The Agency of Mapping

Corner has a high regard for mapping as a tool for urbanization as seen in Terra Fluxus as well. That is where he stated the need for understanding the terrain and stimulating the imagination, among other areas, - these two being directly linked with mapping - “Mapping uncovers realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds”.

Summarising his words: Mapping as a collective enabling enterprise both reveals and realizes hidden potential – its acts may emancipate potentials, enrich experiences and diversify worlds.

Corner distinguishes between the use of mapping as a means of projecting power-knowledge and as a productive and liberating instrument, world-enriching agent, (especially in the design and planning arts).

This can be seen as reductionism vs virtuality – reductionism being the use of maps to reduce knowledge of territory and simplify it (as Corner concluded in Terra Fluxus, Corner concludes the failure of earlier urban design and regionally scaled enterprises was the oversimplification, the reduction of the phenomenal richness of physical life) and virtuality a means of using knowledge to simulate the imagination.

This is what Corner means when he distinguishes between maps and tracings – tracings are reduced representations of the territory but maps can be representations of the imagination.

Mapping therefore can analyse hidden and unseen realities. Mapping can also be used to see the big picture that in many cases cannot be seen – for instance in Mat urbanism it is hard to conceive the whole without mapping the parts.

Corner suggests that mapping should be used not only before planning but also after planning, as a means of simulation and that new techniques of mapping have been overlooked by the urbanists and architects of our times.

Corner discusses three areas in detail:

1) Maps and reality:

- The more detailed and life-like a map strives to be, the more unnecessary it becomes
- The application of judgment, subjectively constituted, is precisely what makes a map more a project than a mere empirical description.
- Concepts of “site” are shifting from that o simply a geometrically defined parcel of land to that of a much larger and more active milieu.
- Thus maps are in-between virtual and real.
- The function of maps is not to depict but to enable, to precipitate a set of effects in time.
- The exploratory mapper detours around the obvious so as to engage what remains hidden.

2) Space and time today:

- Events occur with such speed and complexity that nothing remains certain
- Local cultures have become fully networked around the world
- Corner mentions Reyner Barnham’s question - if unplanned cities like Los Angeles would be as rich and modern if it was not for their relatively unplanned growth. And Rem Koolhas’s perspective on “the generic city” or “those identity-less areas that today comprise the bulk of the sprawling urban fabric where most people live.
- New and productive forms of socialization and spatial arrangement are evolving without the aid, direction and involvement of planners and designers.
- Quotes David Harvey: “planners and architects have been barking up the wrong tree in believing that new spatial structures alone would yield new patterns of socialization. The struggle for designers and planners, Harvey insists, lies not with spatial form and aesthetic appearances alone (the city as a thing) but with the advancement of more liberating processes and interactions in time (urbanization).” – Harvey’s point is that projecting new urban and regional futures must derive less from a utopia of form and more from a utopia of process – how things work, interact and inter-relate in space and time.

3) Mapping:

- Mapping differs from planning in that it entails searching, finding and unfolding complex and latent forces in the existing milieu rather than imposing a more-or-less idealized project from on high. Moreover the synoptic imposition of planning implies a consumption of contextual potential, wherein all that is available is subsumed into the making of the project.
- Whereas the plan leads to an end, the map provides a generative means, a suggestive vehicle that points but does not overly determine.
- In mapping the makers own participation and engagement is particularly important

4) Mapping Operations

- Fields – the continuous surface, the analogical equivalent of the actual ground as well as the graphical representation system.
- Extracts – are the things that are observed within a given milieu and drawn onto the graphic field.
- Plottings – entail the “drawing out” of new and latent relationships that can be seen amoingst the various extracts within the field.