Mapping Conversations With The Land
How should we map complex, appealing forms? Oxford, 1994.
Avoid Maps With Too Much Information
I have always enjoyed this very short story from Jose Louis Borges:
On Exactitude in Science
... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658
Borges, J. L. 1998. On exactitude in science. P. 325, In, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (Trans. Hurley, H.) Penguin Books.
There is no such thing as an accurate map. In fact, an accurate map would be a fiction – it would contradict the idea of the map which is to create a collective judgment about the land and avoid attention to non-meaningful data. The more detail planners add to a map the less they demonstrate a collective judgement about the relevant places that are the subject of the map. Inevitably when presenting a planning concept to a community someone looks at the map and states “the map is wrong.” They usually mean that some point or line on the map does not match precisely with the reality of the land as they know it (or as they hope it will be known in the future). In that simple sense they are quite right. The abstract lines on the map are never seen on the ground. Abstract lines often represent a reality inconsistent with someone’s personal experience, legal documents, previous maps, or some other observation of the land. Some people understand maps as abstractions while others believe that without literal exactitude the map is “wrong” and therefore any plans based on the cartography are wrong.
Today, no one expects a high degree of accuracy from all web-based maps – we just assume digital maps are inaccurate to some extent. So why does “accuracy” matter so much in planning? Planning maps impact people’s lives in a more direct and profound way. The wrong boundary for a zoning district is far more significant to a local resident than the wrong directions to a local restaurant. The content of effective maps in planning must go beyond simple measurement to communicate insights and meaningful concepts.
Too often planners act as if they should always provide more maps, with more data, covering larger areas with more detail. Current geographic information systems (GIS) facilitate this behavior and the amount of data that communicated grows exponentially. The capacity of digital maps to include more information is both a boon and a burden. Just as the map in the Borges allegory became so exhaustive it became useless, so too can digital data systems become so overwhelming that that the task of finding meaningful knowledge, if not wisdom, becomes increasingly improbable.
Excerpt from Caledonia Wisconsin plan communicates the imprecision of neighborhood boundaries. PDI/GRAEF, Caledonia, 2006.
Good Maps Require Talented Communicators
Graphic communication does not replace text-based communication. Maps do not replace photographs. We can look at maps and also view pictures, read the text, tables, and diagrams. They all contribute to our understanding of the land and its places. Maps, however, create the best way for planners to connect communities directly to the land.
Once our maps go beyond the simple recording of territory – property and parcel lines – we are confronted with a much harder and more significant communication task. That is, planners draw maps that contain ideas. The ideas are given a shape on the map – they must have a shape, or they do not become part of the map and not part of the land. The lines on the map represent abstract concepts, not precise points on the ground. All of the following are ideas drawn on maps: flood ways, rights-of-way, historic preservation zones, enterprise zones, tourist districts, market areas, mountain ranges, shorelines, places of interest, locations of criminal activity, bus routes. These words imply generalizable concepts that, when placed on a map, communicate historic, contemporary, and future places on the land.
Every line on a map needs a definition. These definitions (found in a “key” or “legend”) may be more important than the lines themselves. Planners should begin maps by defining the story to be told on the map and then creating a legend that communicates the corresponding narrative. If the legend is not meaningful then the map will not be meaningful.
As we change the legend we change the points, lines, and planes on the map. In my practice, we often create land use plans that are “place-based” not zoning-based or parcel-based. The “places” come from evaluation of the land in a specific area. A place-based map of the land can apply tools like form-based policies for implementation — policies that communicate directly with the land. Effective place-based maps are customized to their unique locations and contexts. For example, a customized place-based map telling the story of a neighborhood in one city is not likely to match the story that should be told about a neighborhood in another community. At the same time, as we learn the elements of places in one neighborhood that knowledge helps us gain insights to better describe another neighborhood.
Excerpt from the Glenview Comprehensive Plan that communicates multiple land uses by building (not parcels) and ground level uses by the perimeter of the building footprint. PDI/GRAEF, Glenview, 2004.
Do Not Copy Customized Maps
When a community implements a customized solution to a customized problem, it may be declared an “innovation.” Within a few days someone may copy that concept, without customizing it to the new context. Online sites abound with the newest innovation in planning or design, but vary little in the degree to which any so-called innovation is transferable to a different place. When planners copy ideas out of context, those good ideas get weaker. When we want to reuse an idea, we should apply a process of critical thinking, observation, and communication with the land. We should not pretend that a non-transferable solution will work. It might work, but there are no short cuts.
