A History of Spaces - Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (Frontiers of Human Geography)

A History of Spaces provides an essential insight into the practices and
ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists
and theorists of maps and cartography to show how maps and map-making
have shaped the spaces in which we live.
The book begins by asking a seemingly simple question: what does it
mean to draw a line? It then gives a seemingly simple answer: to create a
boundary, to define a space, and to shape an identity. The book builds on
this foundation by exploring how, historically, maps have reached deep
into social imaginaries to code the modern world. Going beyond the focus
of traditional cartography, the book draws on examples of the use of maps
from the sixteenth century to the present, including their role in projects
of the national and colonial state, emergent capitalism and the planetary
consciousness of the natural sciences. It also considers the use of maps for
military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health,
disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and
the transparent earth.
The final chapters of the book turn to the rapid pace of change in
mapping technologies, the forms of visualization and representation that
are now possible, and what the author refers to as ‘the possibilities for
post-representational cartographies’.