INTRODUCTION CARTOGRAPHY & POWER LÉOPOLD LAMBERT
A U.S. Airforce A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft lands on the autobahn A29 near city of Ahlhorn (West Germany) during NATO-exercise in March 1984. / Photograph by Sra Glenda Pellum.
“Plan-relief” of Grenoble, France in 1848. / Collections du Musée des Plans-Reliefs de Paris, photograph by Martin Leveneur (2012).
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?” “About six inches to the mile.” “Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yard to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” (Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893.) Welcome to the eighteenth issue of The Funambulist, Cartography & Power. Associating these two words together will come as no surprise for most readers. Just like architecture (which 10
requires plans, i.e. cartography, to be designed), cartography does not constitute a neutral discipline that can be equally used to implement either state violence or resistive endeavors. Cartography is inherently an instrument of power and, as such, it has the propensity to facilitate the violence of military and administrative operations. All contributors to this issue begin (whether explicitly or not) with this axiom and seek for methods of mapping that can serve political struggles mobilizing against the dominant order. I personally take issue in the notion of “counter-mapping,” as some call these methods, as using the term “counter-“ as a label gives a comforting certitude to their authors that they are not reproducing the violent effects of regular mapping. There is not a discipline fundamentally dissociated from cartography (or architecture, for that matter) whose practice could guarantee us of “doing good.” As we argued in issue 16 (March-April 2018), Proletarian Fortresses, architects’ current common practice of mapping self-built urbanities of all kinds — organized neighborhoods or temporary political encampments — should be questioned as to whether they serve these THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER
