(from older PlaceWorks blog)
Growing up in rural Vermont, as I did in the late 1950s, the arrival of National Geographic (the magazine) in the mail box was cause for monthly or semi-monthly celebration, followed by hours of poring over great photos and reading about places so exotic as to be barely imaginable. But most exciting was the once-in-a-while inclusion (two or three times a year?) of a full sized wall map! To be honest, I am not sure how to explain my fascination with these maps. Was it their size (took up most of the kitchen table), somehow commensurate with the vast land and sea areas depicted? Or their color schemes, or the tiny print offering up unpronounceable place names?
Whatever their attraction, these maps made very far away places feel both more real and more accessible to a 12 year old schoolboy. By stretching, really stretching, one could reach all the way from Capetown to Cairo! Or, in the case of the most treasured map-of-the-whole-world, from Norwich, Vermont (my hometown) to Moscow or Antarctica!
A quick aside: one of the teacher participants in a place-based education course I offered some years ago created for her second grade class a map of their town (a standard part of the course) in the form of a game of “Twister.” The object was for students to gain some understanding (sense) of the relative locations of buildings and other landmarks by seeing how far you had to stretch to connect them. (Brilliant!) Other approaches to map-making in this course were equally inventive.
When it comes to tools in the place-based development tool box, it would be hard to rate any other tool above the map. But why is this? I am reminded of something Donella Meadows wrote in Thinking in Systems about her inclination to use diagrams as a way of representing systems as opposed to using only words. “Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once.” If we think of places as systems, maps help us see relationships between component parts “all at once.” We see relationships between many places when we can only be in one place at a time, or we see relationships between various aspects of place (soil types and poverty, for example) that might not be evident from direct experience, and we can track/represent landscape changes over time.
In future posts, I hope to consider (think out loud) about different kinds of maps and their various uses/purposes. I read recently of a large map that was created in maybe medieval time to depict the lands over which a particular pope or emperor held dominion. So there was a map intended to designate (demonstrate, celebrate, enforce) control (political, military, religious). Conversely, my friend Stephen Engle who runs the Maine Center for Community GIS told me about a project he once did in New Zealand in which residents of an area slated for designation as a national park were invited to share their feelings and experiences related to that landscape in the form of an electronic “story” map – calling into question or at least adding dimension to assumptions held by the (more powerful?) park agency planners.
A lot of ground to cover here, so to speak.
And, oh yes, a reference to the Experimental Geography exhibit. One of the pieces in the exhibit was a “map” of the newly established evacuation route leading away from Boston to be used by Bostonians in the event of a major disaster (9/11). The map consisted of approximately thirty recordings of the breaths taken by a runner (the artist) exiting the city along the designated route, each recording representing whatever segment of the route the artist was able to run that day. The title of the piece: “154,000 Breaths.”