My first love was OS 174. No, not a bot, but the Ordnance Survey one-inch-to-one-mile map of a stretch of the North Cornwall coast, where my parents took me on holiday. That love, coupled with two enthusiastic teachers, made me a geographer. But, for the most part, I have remained a consumer, rather than a maker or connoisseur, of maps. Which makes me the sort of reader that William Rankin mostly aims to reach in his latest book. With architectural training and experience, Rankin became a historian who, for two decades, has immersed himself in the cartographic and geographic literatures. Indeed, he opens with a story and discussion of William Bunge, a self-styled radical geographer who, in the late 1960s, produced an influential package of maps of Fitzgerald, a Detroit neighbourhood. But, perhaps confusingly, Rankin does not use “radical” in the same way as Bunge. He's very aware of the political and cultural meaning of maps, indeed draws our attention to that, and on balance leans left, but he is above all concerned with the style of maps, not their subject matter. To that end, in successive chapters he takes us through seven stylistic elements that are embodied in, and help communicate the message of, any map: the choice of boundaries, the layer(s) of information, the people who populate it, the manner of projection, the selection of colour and scale, along with whether and how the element of time is built into it. Throughout, he wants to show us how to read a map for its (often implicit) argument, and therefore the values it embodies. As the subtitle to the book suggests, he does not see this as a purely academic matter. Maps, like words, reflect our world but can also be used to shape it. He includes a wide variety of examples. Not surprisingly, there is a United States bias, but there are others of, and from around, the world. Readers of this journal will be interested to know that he includes two Canadian examples, one brief and one extended. He includes, and briefly discusses, a map from volume three of the Historical Atlas of Canada, pointing out that it effectively shows the temporal dimension to the geography of postwar fertility (Kerr et al., 1990). Earlier, in the chapter on layers, he discusses at length the making and significance of Indigenous maps of the Arctic in the 1970s. These show how very different the settler and Inuit understandings of space, place, boundaries, and meaning could be. Although Rankin doesn't point this out, these were an example of what geographers have called “mental maps.” There's plenty to like here, and not just for Canadian geographers. The physical book is attractively produced, with glossy pages and plenty of colour illustrations. (There is of course a digital version.) Many of the maps are fascinating, and even surprising, at least to this reader. To make his point, Rankin often counterpoints an original map with one that he has made, showing how the intended message might have been clarified, or altered. And, historian that he is, he often uses helpful historical examples, while opening chapters or subsections with an engaging narrative which provides meaningful context to a concrete example. Like Mark Monmonier's How to lie with maps which, between 1991 and 2018, went through three editions, Radical cartography is a book that could interest and inform almost anyone who has used a map. But I do have a couple of reservations. The first is that, although he does cite Monmonier's work, and indeed that of many geographers, cartographers, and others, Rankin doesn't indicate, even briefly, what he thinks his book adds to the literature. Inevitably, he makes some of the same points as Monmonier, but at greater length, while adding others within a different organizational framework. In other words, they are complementary and could usefully be read together. My other criticism is that there are apparent inconsistencies. One of Rankin's more frequent criticisms is of simplified maps with sharp borders. Chicago, Illinois, provides examples: not just Burgess's rings, a model of urban morphology, still familiar to many geographers, but also the “community areas” (p. 36) that were drawn up in the 1920s, and which are still used today even though their social character has changed and “smooth transitions,” rather than sharp segregation, “are the norm” (p. 40). But some transitions are still in fact sharp, and although the alternative map that Rankin shows us is indeed more nuanced and accurate, it must be reproduced in colour and at a larger scale. Another example is a map of America's domestic air travel network which, Rankin argues, “quietly hardens the distinction between foreign and domestic space,” in effect creating “a theory of territory” (pp. 58–59). Arguably true. But, if the purpose of the map is to show domestic routes, then focusing our attention on those alone could make sense. And then later, discussing a map that he has made of the geography of Hispanics in the United States (p. 90) he, too, draws the sharp line at the border, thereby directing attention away from the effect of cross-border connections. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The point is that our judgement of any map depends on the purposes of the people who made and used it. This is an argument that, elsewhere, Rankin emphasizes and demonstrates to great effect. In many ways, Radical cartography is a pleasure to read and ponder. It should interest any geographer, and indeed anyone with even a casual interest in maps. The abundance of striking images might well engage others, too. But I do wish, as one of his examples, he had commented on the OS Landranger series, and perhaps even O.S. 174, now printed at the 1:50,000 scale.
Richard Harris (Thu,) studied this question.
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