Recently, all and sundry had the chance to rummage through LSE Geography’s map library and liberate any maps of their choosing. Naturally some got over excited (cf. James Cheshire) and took numerous maps of all sorts. I was slightly more selective, and whilst being mostly on the look out for maps that represented social areas (cf. Booth Maps) I did find one particularly interesting map.

The map is by Carl Steinitz, from a time when he was at MIT Department of City and Regional Planning, it appears to be made using Symap. The map is entitled “The Principle Local Activity of a Place”. I think this title is both fascinating, and in terms of the development of spatial analysis quite telling. First however, some background.

Carl Steinitz is a Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has been a regular visitor at CASA for as long as I’ve been at UCL. He trained as an architect and planner, but became known as an early evangelist of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), his ongoing work concerns the design of environments, often urban, and the use of GIS to describe possible development trajectories. I respect him most for his impassioned stance against needless 3d visualisations, particularly if those visualisation have a musical backing.

Symap, aka synergraphic mapping system, is one of the first software packages that could create outputs that actively resemble current desktop GIS outputs. It was developed in the mid-1960s and carried with it a distinctive style of using ascii characters in order to draw map elements. Andrew Crooks has a couple of interesting examples and some background on his blog.

Now the map in question here doesn’t seem to have a date, which is a shame, and it does not give a specific location to the mapped area, although given that the map was made in MIT it becomes apparent that the area in question is Boston, Massachusetts with the Charles River Basin in the north of the map, and Boston Harbour to the east. The legend denotes different kinds of ‘principle local activity’, using different ascii characters to create a colour graduation. Unfortunately some of the particular legend categories are lost due to the low quality of reproduction on this particular map, nevertheless we see that Boston exhibits a distinct spatial patterning with respect to principle activity. This kind of map is not unusual, land use mapping is still an actively researched area that continues to generate copious debate – what interests me actually seems rather minor, it is the description of the map as presenting “The principle local activity of a place” (emphasis added). Initially I wondered whether this phrasing was simply standard boilerplate, but a google search couldn’t find the exact phrase, or variations on it, anywhere else on the web (which is not to say that it isn’t standard, simply that it doesn’t exist on google, I imagine it would have appeared had it been related to statistical reporting at some time or another). What it may mean then is that it marks the way in which the author Carl Steinitz saw the representation at the time: as a representation of the local activity of a place.

This is interesting, first it is easy to assume that by place he meant ‘Boston’, Boston is after all a place. However, scale has a very interesting role to play in how we think about place: we can conceive of many places within Boston centred around communities of all kinds, these places will be at least partially defined by the ‘local activities’ that occur there. As such the gridded representation of this map hints at the possibility of lots of places within Boston each with particular autobiographies, and each engaging people in different ways and offering different opportunities. Subsequent advances in GIS formalised the discourse of ‘space’ and spatial analysis, after all GIS does fundamentally hinge on the euclidian system of representation, and as such the vast, expansive idea of space sits much better than a nuanced, specific, local concept such as place. It would be easy to disregard Steinitz’s map and say that of course it simply assesses land use in Boston by a grid of systematically defined areas, but that designation of ‘place’ – purposeful or not- adds another layer of interpretation. Fundamentally it gives a different sense to what it is being represented here.

Michel Foucault introduces the idea of ‘heterotopias’ in his essay ‘of other spaces‘. In this work he first establishes that the present epoch will be the epoch of space: of simultaneity, juxtaposition, near and far, side by side and dispersed.

This pronouncement bodes well for geography as a discipline, but perhaps not for GIS. Foucault, as with other authors who could be thought to be ‘poststructuralist’, is against a determistic views of time and space; a view most evident in GIS where order in space is established through data structures and explicit object hierarchies. However, he also notes that the current understanding of places as ‘sites’ is linked to contemporary technologies.

Sites themselves don’t constitute space or place however, space and place are constructed by the relationships between sites. Thus GIS may have the capability to manage sites- which deal with the relationships and proximity between different objects as defined by structures (series, trees or grids) as well as the demographic issue of placing and attributing things within a site, i.e. siting- but not space and place itself.

Foucault defines heterotopias as sites which relate to all other sites, but suspect, neutralise and invert the relations that they have- basically a site which is linked ot all others but inherently contradict them. Foucault gives examples of heterotopias as sites such as hospitals, schools, cemetaries etc – sites in which societal norms are replaced by another norm which has the effect of challenging and inverting the societal norm and creates instead an ‘unreal space’. Another way of thinking of a heterotopia is as a reflection in a mirror- the image you see is a real place, but reflected to a virtual location and thus inverted.

From this, it is clear to see that we can think of GIS as heterotopias. Any given GIS, depending on the work that it is being used for, contains a set of sites that exist in the real world, but which, within the GIS, are reflections. These reflections are not real places, but abstractions and generalisations of real places projected in an absolute, virtual, space.

Foucault goes onto define some of the properties of heterotopias, most of which apply to GIS. Most heterotopias are heterotopias of deviation, this can be seen to be the case in GIS where norms of societies are replaced by mathematical and geometrical norms, similarly (as discussed in Pavlovskaya, 2006 and 2009 in a previous post) heterotopias are remade by societies as they change, as indeed are GIS. A heterotopia, like a GIS, is often linked to slices in time, taking everything up to a certain point, or simply taking a moment; it is this charactersitic in GIS that means that it has trouble handling temporal data. Heterotopias have rights of entry and are not freely accessible, perhaps this is also true of GIS which require a different way of conceptualising space to the norm. Perhaps the most important aspect though is the following: a heterotopia is a space which is ‘other’, it can be seen as the mirrored ‘perfect’ space- as well ordered as our real space is disordered. Thus the GIS cements its position as a tool for interpreting the conceptual model of our world, in doing this it is the ‘heterotopia of compensation’.

postscript: I’ve recently been reading Generation A by Douglas Coupland, the novel really dovetails together the ideas of unreality in things like maps and earth-observation images and the challenging of societal norms. The insight is similar and conguent with viewing GIS as a heterotopia.

My colleague Paul Richards has started a blog related to his research on crime, mapping and fear. Thinking about ‘fear of crime’ and its various definitions caused me to remember my favourite interpretation from Teresa Caldeira, in her book “City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo“.

“The talk of crime – that is , everyday conversations, commentaries, discussions, narratives and jokes that have crime and fear as their subject – is contagious. Once one case is described, many others are likely to follow. The talk of crime is also fragmentary and repetitive. It breaks into many exchanges, punctuating them, and repeats the same history, or variations of it, commonly using only a few narrative devices. In spite of the repetition people are never bored. Rather, they seem compelled to keep talking about crime as if the endless analysis of cases could help them cope with their perplexing experiences or the arbitrary and unusual nature of violence. The repetition of histories, however, only serves to reinforce people’s feelings of danger, insecurity, and turmoil. Thus the talk of crime feeds a circle in which fear is both dealt with and reproduced, and violence is both counteracted and magnified” – (Caldiera, 2000 p.19)

Thus fear of crime derives from narratives about crime, much in the same way that place is constructed by narrative, or ‘stories so far’ as per Massey (2005). The suggestion of this kind of interpretation relates to the plural nature of crime and the social construction of fear of crime – it is a constantly revisited and reappraised phenomena.

References

Caldeira, T. (2000) City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Massey, D. (2005) For Space, Sage, London.