Mapping é City“ Carroc cir. Mapping and Urban Space Denis Cosgrove URBAN SPACE AND CARTOGRAPHIC SPACE are inseparable. This is so historically, practi- cally, and conceptually. Urban origins, at Ur or Sumer for example, are revealed through the mapped reconstruction of their street geometry and building plot plans." Elev ation is the least durable element of urban form, horizontal plan the longest lasting. Urban archaeology reconstructs urban places through peeling back successive surfaces, like the pages of an historical atlas, and map- ping the stratigraphy of material deposi stretched across former urban space. From such material mappings we reconstruct not only its physical appearance but also the city’s social, political, commercial and relig- ious life. Practically, confrontation with an unfam- iliar city is typically mediated by the map: of transit routes, of streets, of tourist destina- tions. Urban experience in a new city is often a process of negotiating the divergence be tween cartographic and material spaces. In cities with complex underground rail systems, such as Tokyo, London or Paris, it can take years before the point pattern of stations familiar from the subway map is fully coor- dinated with the surface experience of town: scape. In great metropolises, possession and use of a standard street directory such as London’s pocket A~Z Guide or Los Angeles ‘Thomas Guide are signs of citizenship.* They have become cartographic icons of the cities whose streets and addresses they designate, Much more than functional instruments, aids to fixing destinations or following routes, they are bearers of urban meaning and char- acter: the map becomes to some degree the territory. Conceptually, the map has either preceded: the physical presence of the city or served to regulate and coordinate its continued exist ence. St. Petersburg, Washington DC, New Delhi, Brasilia, countless fortress and colo- nial cities, existed on paper before they had any material expression. Paris, Rome, Vienna, Amsterdam, Beijing, Jerusalem ~ virtually every great city ~ has been either recon- structed or expanded by means of a drawn, plan. And beyond the physical extension or reconstruction of urban space, the map has both recorded and determined countless aspects of urban life and citizenship. Maps of disease and morbidity, for example thecholera cartography of Victorian London Philadelphia, helped make the modern ttopolis a survivable space in the face of viruses and bacteria that thrive on sman density. Maps of social and ethnic tus have shaped the political life of urban smocracies, nowhere more dramatically in the case of 20th-century American ing maps, used by housing and loan com- ies for »red-lining« inner-city ghettoes later by government agencies to assert rights. In every way, the map registers city as a distinct place and a unique land- ‘Scape. Cartography acts not merely to record the various ways that the city is materially ent, but as a creative intervention in urban space, shaping both the physical city “and the urban life experienced and per- ‘formed there.* The ubiquity of cartography as a dimen- sion of urban life and form makes a compre- hensive survey of their relations impossible. ‘focus here on ways that the urban map is positioned between creating and recording the city. It is this dual function that releases _ the imaginative energy of mapping, and which has consistently attracted the attention of artists as well as technicians to urban ‘mapping. From the vast archive of urban ‘maps, plans and artistic interventions into urban mapping, I explore how the modern ‘ity as material and social space interacts _ with the map as scientific instrument and _ amtistic representation of its space and life. The complexity of the interaction is dra- Iatically apparent in post-modern Ameri- ‘ean cities such as Los Angeles, Houston or - Phoenix. These are perhaps the most inten- sively mapped spaces in the history and ge- ‘ography of the planet: every square meter is geo-coded by government and private or commercial agencies for purposes ranging from environmental protection, public health and safety, efficient transportation and tax- ation to property insurance, marketing, poli- tical persuasion and religious evangelism.’ Maps have played a critical role in shaping their physical spaces and land uses, and con- tinue to control the daily lives of citizens through zoning ordinances, zip codes and the myriad territorial regulations that shape urban daily life. Theoretically, scientific car- tography should make these cities highly rational, coherent spaces. Indeed, flying over a city such as Houston, a cartographic order is immediately visible in the repetitive grid of major streets, and within this the curvilinear geometry of residential roads and house lots, or in the rectangularity of office, produc- tion, storage/distribution and retail spaces. Yet, on the ground, such cities are among the least »legible« places on earth. Moving 1 Adam T. Smith, The Political Londzcape, Constellations of Authority in Early Camper Patties Berkeley and Los Angeles, 20031 2 Appropriately, London's Geographers A-2 Guide can be held in the hand and carried inthe pocket, Los Angeles’ Thomas Guide, by conteast, is designed to ston the paccengor seat of a car. 3. Most histories of eroon form are illustrated with maps and plans but rarely explore critically the precise rela tions between these images and the built form of cites. See for example Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and Cluiiation in Western Civitan London, 1994: Joseph Rykwer, The Seduction af Place. Te City in the Twenty-first Century New Yerk, 2000) 4 For historical examples, see Ola Saderetrsm, +Papor Cities: Visual Thinking in Urban Ptanning.« in Eeurmone, 3 119961. pp. 249-281. For a more contemporary discussion af the processes of negotiating urban space planning through maps see Gla Soderstram, Elena Cogato Lanza, Roderick J. Lawrence and Gilles Bary, Lusoge dv projet, Editions Payet (Lausanne, 2000 5 On Los Angeles for example, see Greg Hise, Mognetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentiet-Ceniury Metropolis {Battimore and Londen, 1997) and idem and William Deveral, Eden by Design, The 1990s Olmsted-Berttolem- ‘new Plan forthe Greater Los Angeles Region (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000)