The Politics of Mapping. Bernard Debarbieux
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illustration of the vote of November 29, 2009 on the ban on the construction of minarets in Switzerland cartogram."/>
Figure 1.9. The vote of November 29, 2009 on the ban on the construction of minarets in Switzerland: cartogram (population) (source: Chavinier and Lévy 2009)
The vote was based on a popular initiative to ban the construction of minarets and was seen by its opponents as a sign of religious intolerance with racist and xenophobic overtones. The vote gave victory to the proposed ban by 57.5% with a turnout of 53.8%.
1.4. Cartographic turn, geographic turn and political space
This awareness of the active force of the “map” object is reinforced and transformed by changes in the context of cartographic production.
Cartography has indeed been turned upside down by the advent of digital technology. In a sense, everything has changed: authors, techniques, audiences and uses. One of the paradoxical effects of these changes is the strengthening of the map as a specific language distinct from all others. Non-geographic mapping (the use of spatial languages to represent something other than space) has been and continues to be influenced by cartography, and has expanded considerably, in turn influencing cartographic semiology. The same can be said for the non-mapping features of satellite geolocation. At the same time, the production of maps is facilitated by the mass of available data, the emulation of the cartographers’ guild through the arrival of new players, the cognitive progress resulting from the more explicit consideration of the achievements of graphic semiology and visual communication and the rise of the general public’s culture in this field. In the end, the map emerges rather stronger in this rapidly changing landscape.
In this context, the connections of the map with other fields of knowledge become even more significant. Since the map is, from start to finish, a spatial object, the geographic turn in the social sciences (taking the spatial dimension of the social seriously) and the spatial turn in geography (new theoretical developments in thinking about this dimension), which have been taking place over the last half-century, offer new resources and requirements for the cartographer’s work. Among the many innovations that have resulted, we can note the success, less and less contested, of the Leibnizian conception of space (Harvey 1969; Werlen 1992; Lévy 1994): the Newtonian model of the prior empty frame that the Newtonian approach carried has receded. On the contrary, the idea tends to impose that there is no space in itself but also, as proposed by Leibniz (Robinet 1957), that space is nothing else but the set of distance relations, according to various metrics, between localized realities. These realities are not in space, but they make space, and this is not without consequence for the notion of the background map, which ceases to be a tool of naturalization (in both senses: dehistoricization and naturalism), and becomes a sort of summary of all of the pre-existing maps that the one we are drawing deserves to be compared to. This cartographic counterpart of geographical extent makes each map an open dialogue between a background and a theme. From this perspective, spatialities – the actions of humans in the geographical environments that are spaces – can take their full place, and will no longer be seen as second or secondary. Thus, the definition of urban areas includes the mobility of inhabitants as a primary datum, which means that they contribute through their practices to shaping the environment that nevertheless encompasses them. The strength of spatialities as a political issue is reflected in a multiplication of scales, from local to global, and of metrics, with a pre-eminence of networks and their multiple interactions.
A map can then be used as a tool to understand the relationships between the prompts issued by the environments and the affordances expected by the actors. The notion of affordance was proposed by Gibson (1977, pp. 67–82) to account for the resources that the user of a space finds and uses to enable them to carry out a project: this can be an inclined plane for a suitcase or a pushchair, an information board, a bus stop, people who can be questioned, or the urban legibility ensured by a simple map or recognizable monuments, in short, any element that makes it easier to use a place. A prompt is an incitement to action proposed by spatial environments (Rudler 2018). It is close to behavior settings, a notion that Barker (1968) uses to describe devices that, by their configuration, send messages, more or less imperious, to those who approach them that indicate that a specific behavior is expected of them. More generally, the prompt applies to any situation in which it is the environment, arranged or not, that proposes an action to the actor, and this at all scales: it can be the layout of a station platform or a photo of a beach bordered by a turquoise lagoon. In the encounter between prompts and affordances (Koseki et al. 2020), the construction of a spatial capital is at stake, a combination of experiences and skills that gives an actor or a place the capacity to act on geographical environments (Lévy 1994).
From this perspective, inhabitation can be seen as the spatial component of resonance, if we wish to use Rosa’s (2019) expression. If we define inhabitation as a dialogical interaction between actors and environments (Lazzarotti 2006; Frelat-Kahn and Lazzarotti 2012) or, more precisely, between spatialities and spaces, this creates a tension due to, in Rosa’s words, the relative “unavailability” of the external world to actors’ projects.
From a cartographic point of view, this relationship between actors and environments has long been tilted in favor of spaces. It was up to the user to cope with maps that provided reliable information, but were not designed to facilitate their action. In recent years, however, there have been innovative alternatives in this area. Transport for London has placed maps of the area at the exit of underground stations and these maps are “anthropocentric”, that is to say, their orientation does not place north at the top (as is the case with “geocentric” maps), but instead what is in front of the pedestrian, which allows the latter to use this affordance to find their way more easily in an unknown space. In retrospect, there is a realization that before these maps were introduced, the passenger exiting the underground was expected to find their way on their own, until they found a map, sometimes very distant and geocentric.
The relationship is thus rebalanced by the fact that, on the side of spatialities, putting actors on the map is now easier due to digital technology (Calbérac et al. 2019). What was once confined to the statistical imagination and its relentless pursuit of the average man is greatly enriched by the appearance of individualities that are no longer sums of factors or propensities, but complex autonomous systems. We tend to have as much data, mostly localized, for an individual as we used to have for a whole society. We must learn to work together with mass data and individuals, and tame these powerful singular spaces that maps can also become. The risk that they will be used, like other individual databases, for purposes of control or manipulation is not negligible. However, this new landscape also undoubtedly gives new margins of freedom to the citizen-inhabitants, which means new responsibilities for them at the same time. On these innumerable maps populated with Is, how do we construct the politics? Undoubtedly not by the magic of cartographic language alone, but rather by the processes that assemble citizens around their map(s).
1.5. Ethical turn and mapping
Thus, it is not only as inhabitants that people “get on the map”, but also as citizens. For a long time, cartographic controversies superbly ignored them. The truth/lie pairing applied to maps was situated within a framework of enunciation that made the cartographer the holder of an intrinsic truth linked to their technical command, making their relationship with citizens a master/student one at best.
On the contrary, it may be thought that if researchers and cartographic engineers have indeed signed a contract with society consisting of concern for the truth of the maps they draw, this does not ipso facto guarantee that they are immune against any slippage in terms of the truth regime. They are specific actors, but actors among others, who do not, for example, have a monopoly on argumentative competence. Arguing is what citizens do in public debate, while the world of research must accept the tension that fundamentally characterizes it, between an abundant and difficult-to-decipher empirical material without prior reference points and