Interplace explores the interaction of people and place. It looks at how we move within and between the places we live and what led us here in the first place.
Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me back to that time and the start of my own journey at Microsoft at the dawn of a new global reality.
HOMELAND HATCHED HERE
With all the focus on Olympics and immigration recently, I’ve found myself reflecting on my days at Microsoft in the 90s. As the company was growing (really fast), teams were filling up with people recruited from around the world. There were new accents in meetings, new holidays to celebrate, and yummy new foods and funny new words being introduced. This thickening of transnational ties made Redmond feel as connected the rest of the world as the globalized software we were building. By 2000 users around the world could switch between over 60 languages in Windows and Office. In behavioral geography terms, working on the product and using the product made “here” feel more connected to “elsewhere.”
This influx of new talent was all enabled by the Immigration Act of 1990. Signed by George H. W. Bush, it increased and stabilized legal pathways for highly skilled immigrants. This continued with Clinton era decisions to expand H-1B visa allocations that fed the tech hiring boom. I took full advantage of this allotment recruiting and hiring interaction designers and user researchers from around the world.
In the same decade the federal government expanded access to the United States, it also tightened security. Terrorism threats, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, spooked everyone. Despite this threat, there was more domestic initiated terrorism than outside foreign attacks. The decade saw deadly incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by radicalized by white supremacist anti-government terrorists, which killed 168 and injured hundreds, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history before 9/11.
A year later, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and related bombings by anti-government Christian extremists caused multiple deaths and injuries. Clinic bombings and shootings by anti-abortion extremists began in 1994 with the Brookline clinic shootings and continued through the 1998 Birmingham clinic bombing. These inspired more arsons, bombings, and shootings tied to white supremacist, anti-abortion, and other extreme ideologies.
Still, haven been shocked by Islamist extremists in 1993 (and growing Islamic jihadist plots outside the U.S.) the federal government adopted new security language centered on protecting the “homeland” from outside incursions. In 1998, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 62, titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” a serious counterterrorism document whose title quietly normalized the term homeland inside executive governance.
But there was at least one critical voice. Steven Simon, Clinton’s senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, didn’t think “Defense of the Homeland” belonged in a presidential directive.
Simon’s retrospective argument is that “homeland” did more than name a policy, it brought a territorial logic of legitimacy that the American constitution had historically resisted. He recalls the phrase “Defense of the Homeland” felt “faintly illiberal, even un-American.” The United States historically grounded constitutional legitimacy in civic and legal abstractions (people, union, republic, human rights) rather than blood rights or rights to soil. Membership was to be mediated by institutions, employment, and law rather than ancestry.
“Homeland” serves as a powerful cue that suggests a mental model of ‘home’ and expands it to encompass a nation. This model is accompanied by a set of spatial inferences that evoke familiarity, appeal, and even an intuitive sense. However, it also creates a sense of a confined interior that can be breached by someone from outside.
This is rooted in place attachment that can be defined as an affective bond between people and places — an emotional tie that can anchor identity and responsibility. But attachment is not the same thing as ownership. Research on collective psychological ownership shows how groups can come to experience a territory as “ours.” This creates a sense of ownership that can be linked to a perceived determination right.
Here, the ingroup is entitled to decide what happens in that place while sometimes feeding a desire to exclude outsiders. When the word “homeland” was placed at the center of statecraft it primed public reasoning from attachment of place through care, stewardship, and shared fate toward property ownership through control, gatekeeping, and exclusion. It turns belonging into something closer to a property claim.
What makes the 1990s especially instructive from a geography perspective is that “access” itself was being administered through institutions that are intensely spatial: consulates, ports of entry, employer locations, housing markets, and the micro-geographies of office life. The H-1B expansions was not simply generosity, but a form of managed throughput in a system designed to meet labor demand. And it was paired with political assurances about enforcement and domestic worker protections.
Mid-decade legal reforms strengthened enforcement by authorities in significant ways. Mechanisms for faster removals and stricter interior enforcement reinforced the idea that the state could act more decisively within the national space. The federal government found ways to expand legal channels that served economic objectives while also building a governance style increasingly comfortable with interior control. “Homeland” helped supply the conceptual bridge that made that socioeconomic coexistence feel coherent.
It continues to encourage a politics of boundary maintenance that determines who counts as inside, what kinds of movement are legible as normal, and which bodies are perpetually “out of place.” If the defended object is a republic, the default language justification is legal and civic. If the defended object is a homeland, the language jurisdiction becomes territorial and affective. That shift changes what restrictions, surveillance practices, and membership tests become thinkable and tolerable over time.
