Para el cartógrafo “entender” nada tiene que ver con explicar y, muchos menos, con revelar. Para él no hay nada arriba (cielos de la trascendencia) ni abajo (brumas de la esencia). Lo que hay arriba, abajo y por todos lados, son intensidades buscando expresión. Lo que él quiere es bucear en la geografía de los afectos y, al mismo tiempo, inventar puentes para hacer su travesía: puentes de lenguaje.
Es notorio que, para el cartógrafo, el lenguaje no es un vehículo de mensajes y salvación. Es en sí mismo creación de mundos. Alfombra mágica. Vehículo que promueve la transición hacia otros mundos, nuevas formas de historia. Incluso, hasta podemos decir que, en la práctica del cartógrafo, se integran Historia y Geografía.
Eso nos permite hacer dos observaciones más: para el cartógrafo el problema no es el de lo falso vs. lo verdadero, ni el de lo teórico vs. lo empírico, pero sí el de lo vital vs. lo destructivo, el de lo activo vs. lo reactivo. Lo que él quiere es participar, embarcarse en la constitución de territorios existenciales, constitución de realidad.
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really absolutely hate it when white ppl regurgitate the “fuck imperialism fuck the liberal nation-state no borders!!!1!” trope
i see it dangerously close and tangentially related to the whole “we’re all human” thing (problematic for obvious reasons, none the least of which being that we’re certainly not all treated as human), and as people who construct(ed) the borders and continue to benefit from them in material ways on a daily basis, it certainly rings a little hollow and contrived from whites’ mouths. it feels like a catch-phrase they’ve learned to say and like it has basically no meaning. i really don’t think that people who have not experienced colonialism could ever possibly understand the complexities of border issues and what’s at stake in a gross claim like “fuck borders.”
if you’ve never had your right to life on your ancestral lands called into question, if you’ve never experienced the intergenerational trauma of forced removal, if you’ve never had to cross a border to survive, if you’ve never had your land stolen from you, never had to stand helpless watching your lands be destroyed and your cultural ideas of territory negated & erased, or never experienced life in an area of land struggle, then how could you possibly understand border violence?
the irony is that the bulk of the foundational postcolonial theory that a lot of white activists casually cite was born out of anticolonial sovereignty struggles that had everything to do with borders. the Third World movement, waves of anticolonial resistance…all of that was predicated on self-determination & sovereignty—for a formerly colonized people, the right to govern their own nation/lands is a major part of liberation. colonized people of color worldwide have given their lives defending that right to a nation of their own.
borders are not the problem, they’re a scapegoat for lazy people. colonizer-drawn and imposed borders & ideas of nationhood/territory are the crux of the issue, and thus ongoing colonialism & (neo)colonial socio-political relations are the fundamental problem. obviously not all cultures share the same ideas of nation or territory, so it would stand to reason that there are probably (and definitely are) some ideological border formations out there that are not inherently violent. total decolonization would require the radical transformation of global cartography defined by capitalist-cartesian spatial demarcations of power, allowing for indigenous (in the broadest sense of the word) self-determination not only of borders themselves, but of what those borders mean and how they are understood.
so to all people who casually shout out “fuck borders” with no context or nuance: you’re not an ally (especially not to ppl who are still experiencing ongoing colonial occupation), you’re just lazy.
576 notes (via nitanahkohe)
How the Internet Reinforces Inequality in the Real World - The Atlantic Cities
“Maps have always had a way of bluntly illustrating power. Simply appearing on one can be enough to make a place or community matter. Meanwhile, absence from “the map” conveys something quite the opposite. Recall 19th century colonial surveys of Africa with the continent’s vast interior labeled as “unknown.” That one word on unmapped territory was simply another way of saying – in the eyes of the mapmaker – that the region was of little consequence. Whoever lived there didn’t matter.
This old idea of paper maps as power brokers offers a good analogy for how we might think today about the increasingly complex maps of digital information on the physical world that exist in the “geoweb.” This is where Wikipedia pages and online restaurant reviews and geocoded tweets live, all theoretically floating atop the actual cities and neighborhoods they describe. (…)
What happens to the people who aren’t on the map, or who are barely represented at all? “What I worry is that what this will start to do is simply reinforce the divides and the differences between the haves and the have-nots, the cores and the peripheries,” Graham says. “It’s most worrying for the places that are essentially off the map – or not in the database.” “
7 notes
Cute, yes, but a feasible solution to issues of modern urban overcrowding?
The experimental rooftop townhouses seen here - which are actually used as offices for a Chinese shopping mall’s 160 real estate management employees - are a creative option for maximizing existing rooftop space and incorporating urban greenery. But why must an innovative use of space in a sophisticated asian city perpetuate a superficial image of middle class American suburbia? There is something unsettling about an urban planning effort to tackle overcrowding - and all of the socioeconomic issues and inequalities that it harbors - with a vision that perpetuates a sense of entitlement, isolation, and ownership. Can we not reinvent spaces in a way that builds communities rather than segregating them?
186 notes (via geographervorr & amyeconnors)
39 notes (via herefornow)
Detail from the Pianta Grande di Roma, now universally known as the Nolli Map, by Giambattista Nolli. Nolli began surveying in 1736 and engraved the map in 1748.
Using a figure-ground representation of built space with blocks and building shaded in a dark poché, Nolli represents enclosed public spaces such as the colonnades in St. Peter’s Square and the Pantheon as open civic spaces. The map was a significant improvement in accuracy, even noting the asymmetry of the Spanish Steps. The map was used in government planning for the city of Rome until the 1970s. (Source: Wikipedia)
66 notes (via thegullible & drawingdetail)
Lo que nos interesa aquí es más bien entender los espacios y sus divisiones públicas o privadas, su opacidad y su transparencia, su accesibilidad o su cierre, no tanto como escenarios vacíos en los que se lleva a cabo el drama de la identidad, sino como auténticas tecnologías de producción de subjetividad.”
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