Occupy Maps

We just picked up the new book by our friends' at AREA Chicago, Notes for a People's Atlas: People Making Maps of Their Cities, which we strongly encourage anyone reading this to check out. The book contains a collection of maps of Chicago (as well as a handful of other cities and neighborhoods from around the world) made by residents, visitors, activists, artists and others, along with short essays that provide some historical context for informal and artistic map making.  The Notes for a People's Atlas project began 7 years ago, facilitating the mapping from below of the city of Chicago. One thing that emerges from the collection of rather random mappings of the city (from the politically motivated to the idiosyncratic and comedic) is an understanding of how much our spatial understanding of where we live has to do with how we live in it and what we imagine is possible.

The People's Atlas starts by asking people to mark up blank maps, and it becomes extremely clear that what remains blank in the maps produced is as important as what gets filled in. Through the process of mapping what is known, we also map what isn't known. How can we deal with gaps in individual and collective experience if we don't know those gaps even exist? The immediate, micro moments that define our everyday lives (where we eat, go to school, or get unnecessarily harassed by the police as one map narrates), put into the space of a map, can be projected onto the social fabric that is woven from the experiences of those surrounding us, whether we know them or not. The individual maps in People's Atlas give us an incomplete visual index of a city that isn't some kind of static, naturally defined terrain, but rather is a living entity with permeable boundaries. Various entities flow in and out of its walls, not unlike genetic material breaching cellular walls, struggling to make it a habitable place. Notes for a People's Atlas, encourages us to make this a more just process, realizing in maps our connections to others who are also fighting to make the city inhabitable.