HOMELAND’S HOHFELDIAN HARNESS
If “homeland” structures a place of belonging, then “rights” are the legal grammar that tells us what may be done in that place. The trouble is that “rights” are often treated as moral abstract objects floating above context. Legally, they are structured relations among people, institutions, and things. But “rights” can take on a variety of meanings.
Wesley Hohfeld, the Yale law professor who pioneered analytical jurisprudence in the early 20th century, argued that many legal disputes persist because the word “right” is used ambiguously.
He distinguished four basic “incidents” for rights: claim, privilege (liberty), power, and immunity. Each is paired with a position correlating to another party: duty, no-claim (no-right), liability, and disability. When the police pull you over for speeding you hold a privilege to drive at or below the speed limit (say, 40 mph). The state has no-right to demand you stop for going exactly 40 mph. But if you’re clocked at 50 mph, the officer enforces your no-right to exceed the limit which correlates to the state’s claim-right. You have a duty to comply by pulling over. If the officer then has power to issue a ticket, you face a liability to have your driving privilege altered (e.g., fined). But you also enjoy an immunity from arbitrary arrest without probable cause.
Let’s apply that to “homeland” security.
If a politician says we must “defend the homeland,” it can mean at least four different things legally:
* Claim-Rights: Citizens can demand that the government protect them (e.g., from attacks). Officials have the duty to act — think TSA screening or border patrol.
* Privileges: Federal Agents get freedoms to act without legal blocks, such as stopping and questioning people in so-called high-risk zones, while bystanders have no-right to interfere.
* Powers: Federal Agencies hold authority to change your legal status. For example, they can label you a watchlist risk (e.g., you become a liability). This can then lead to loss of liberties like travel bans, detentions, or asset freezes.
* Immunities: Federal Officials or programs shield themselves from lawsuits (via qualified immunity or classified data rules), effectively blocking citizens’ ability to sue.
Forget whether these are legitimate or illegitimate, Hohfeld’s point is they are different forms of rights — and each has distinct costs. Once “homeland” is the object, the system tends to grow powers and privileges (capacity for overt or covert operations), and to seek immunities (resistance to challenge), often at the expense of others’ claim-rights and liberties.
Rights are not only relational, but they are also often spatially conditional. The same person can move through zones of legality experiencing different practical rights. Consider border checkpoints, airports, perimeters of government buildings, protest cites, or regions declared “emergency” zones. Government institutions operationalize these spaces as “behavioral geographies” which determines who gets stopped, where scrutiny concentrates, and which movements count as suspicious.
The state looks past the abstract bearer of unalienable liberties and due process to see only a physical entity whose movements through space dissolve their Constitutional immunities into a series of observable, trackable traces. Those traces become inputs to enforcement. This is what makes surveillance so powerful. “Homeland” governance is especially trace-hungry because it imagines safety as a property of space that must be continuously maintained.
But these traces are behavioral cues and human behavior is never neutral. They are interpreted through normalized cultural and institutional schemas about who “belongs” in which places. Place attachment and territorial belonging can become gatekeeping mechanisms. Empirical work on homeland/place attachment links it to identity processes and self-categorization. Related work suggests that collective psychological ownership — “this place is ours” — can predict exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants and outsiders. In legal terms, those social attitudes can translate into pressure to expand state powers and narrow outsiders’ claim-rights.
A vocabulary rooted in a ‘republic’ tends to emphasize rights as universal claims against the state. This is where we get due process, equal protection, and rights to speech and assembly. A homeland vocabulary tends to emphasize rights as statused permissions tied to membership and territory. Here we find rights of citizens, rights at the border, rights in “emergencies”, and rights conditioned on “lawful presence.” The shift makes some restrictions feel like a kind of protecting of the home. Hence the unaffable phrase, “Get off my lawn.”
HOMELAND HIERARCHIES HUMBLED
If the “homeland” is framed as a place-of-belonging and rights are the grammar of that place, then the current crisis of American democracy boils down to a dispute over the nature of equality. This tension is best understood through the long-standing constitutional debate between anticlassification and antisubordination, which dates back to the Reconstruction era.
Anticlassification, often called the “colorblind” or “status-blind” approach, holds that the state’s duty is simply to avoid explicit categories in its laws. Antisubordination, by contrast, insists that the law must actively dismantle structured group hierarchies and the “caste-like” systems they produce. When the state embraces a “homeland” logic, it leans heavily on anticlassification to mask a deeper reality of spatial subordination.
In what we might call the “Theater of Defense,” agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increasingly rely on anticlassification principles to justify aggressive interior crackdowns. They frame enforcement as a territorial necessity by protecting the sanctity of the soil itself. A workplace raid or roving patrol, in this view, does not target any specific group. Instead, it simply maintains the “integrity” of the homeland. This reflects what law professor Bradley Areheart and others have described as the “anticlassification turn,” where formal attempts to embody equality end up legitimizing structural inequality.
