c

The first version of this paper was included in the SPESP Study Programme on European Spatial Policies (European Commission, DG REGIO, 1999). 

A reviewed version was presented as a lecture in the SIRIUS Programme for Urban and Regional Planners (Stockholm, November 2000). 

A second revision and improvement was made for the DATAR "France 2020" prospective programme (Marseille, February 2001). 

A third version was presented during a seminar on Map Epistemology and Cartography Innovation (Paris, September 2001). 

L'invention cartographique aujourd'hui

"La carte a longtemps ordonné et structuré le regard des hommes sur leur monde. Jamais le modèle cartographique  aura été  aussi  perfectionné, du  point de vue technique  et graphique, jamais  il n'aura connu autant  de supports et d'utilisations pour la navigation, la mesure et la représentation de l'espace terrestre. Or, l'évolution des modes de vie et des organisations (sociales, économiques, politiques) ont laissé paradoxalement apparaître les limites du modèle cartographie notamment pour l'aménagement  et la prospective territoriale. De  nombreux phénomènes qui caractérisent les sociétés actuelles s'adaptent mal à la représentation cartographique, à l'exemple des mobilités et des réseaux, voire des dynamiques qui se prolongent dans le temps. Dans cette séance il ne s'agira pas seulement  de mettre  en lumière ces limites, mais également, en fonction de l'experience des participants, de montrer de nouvelles approches: des méthodes, des techniques ou des modes de représentation en mesure d'adapter la carte à la societé d'aujourd'hui."

Gian Poolo Torricelli

We thank Mr. Peter Melhby, who launched the "Infographics Working Group" at SPESP, as well as the members of that group, appointed by most European countries: Kari Oinonen (Finland), Volker Schmidt-Seiwert (Germany), Ode Guissard (Belgium), Michel Chenais (France), Paul van Hemert (Netherlands), Ugo Schiavoni, Maria Ioannill (Italy), Hans Skov-Petersen (Denmark), Alessandro Aurigi (U.K.), José Luis Calvo (Spain).

Dealing with imperfect communication: "The most important can not be said"

The communication paradox

Being "like one" (the meaning of "communication" in its Latin root) is obviously impossible. Languages both helps us to understand and misunderstand each other. There is a fundamental gap between our feelings and thoughts and the words or numbers or images we choose to express them. Or are the words we have what actually "choose" the way we think?. Anyway, our thoughts, and also ourselves, we are mysteriously subjected to the patterns of our language, we say less and more than we wanted to say. Furthermore, our message looses part of information when being transmitted and the receptor, another human being, also passes through an internal translation process. Between our thoughts and feelings and the thoughts and feelings of the others there are a number of intermediations.

The skill of the Map maker

The skill of the mapmaker is avoiding the pitfalls of misinterpretation, by an explicit design showing what elements of information have scientific consistency and what other elements correspond to aims, goals or desires. Mapmaking is, more than anything, a management of uncertainty. Maps, since early medieval times, do not possess the aura of objective truth numbers have. They always reflect both the existing level of information (the layout of coasts, rocks and beaches on early maps) and ignorance (the dragons early mapmakers draw on unexplored territories). 

The evolution in the production of maps reflects the progress in science. Early artistic craftsmanship and graphic translation from the narrative information provided by early geographic discoveries are being replaced by advanced information and communication technologies. A digital vectorial map is nothing but an array of numbers based on numerical algorithms. While the number is unambiguous and precise, maps can be by nature vague and encompass uncertainty. This mix of science and art, objective reason and subjective creation, makes maps a powerful and risky mean of communication.

Coarseness (the scale)

Every map has a characteristic inexactness, so the precise location and size of the objects being represented have a margin of error which can be calculated with full precision. This makes the inexactness explicit. The coarseness is an arbitrary choice which depends on the function the map has to fulfill.

