Читать книгу The Politics of Mapping - Bernard Debarbieux - Страница 19

Ultimately, 40 years after the publication of Cartes et Figures de la Terre (Centre Georges Pompidou 1980), and 30 years after the writings of Harley and other researchers, who furthered the critical approach to cartography, this book intends to contribute to the assessment of the work produced under this banner. It also aims to question the challenges posed by the technical, social and political changes in mapping, the forms and effects of which, although the subject of a growing number of analyses, have not yet given rise to large-scale syntheses. The preceding introductory elements were therefore intended as much as to sketch a genealogy of works questioning the relationship between mapping and “politique” (politics/polity/policies) as to underline the main issues that have run through them. Whether through the analysis of forms of representation or modes of production – authoritarian, participatory or contesting – they all enable us, to one degree or another, to see how mapping participates in “ordering the world” (Noucher et al. 2019), which concerns both the inhabited world and social and political worlds.

Apart from two of them which deal with the power effects of state cartography in a historical perspective (Farinelli and Debarbieux), the chapters that follow focus on the analysis of very current issues: the use of participatory mapping (Burini, Lardon), opening up the field of possibilities of mapping production to semiological and political innovations (Lévy), uses aiming at illustrating and defending the interests of Indigenous peoples (Hirt), the challenges posed by the explosion of data and digital mapping (Gautreau and Noucher), including in the work of international organizations (Dao), the use of alternative forms of representation to contribute to public debates (Clochard) and the changing modalities of state cartography applied to land use planning policies (Bailly).

However, these chapters take contrasting forms. The first group (Lévy, Farinelli, Gautreau and Noucher, Burini) is made up of essays: they are less concerned with offering a panorama of the academic production on the issues dealt with than with offering a personal reading. A second group (Debarbieux, Dao, Hirt) brings together texts that share a more encyclopedic concern; they attempt to identify the main orientations of the many works related with the chosen theme. A third group (Lardon, Bailly, Clochard) is made up of accounts of experiences: the authors are cartographers who are heavily involved in interactions with administrations, elected officials, groups of inhabitants and associations, and they show practical methods of mapping within particular political contexts: the past 20 years of cartography within the French administration of regional planning (Bailly), various territorial diagnosis and projects of local or regional scope (Lardon) and cartographic works aiming to illustrate migratory issues on modes capable of changing their representations (Clochard).