30.
46 Ibid., p. 32.
47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley, University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1988.
176 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

related art is the fact that London’s principal modern art collection, Tate
Modern at Bankside, devotes a major gallery to the theme “environment
and place” that displays the work of these artists.

Fig. 4 Michael Heizer, City (under construction).


Michael Heizer, Cité (en construction).
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While both Situationism and Land Art were movements of the 1960s
and 70s, they have attracted renewed attention among young artists in the
early 2000s. The Situationist dérive has been the stimulus to a wide variety
of informal and non-conventional site specific artistic engagements with the
city, many with activist agendas connected to community development, or
explicitly challenging the politics of new technologies that document,
record and regulate urban space such as Closed Circuit Television (CCTV),
Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and GIS itself 48. For example, the Ame-
rican artist kanarinka’s various engagements with the psychogeography of
Boston include a project entitled It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston
in which she documents twenty-six runs following officially recommended
emergency evacuation routes out of the city, monitoring her physiological
responses with various instruments attached to her body and documenting
the resulting statistics though maps and charts in order to “traverse new
geographies of insecurity” 49. Site-specific artists today share many of the
conceptual concerns of earlier land and environmental artists. More
conventionally geographic, a 1998 British project titled Artranspennine
commissioned thirty individual artists and artistic groups to undertake
projects that articulated the idea of a distinctive trans-Pennine region in

48 See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge
Mass., MIT Press, 2002.
49 http://www.ikatun.com/evacuateboston/about.
Articles Cultural cartography: maps and mapping in cultural geography • 177

Northern England, stretching from the River Mersey to the Humber


estuary. The initiative’s declared aim was explicitly cultural and geographic:
to explore “the richness of the region through the creativity of contempo-
rary art” and help “forge a cultural identity and exemplify and project the
quality and diversity of our region to resident communities and visitors”.
Thirty projects were exhibited or performed across the region during the
year and documented in a book: Leaving Tracks 50.
While site specific and community art projects may not always incorpo-
rate cartography in its conventional sense, they all involve “mapping” in
the expanded sense in which cultural geographers now use it: organizing,
documenting and representing spatial knowledge in graphic form. Artistic
goals closely parallel those of many contemporary cultural geographers, as
scholar and scientist converge in the aftermath of deconstruction, which
has been as effective in reshaping what constitutes art as in reshaping
science. One consequence has been a growing number of collaborative pro-
jects between artists and cultural geographers, including artists in residence
in university geography departments, shared community arts projects in
urban areas, collaboration on GIS-based art projects, and curatorial activi-
ties among cultural geographers. There is every indication that such colla-
boration will increase in the coming years 51.
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Conclusion

Laura Kurgan’s 9/11 map with which I opened this discussion is thus not
an aberrant incursion of the artist into the field of geography and carto-
graphy, but an example of a much broader and significant outcome of the
“cultural turn” in geographic, cartographic, artistic and spatial practice. As
the geographic discipline has become more self-critical about its traditional
claims to document at determined scales and with scientific objectivity pat-
terns and processes on the earth’s surface, especially for the social world, a
significant opening towards the roles of creativity and imagination in
making and communicating geographical knowledge has developed. At the
same time a greatly expanded number of practicing artists have moved away
from the conventional confines of aesthetic production, visual media and
gallery display to engage directly with the world, with the intention of
researching, documenting and representing in challenging ways its environ-
mental and social conditions. Advances in information technology that have
democratized the gathering, storage, manipulation and display of spatially
referenced data have afforded innovative opportunities for artists to fulfil

50 The project and its various artistic productions are documented in Nick Barley (ed.), Leaving
Tracks: Artranspennine 98 — An international contemporary visual art exhibition recorded, Man-
chester, August Media, 1999.
51 A number of research projects evaluating the goals and achievements of site specific and local or
community art projects are currently being undertaken in British university geography depart-
ments (eg Open University, Exeter University).
178 • Denis Cosgrove ANNALES DE GÉOGRAPHIE, N° 660-661 • 2008

these goals. The traditionally separate disciplinary projects of geography


and art thus overlap and converge in exciting ways, and nowhere is this
more directly expressed than in map work. As I have sought to demons-
trate, late 20th century theoretical and historical critiques of cartography,
and the continuing revolution in cartographic techniques and practices have
provided the conceptual and technical foundations for these shared prac-
tical developments, so that, contrary to a sometimes expressed concern
among geographers that the cultural turn might lead into an epistemolo-
gical cul-de-sac, new concepts of cartography and new mapping practices
are generating an active and intensely practical engagement with everyday
cultural life.

UCLA, Department of Geography


1255 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles CA 90095-1254, USA
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Denis Cosgrove est mort le 21 mars 2008 à l’âge de 59 ans, d’un cancer contre lequel il se
battait depuis deux ans.
Né à Liverpool, Denis Cosgrove fit ses études à Oxford et Toronto. Il enseigna d’abord à Lou-
ghborough University puis à Royal Holloway College, avant d’accepter en 2000 un poste de
Professeur au département de géographie de l’Université de Californie à Los Angeles
(UCLA), dont il était venait d’être nommé directeur. Ses travaux sur le paysage — notamment
italien, l’image — notamment artistique — et la carte ont rencontré un large écho, au-delà de
la géographie culturelle et historique dont il était un des spécialistes les plus reconnus. Co-
fondateur de la revue Ecume, devenue Cultural Geography, il a participé au renouvellement
de la discipline dans son ensemble. Toute son œuvre invite à questionner les liens complexes
entre le Monde et les représentations que nous nous en faisons, qu’il a magistralement travaillé
à dénouer, des paysages palladiens aux photographies de la Mission Apollo.
Plusieurs de ses recherches sont en cours de publication. Geography and Vision : Seeing, Ima-
gining and Representing the World, qui vient de sortir, offre un brillant panorama de son tra-
vail. Les publications posthumes laissent un sentiment ambivalent à ceux qui ont
personnellement connu l’auteur, notamment ceux qui ont travaillé avec lui à l’occasion de cel-
les-ci. Frustration de n’avoir pu mener avec lui le projet à son terme, tristesse de devoir inscrire
cette croix après son nom. Bonheur d’avoir encore profité de son intelligence et échangé avec
lui ; fierté de présenter aux lecteurs son texte et d’avoir suscité son élaboration. Vanité de
n’être plus avec lui que par la trace de ses mots.
Nous étions reconnaissants à Denis d’avoir répondu à notre invitation à prendre part à ce nu-
méro, dont nous savions combien il l’enrichirait. Sa participation atteste de l’attention d’un
géographe généreux de son temps et de ses efforts, très ouvert sur les mondes académiques
qui n’étaient pas les siens ; elle montre aussi le courage et la volonté d’un homme face à la
maladie.
Merci à lui.

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