But as the famous paradox of Mandelbrot demonstrated, there is an intrinsic impossibility to eliminate this inexactness: the more detailed is the map, the larger the length of a given coastal line becomes. Fractal shapes reproduce their shape at all scales, notwithstanding how precise it is. So the assumption of a level of inexactness is unavoidable in science. The implications of these measurement errors can be serious when modelling the dynamic evolution of complex systems, those constituted by the permanent interaction of many individuals or agents within a given environment, each one adapting his or her decisions to his or her perception of the system's evolution. 

Projection (the geographic projection)

It is also unavoidable to use a given projection, which leads to distortions given the obvious fact that Earth is not flat.

Facing scientific uncertainty: "The most important is never known"

During the last decade, there is a move from hierarchical and scientifically based processes to participatory and multi-party policy processes (e.g. the Agenda21 processes, happening in most cities world-wide). Environmental problems are showing interdependencies between different scales, different sectors and moments in time.

Cybernetics, the communication revolution

It was Gregory Bateson the first thinker to realise the impact of cybernetics (the contemporary revolution on Information and Communication Technologies) in communication. The computer brings to human beings the first tool able to store human knowledge, not just information. Computers can run mathematical models and generate new unexisting information (e.g. forecasting the future) based on existing data. Computers can even learn by themselves, modifying and adapting their models overtime, so generating new knowledge. In this sense, they can become "intelligent". By doing so, they are perfect intermediators. Decartes reached the conclusion that mathematics was the only objective language and so is the language of computers.

Policy-implications: "Give me the maps, said King Lear"

Shakespeare, recognized by many for his capacity to portrait and explore the human condition, created King Lear, one of greatest characters in Western literature. When latter says "Give me the maps" to divide his kingdom among his sons he is actually pushing them to a terrible war, their "ultimate struggle for recognition". In south Mediterranean countries it is said that a son forgets more easily the killing of his father that the stealing of his father's land. Human beings are "territorial animals", their desire for individual and social recognition is closely linked to territorial recognition. 

All borders between European countries are the result of massive killing during the last centuries, specially during the 20th century, and national governments have been engaged in strong unification strategies, leading to the destruction of pre-existing cultural diversities by different strategies, from systematic bureaucratic modernisation (e.g. diminishing the role of "regional languages" to mere folklore) to pure genocide (ethnical clearance is still happening in Europe). Territorial policies have played a key role in nation-building policies, such as the territorial extensions towards the so-called "natural borders", the arbitrary location of national capitals in the middle of the territory (from Madrid in Spain to the more recent case of the new capital of Kazagistan), the layout of roads and railways reinforcing centralism, "rational" administrative divisions and so on.

Internet and other a-geographical and borderless globalization trends, are threatening the status-quo of existing nation-states, slowly diminishing the power of governments, the cultural homogeneity within each nation and the difference between nations.

Because all this, measuring and representing the territory, mapping the space which belongs to a particular group of people or nation, or is under the jurisdiction of a given institution, company or individual, are highly sensitive political questions. Maps are both objective representations of the territory "as it is" in reality, and subjective representations of how we imagine it is, it was or it should be. Maps have always being embedded into unavoidable cultural and political values. Therefore, illustration of abstract policy goals and the visualisation of potential policy impacts involves a risk for misinterpretation between readers, even when maps are produced using strict scientific methodologies (e.g. validated remote sensing techniques, accurate geographic projections, etc).

All considered, measuring objectively the territory and communicating policy options and visions efficiently, in a meaningful manner, is a complex area where art, science and politics intersect. A variety of examples from different EU Member States, produced during the SPESP (1998-1999), serves to illustrate this discussion.

The ESDP: European Spatial Development Prospective

The ESDP debate has shown how cartography (based on scientific methods to represent the territory) is an extremely sensitive mean to present spatial policies, due to the way they give geographical precision to the conflicts and make explicit the existing tensions under each policy option.

Infography is an alternative approach to visualisation of the ESDP policy options, more focused on the communication of policy aims than on the objective representation of the territorial problems to be addressed. In recent years, numerous cartographic and infographic symbolic representations of the European territory have been created.