For decades planners have copied, verbatim, zoning codes from one place to another place that is completely “out-of-context” with disastrous consequences. Copying the required setback from a historic colonial neighborhood on the East Coast to a rural village in the Midwest represents a complete lack of understanding places. There are times when copying text from one code to another is helpful and times where it is harmful. Too often codes are copied because the planners cannot, or will not, use the graphic communication skills needed to customize codes. The convenient assumption that one place on the land is just like another may be an unfortunate American legacy. I find it disturbingly ironic that Jefferson was so skilled in customizing the form of his own home and yet applied the most relentless authoritarian system to the form of the land for everyone else.
Learn Planning Graphics
Regardless of how well we customize land and its places, planners must still find ways to use graphics effectively. The graphic elements with which we draw maps are akin to different words in a language. Graphic design and communication are a way to listen to, and speak about, the land. Beautiful, well-designed maps abound in books about cities, planning and urban design. These books contain excellent graphic observations of public places. When first-timers draw a map, just like the first time a child starts to speak, they may depict maps that seem visually simplistic without an adequate graphic vocabulary or grammar. There is very little universal education in our grade school, high school, or college systems, to help the general population learn graphic communication. Even professional planning programs lack adequate instruction in graphic communication. In the long run, good planning cannot succeed with continued graphic literacy.
The lack of education regarding graphic communication becomes more harmful when we communicate future plans and intentions. In the last decades, the ability to use technology for visual communication has increased exponentially. Instead of educating more people about graphic communication, however, we just make it easier to miscommunicate. For example, with a few clicks we create photo-realistic images of places that seem real and desirable but are actually inauthentic or infeasible. Today graphic depictions have less relevance to actual places and contexts and instead represent a well-crafted delusion with little authentic opportunity for change.
The problem of graphic validity worsens as new software creates pre-packaged graphic systems that lull us into thinking that anyone can create a useful map. The appearance of effective and seemingly intelligent graphics makes the situation worse when it is devoid of critical thinking. Mapping becomes clicking. Machine learning should be an asset to intelligence, not a replacement. The latest software rarely creates insights customized to each place but rather abstracts the information to a level at which it no longer has local meaning.
The increased ability to draw maps often depicts useless data, not insightful commentary. Someone may call a map “innovative” because they have not seen it previously. Such a map may be new or original because it uses exceptionally detailed, colorful and precise graphic techniques that are unconventional. If, however, the graphics (including the legend) lie outside the realm of the audience’s visual literacy they may be meaningless. Every day there are fewer meaningful needles in these ever-growing haystacks of digital maps.
Landmarks come in many forms with varied meanings — a storied tree showing natural history in Wisconsin to a wall mural in Boston depicting social justice issues. Wisconsin, 2009; Boston, 1968.
Maps Help Make Landmarks
The points, lines, and planes on the map link us to the land through technical surveys. As a planner we usually ignore surveying or, at best, consider it a minor technical issue to be resolved. In practice, surveying, actually delimits what we impose on the land. Surveying takes an abstract system for imposing intentions on the land and makes it real. The land is filled with the physical elements that link surveys to the land. When we fly over the United States the expansive grid looks anything but abstract. Yet that is how it began – as a system of recording our intentions over private property that, over time, has become an integral part of the land. When I imply that the land can think and speak, the fly-over image of the one-mile grid provides clear evidence. The idea of the grid came from the government, but the land-form makes it a reality. That grid, laid out on a map regardless of natural geography, has shaped our world profoundly, not always for the better.
Points, lines, and planes become marks on the land. Some marks rise to cultural fame and become official “landmarks.” Memorials to wars and their consequences are always foremost when we mention broad cultural landmarks. At a smaller scale, local neighborhood tragedies and victories may be commemorated. A landmark for just a few people on a block – is still a landmark. That is, a landmark need not have community-wide recognition. We also have our own personal landmarks – like the house of a friend or a favorite tavern or a single tree.
By definition, however, a community landmark must have shared community recognition. A proclamation, by one individual or group, does not become a landmark if it is not acknowledged over time by a larger community. Sometimes planners and designers claim their ideas, if implemented, will become a landmark. If this pronouncement does not materialize in the minds of the community, then an intended landmark may become an empty gesture. What is, and what is not, a true landmark is a significant question that has no readily apparent answer. Listening to the “marks” on the land and trying to interpret their shared meanings can be difficult for even the best planners.
