Radical cartography How changing our maps can change our world

Review by Booklist Review

Rankin, associate professor of history at Yale, has synthesized his years of experience with mapmaking into a comprehensive exploration of the complexities of translating data visually onto a map. Chapters on boundaries, layers, people, projections, color, scale, and time outline the multiple parameters that affect map design, with color maps interspersed throughout effectively illustrating the concepts. The same statistics can tell a different story based on design--a map of neighborhood ethnicities in a jigsaw puzzle format, for example, is less nuanced than one that illustrates neighborhoods using a dot format. Rankin also references and reimagines historical maps, including those used by Lincoln during the Civil War, and highlights the work of Indigenous mapmakers. He discusses influential cartographers of the recent past, like William Bunge, Arno Peters, Jacques Bertin, and Arthur Robinson. Rankin effectively makes the case that "radical cartography resists the urge to show the world everywhere as crisp, clear and unambiguous" by embracing uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity. Readers interested in current possibilities in mapmaking and other types of data visualization will appreciate this far-reaching book.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This striking study from cartographer and historian Rankin (After the Map) explores the politics of mapmaking. "Maps aren't just collections of facts," Rankin writes, but are "profoundly cultural." What may seem like simple lines on paper can be "forms of social othering" and "the preferred tools of top-down management and control" (think redlining, gerrymandering, and "colonial partition"). Each chapter examines the politics and history behind a certain convention. In a chapter on boundaries, for instance, Rankin casts a critical eye on the 1920s University of Chicago sociologists who, seeking to "nudge their young field away" from the humanities "toward the prestige and influence of science," ended up creating an influential cartographic study of Chicago's racial segregation that had the effect, Rankin asserts, of "naturalizing" segregation as organic. In a chapter on layering in mapmaking, he examines how the reuse of the same printing plates to create the backgrounds for different maps reinforced certain political realities (like Indigenous dispossession, with "the background for precolonial Indigenous groups" showing "only rivers" rather than political boundaries). Rankin argues for a "radical" approach to cartography that not only spotlights marginalized groups but also is "less well-behaved," embracing noise and messiness; he includes several examples, among them an eye-catching one of his own design that depicts a white globe encircled in the red grip of its most prominent trade routes. Lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, this stuns. (Nov.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An in-depth, revisionist plunge into the extraordinary world of maps. Rankin, a Yale University historian, argues that it's time to reimagine what a map can be and how it can be used. We now have non-geographic maps of everything from social networks to the human genome. "Any map is now just a representation of data, a special case of visualization." Cartography becomes radical when "it embraces the inherentuncertainty,multiplicity, andsubjectivity of both our data and the world itself." Rankin organizes his lavishly illustrated book around seven basic features of maps: boundaries, layers, people, projections, color, scale, and time. Using Chicago as an example, he describes how community area boundary maps from the 1930s provided valuable sociological data that could result in changes to benefit people's daily lives. Rankin then discusses the work of Arthur Robinson, who transformed "cartography from a technical craft into an expansive social science of visual communication" from his position as chief of the Map Division during World War II, advancing the concept of layering in maps. Rankin also delves into Indigenous mapping and Lincoln's "slave-map." The author argues that, with maps, we "need to match the projection to the particularwe of the map, knowing that there are manywe that don't includeus at all." He's quite good at covering the politics of artificial and natural colors in maps, intentional and unintentional. He ponders whether scale comparisons are always colonial and objectifying. Lastly, he covers the dilemma of how maps can handle time, the rise of photographic cartography, photo-cinematic maps, and what Rankin calls "spatial memory," maps that show a relationship between the past and the present. These values he proposes for radical cartography in maps--uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity--have the potential to be a "tool for change." A challenging but edifying read about the power of maps. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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