Often they have presented mind-catching illustrations, which have served as powerful tools for both shaping attitudes and visualising policy aims. Some cartographic and infographic images have become policy icons (such as the satellite image of the light from cities produced by NASA, the map of series of road traffic maps by United Nations or the so-called "Blue Banana" by the RECLUS group). Therefore, policies need images to be communicated and, once an image becomes an icon, it may influence the political perception of the policies in one way or another.

The works of the infographic group show that two major approaches must be considered when producing images to communicate spatial development policies and represent problems:

• Rational methods which propose to follow strict systematic methods to develop "policy-oriented" maps starting from cartography produced by GIS software tools.
   

• Creative methods which produce images based on arbitrary symbolic languages, somehow based on the tradition of spatial planning studies.

In fact, the purely scientific methods presented in the Infographic collection involved an implicit process of translating "scientific languages" (in this case cartographic conventions) into a "policy-oriented" language, and the purely creative methods follow the opposite direction. Therefore, none of them can be labeled as "pure".

On one hand, scientific methods have advantages providing objective visualisation of real spatial problems and opportunities, as well as mapping future trends (the "real context" for policies, so to speak). On the other hand, creative methods are required to represent abstract aims and somehow shape desired futures.

One of the approaches presented in the Collection proposes just the overimposition of policy symbols into a cartography of spatial problems and trends. This approach clearly suggests to readers that since policies never emerge "only" from scientific knowledge, but from purposes and goals, the unavoidable gap between policies and problems becomes apparent.

Other approaches consisted in rationalising creative inputs. In one them, virtual landscapes were created by overimposing the three layers constituting currently build environments: physical features -mountains, rivers...-, communication networks -transport, telecommunications- and urbanised areas. Each layer was represented according to their intrinsic spatial attributes: physical elements as realistic 3D images, networks as links and nodes, urbanised zones as grids. Selected fragments of the landscape were then selected as representations of applied policies. In other proposal the procedure was similar, but the virtual landscapes were created by re-designing maps produced by GIS.

All considered, any method of representation presented in the Collection involves a combination of both rational and creative methods. Somehow, the "invented policies" and the "discovered problems and trends" were merged. The paths of each alternative method started from very different and distant places, but carefully reading the final proposals, all of them show the same tension, the one that never can be solved: there is gap between policies and problems, between imagination and reality. The merit of cleaver images is to evoke the tension of this unsolvable problem to the reader.

Clever images and human communication in general are embedded in metaphors (something referring to something else) and metonymies (taking the part as the whole). In the case of communicating spatial policies, images and maps will always have this tension. We can consider as a reasonable goal knowing (and even controlling) the fundamental tension in any image, and helping readers to realise that scientific knowledge generates more questions that the ones they answer, and artistic knowledge provides answers to actually unknown questions.

Conclusions: Why dragons are still needed

The point of view of the Map maker

The tension in the map: known reality and unknown imagination

An explicit symbolic language

Bibliography

Special thanks to  Silvio O. Funtowicz & Jerome R. Ravetz for the ideas expose on their book "Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy", 1990, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Series A; Philosophy and Methodology of The Social Sciences. 

• Infographics - 2000 (sub report to the Study Programme on European Spatial Planning) Website of SPESP where they can find the works and texts of all people in the infographic's group. This is at www.mcrit.com/spesp
  

• Additionally, in www.mcrit.com/studies there is an specific option for "design" with more ideas, hyperlinks, articles, samples etc. can be found.
  

• Funtowicz, S. And Ravetz, J.R., "Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy", 1990, Kluwer
  

• Harley, J.B.- 1980 "Maps, knowledge and power", The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge University Press
  

• Beck & Wood: Cognitive transformation of information from urban geographic field to mental maps. - Environment and behavior 2, 1976, pp 199
  

• Brocard, M.: Les grilles chorématiques. Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes Géographie,1993
  

• Brunet, R.: La France dans l'éspace européen, 1989
  

• Downs, R.M. and Stea, D: Maps in mind - reflections on cognitive mapping, 1977
  
  
  

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