99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-13- Maps

Episode Date: December 17, 2010

I’m sorry, but if you don’t love maps, I don’t think we can be friends anymore. Maps are amazing. They are art and story. A representation of where we are and where we wish we could be. They’ve always had … Continue reading →

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I think there are people nowadays who admit that they don't love puppies and kittens and children, but nobody's gonna admit that they don't love maps. kittens and children? But nobody's going to admit that they don't love maps. Maps are awesome, as art, as story, as representation of truth, as representation of lies. Really interesting visual information, it's a little bit like a puzzle, you're solving it, really engages your brain. But it also is an invitation in a way nothing else is. You know, music, somebody else is playing it, but the map,

it's a score for you to live your own life, to go there and do that, even if you're looking at 12th century Siberia or something and this is the kind of map I really like along with maps of my own neighborhood. And if your only experience with maps is a triple A road atlas, then Rebecca Solnet's new book will blow your mind. This is Rebecca Solnet with Infinite City as San Francisco atlas. It's both a collection of maps and a proposition that any city is infinite because it can be described in infinite ways.

No one map tells you everything about a region. It's 22 maps that want to be beautiful and want to celebrate old-fashioned map making with paper, with drawings, with old cartography, with a sense of wonder and with practical information you can actually go to. We each contain multitudes of maps. If I say to you, there were 99 murders in Ceres' Go in 2008, you know, you'd think it

was deplorable for the three seconds before you completely forgot about it. But if I show you the actual map, it makes you think this person died here and that one over there, you see a pattern, you see that most of them are in the east side of town. You know, it becomes particular and specific, it becomes places you could have been, it could have been you, you can go to them, you could bring flowers.

And in the San Francisco Infinite City Atlas, these murder sites are represented on the city map as red dots, but alongside them is an array of green dots that represent all of the living, monoray, cypress trees in the city. It's new, ugly, death, and old, beautiful life side by side, sharing a map because, I mean, just because, because you can make a map do anything. My story is my story, but it's a map is also your, because you can make a map do anything. My story is my story, but a map is also your story, because you can literally enter what's shown on the map. You can go there, you can walk it, you can be there.

And so maps give you a different sense. They quantify and locate and invite in a way that no other medium does. Would you like any other maps that show other kinds of information? Sure. other medium does. One of the infinite city maps is a treasure map with a panoply of treasured sites in San Francisco. You know the mission Dolores graveyard Monacoirons murals the African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane some labyrinths the nesting site of the great blue herons on Sto Lake we have treasure and this is the map to help you find it. But the most curious feature The nesting side of the great blue herons on Sto Lake, we have treasure. And this is the map to help you find it.

But the most curious feature about this map is that San Francisco isn't depicted as that little thumbnail at the end of the penanceless thumb that it actually is. San Francisco is drawn as an island. On the treasure map, San Francisco not only has the North Coast, East Coast and West and West Coast you all know and love it has a South Coast There's a fictitious blue ribbon of water just north of San Brie, O'Mail There's a lot of ways San Francisco really is in Ireland in terms of its difference from the rest of the country Ecologically geographically and culturally before the bridges You basically came in out of San Francisco by by boats as though it was in Ireland and I just wanted to make that literal and the wonderful way maps always are literal.

So Shizu's, the cartographer Ben Piz's wife Shizu Sikal, obliged me by making San Francisco into an island. Maps are powerful objects. They give direction, they hide secret places, they can support imperialism and oppression. A newly designed map can create a nation state and present a false sense of absolute truth. They change the way we see the world. I joked to some of my friends when I was working on this project that owning racehorses and castles has nothing to commissioning maps when it comes to a sense of power and luxury.

It's pretty amazing. 99% invisible is produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar. It's a project of KLW the American Institute of Architect San Francisco in the Center for Architecture and Design. Find out more at 99%invisible.org