Landmarks, national or neighborhood, represent ideas about our history — ideas that often begin as a point on a map. Most planners see landmarks as positive statements about our communities. The mall in Washington D.C. is a district filled with landmarks representing different ideas at different times in our history. The social value of a landmark changes over time. A landmark can invoke societal victories or terrible memories. In Oxford, England the Martyr’s Memorial commemorates people who were burned at the stake for their religious beliefs. Almost 500 years after their death, that landmark now serves as a tourist attraction amidst a business street. In Rome, a statue marks the location where the Vatican burned Jordano Bruno to death. His statue, facing away from the Vatican, has become the centerpiece of a popular marketplace. Landmarks arise around events that create strong community-wide emotions. These events can be massacres or celebrations, deaths or births, acts of violence or virtue. Over time the emotional intensity wanes and, hopefully, leads to a collective acceptance of past events and their social significance. Or, as we have seen recently, sometimes communities decide landmarks need to be removed. But more often, the landmarks become part of the land, the place, and the living cultural history of the community.
This block plan with a figure-ground of retail buildings validates the potential value of small corner stores in underserved neighborhoods in Midtown. PDI/GRAEF, Milwaukee, 1990s.
Beyond Landmarks, Maps Show Concepts
The conversation with the land can be extended beyond just individual landmarks to other more complex patterns of form and places. Kevin Lynch (Image of the City) named five such types of places: paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks. Many writers, who are not planners, found this simple model easy to understand and use Lynch’s five-point categories as an explanation of the complexities of city form. Any of these types of places can carry helpful or harmful ideas, but only if they “take place” — that is, the ideas associated with the form of places have to be drawn on a map to be linked to the land. Any one of these types of places (such as an “edge”) can, in fact, take on many different manifestations from railroads to rivers, from a string of fences to a major highway. One person’s “edge” may be another person’s “path.”
The study of cognitive maps — the imagined map in our mind — also arises as a critical example of the relationship of maps to places on the land. Cognitive maps were hypothesized as the maps we carry in our mind’s eye of our neighborhoods (and sequences of movement through those neighborhoods). Our memory holds cognitive maps of how to get from our residence to a job, school, store, etc. In hindsight this is an odd concept because it implies that there are non-cognitive maps or non-imaginary maps. Somehow the hard copy map we buy or download from the web is not “imaginary” but real. Anyone who has used a web-based map will know that they are partially unreliable – they are imagined routes and sequences that do not always match the reality we experience. Many people have viewed a digital navigation device that does not match the reality outside the car windshield. Directions from point A to B often vary with the person (or device) providing an answer. Is the map in our head better than the map on our phone?
When planners present maps, the ideas depicted become important almost immediately. That is, the places on the maps become statements that can range from technical and functional changes to aesthetics and ideological shifts. When such statements become highly political the maps embody debates and their consequences. The maps themselves become famous or notorious as great ideas or great tragedies, regardless of details. Sometimes the ideas on maps become disasters — the Garden City of Tomorrow, the Radiant City, and Broadacre City come to mind.
Other concepts on maps, less ideological and more humanist, have had happier impacts. Typically, these ideas are not remembered as diagrams embedded in famous maps but rather implemented in our famous cities — cities like San Francisco, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Savannah, and great neighborhoods like Cobble Hill in New York, Georgetown in Washington D.C. and Uptown in Chicago. The success of these places comes, in part, from the planners that created these places by engaging in conversations with the land — conversations about ideas and aspirations, not just property and functions. On rare occasions the diagram on the map produces a favorable outcome. Daniel Burnham’s famous quote (as related to the Plan of Chicago by Burnham and Bennett) comes to mind:
“ ... a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.”
Children playing in fantasy coach. Is this image poignant, distressing, neither or both? Camden, 1968.
Connecting Ideas And Land — Culture, Screams, and Daily Life
Planners often incorrectly describe a jurisdictional area (city, town, village, state, nation, watershed) as if it was a singular entity we could see, just like people oversimplify descriptions of a mountain or lake. When we look at older maps, we can see the history of the abstract lines and how they have changed over time, encompassing different ideologies, political systems and places. At a small scale, for example, since I moved to Milwaukee the maps of neighborhoods change about once a decade. At a larger scale, growing up in New York City, I learned that my grandmother was born in a place she called the Austro-Hungarian Empire; my aunt noted that my grandmother was actually born in place called Poland; when I looked it up around 2000 I found she was born in the Ukraine; as I write this (while Russia is attacking Ukraine) I do not know where she will be born as of tomorrow. The context changes constantly.
