Maps as Place

The excellent Ecotone wiki has moved on to Maps as Place for its bimonthly topic.

Maps I think are a language, not a place. They translate what you see as you walk around into another medium, a story if you like, a story that you can take away and reread. Like any language some of us are more fluent than others and can read them in the original - we can look at a map and visualise what it represents. I find that easier with rural mapping than with urban. I can read the topography and get some idea of the landform, although crucially the vegetation will be missing except in the most rudinentary form.

With urban mapping however there is no building equivalent of the contour and so the key issue of enclosure is missing. That square we see could be surrounded by a series of single storey sheds or by the most elegant of Georgian terraces. While there are often clues in things like road layout, usually the place has to be experienced in the 'original language' for the urban map to mean something. Pushing the metaphor too far perhaps, urban mapping needs some sort of Rosetta Stone - photographs, written descriptions, personal experience for a full ranslation to be possible.