Conversations with the land rarely end with the analysis of the current context. When we do analyze the context and develop an appropriate plan for a particular place, that context and plan will change over time. The maps that we draw provide a useful record of where we have been and our past intentions for the future. The map, its legend, and the land all become part of one story or conversation with the land. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the map is grafted or transposed onto the land.
This evolution can be imagined as a large tapestry of ideas that covers the planet, settles into the land and then becomes part of the land itself. The tapestry slowly transposes itself onto the land. The tapestry reflects the past and tells us what has happened. Often, we do not see, listen to, or interpret the tapestry. We just want to transpose another set of lines, colors, and legends on to the land. One argument might be that our transposition of ideas onto the land should be thoughtful and conservative. We should not say too much to the land because it may come back to us in an unwanted manner. The land will live longer than we will and in the end the land will have the last word in any conversation.
Many models of planning suggest that we should leave a small footprint on the land rather than the marks of major interventions. However, it is not the size of the footprint, but its ideational and cultural content of that footprint, that might be most significant. The ideas that underlie and overlay our cities and our places are the most important parts of our conversation with the land.
Walter Benjamin’s collection of essays and writings found in his book The Arcades Project describes the cultural, artistic, ideological and philosophical history of Paris. It constitutes an overwhelming set of ideas and philosophies that are part of the built form of Paris. Here are just two quotes from his work describing Paris streets (page 518) and then later when describing Arcades (page 878):
[Page 518]
Not only city and interior but city and open air can become entwined, and this intertwining can occur much more concretely. There is the Place du Maroc in Belleville: that desolate heap of stones with its rows of tenements became for me, when I happened on it one Sunday afternoon, not only a Moroccan desert but also, and at the same time, a monument of colonial imperialism; topographic vision was entwined with allegorical meaning in this square, yet not for an instant did it lose its place in the heart of Belleville. But to awaken such a view is something ordinarily reserved for intoxicants. And in such cases, in fact, street names are like intoxicating substances that make our perceptions more stratified and richer in spaces. One could call the energy by which they transport us into such a state their vertu evocatrice, their evocative power – but that is saying too little; for what is decisive here is not the association but the interpenetration of images. This state of affairs may be adduced, as well, in connection with certain pathological phenomena: the patient who wanders the city at night for hours on end and forgets the way home is perhaps in the grip of this power.
[Page 878]
Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally wakeful, eternally agitated being that – in the space between the building fronts – lives, experiences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their "Post No Bills" are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the cafe terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household. The section of railing where road workers hang their jackets is the vestibule, and the gateway which leads from the row of courtyards out into the open is the long corridor that daunts the bourgeois, being for the courtyards the entry to the chambers of the city. Among these latter, the arcade was the drawing room. More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses.
Seeing the flowers makes you realize that the occupant of this place cares deeply about their environment. Baltimore, 1968.
After reading Benjamin’s work it should become impossible to map cities as anything but a never-ending conversation between the land and the places built upon it. A less lyrical but equally powerful image of a conversation with the land is evident in the painting called “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. The first time I looked at this painting I presumed the person in the foreground, the main figure, was screaming. Later on, I looked at it differently. I saw the person covering their ears to block out the sound of a scream coming from the background — it is the land that screams at people.
It is not hard to imagine a wide range of places that could be examples of the way in which the land screams at us — not just places that embody immorality and cruelty, but places which, by themselves, could be judged as offensive to the land — both the built and natural environments. Maybe some of the irresponsible housing developments we have built are so offensive that the land responds with a constant scream that can be stopped only by demolition. At the same time, it also must be possible that our conversation with the land may not involve screaming, but a more civil conversation with both the built and natural environments. Everyday ordinary streets can still communicate a pleasant feeling, provide helpful activities, and remain long-lasting. How can we plan and make such places?
In his diary, in an entry headed "Nice 22 January 1892," Munch wrote: “One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.” Reference in Wikipedia from Stanska, Zuzanna, "The Mysterious Road From Edvard Munch's The Scream," from the Daily Art Magazine.
Topic summary
Avoid maps with too much information
Good maps require talented communicators
Do not copy customized maps
Learn planning graphics
Maps help make landmarks
Beyond landmarks, maps show concepts
Connecting ideas and land – culture, screams, and daily life