Put differently, the state exercises a Hohfeldian Power to alter individuals’ legal status based on their geographic location or “lawful presence.” At the same time, it shields itself from legal challenge by insisting that the law applies equally to everyone who is “out of place.” This claim of territorial neutrality is a dangerous legal fiction. As scholars Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst have shown in their work on algorithmic systems, attempts at neutral criteria often replicate entrenched biases.
Triggers like “proximity to a border” or “behavioral traces” in a transit hub do not produce blind justice. They enable targeted scrutiny and the erosion of immunity for those whose identities fail to match the “belonging” model of the “homeland.” The state circumvents its Hohfeldian Disability, avoiding the creation of second-class statuses, by pretending to manage space rather than discriminate against persons.
This shift from a civic Republic to a territorial “homeland” is the primary driver of democratic backsliding. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach captured this dynamic in his 2022 paper, Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding. Analyzing 51 indicators of electoral democracy across U.S. states from 2000 to 2018, Grumbach developed the State Democracy Index. His findings reveal how American federalism has morphed from “laboratories of democracy” into sites of subnational authoritarianism.
States with low scores on the index — often under unified Republican control — have pioneered police powers that insulate partisan dominance. We see this in the rise of state-level immigration enforcement units, the criminalization of movement for marginalized groups, and the expansion of a “right to exclude.”
These states are not just enforcing the law. They are forging what Yale legal scholar Owen Fiss would recognize as a new caste system. By fixating on “defending” state soil against “infiltrators,” legislatures dismantle the public rights of the Reconstruction era — the right to participate in community life without indignity. Today’s backsliding policies transform the nation’s interior into a permanent enforcement zone. They reject the Enlightenment ideals of America, rooted in beliefs like liberty, equality, democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law.
To fully understand Constitutional history, we best acknowledge that America’s universalist creedal definition wasn’t solely European. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything shows how Enlightenment values of liberty and equality arose from intellectual exchanges with Indigenous North American thinkers. Kandiaronk, a Huron statesman, traveled to Europe in the late 17th century and debated French aristocrats. His critiques were published and circulated widely among European intellectuals, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.
Graeber and Wengrow point out that before the widely popular publication of these dialogues in 1703, the concept of "Equality" as a primary political value was almost entirely absent from European philosophy. By the time Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men in 1754, it was the central question of the age.
Kandiaronk criticized European society’s subservience to kings and obsession with property. He contrasted it with the consensual governance and individual agency of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy embodied in their Great Law of Peace — a political order prioritizing the public right to exist without state-sanctioned indignity.
The writers of the U.S. Constitution codified a Republic of “unalienable rights,” synthesizing Indigenous/European-inspired liberty with Hohfeldian Disabilities that legally restrained the state from territorial monarchy. Backsliding erases this profound philosophical endeavor. Reclaiming the Republic means honoring the Indigenous critique that a nation’s legitimacy rests on its people’s freedom, not its fences.
We seem to be moving from governance by the governed to protecting an ingroup. In Hohfeldian terms, the state expands its privileges while shrinking the claim-rights of the vulnerable to move and exist safely. This leads to “spatial subordination,” managed through adiaphorization — a concept from social theorist Zygmunt Bauman’s 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust.
Bauman, a Polish-Jewish survivor who escaped the Nazis’ grip on his early life, drew “adiaphora” from the Greek for matters outside moral evaluation. Modern bureaucracies make horrific actions morally neutral by framing them as technical duties, enabling atrocities like the Holocaust without personal ethical torment.
As territorial belonging takes precedence, non-belongers are excluded from moral and legal obligations. They become “non-spaces” or “human waste” in the eyes of ICE and DHS. This betrays antisubordination, the “core and conscience” of America’s civil rights tradition, as Yale constitutional scholars Jack Balkin and Reva Siegel called it. A democracy can’t endure if it permanently relegates any group to legal impossibility.
In the “homeland”, immigrants may live, work, and raise families for decades, yet remain mere “traces” to expunge. Weaponized place attachment turns affective bonds into property claims. This empowers the state to “cleanse” those deemed to be “out of place.” Rights become statused permissions, not universal ideals. If immunity from search depends on territorial status, the Republic of laws has yielded to a Heimat — a term the Nazis’ usurped for their blood-and-soil homeland…that they then bloodied and soiled.
Reversing this demands confronting the linguistic and legal architecture that rendered it conceivable. It’s time to rethink the “homeland” frame and its anticlassification crutch. A truer and fairer Republic would commit to antisubordination and the state would be disabled from wielding space for hierarchy. A person’s immunity from arbitrary power should be closer to an inalienable right to be “secure in one’s person” that holds firm beyond checkpoints or workplace doors…or your front door.
Steven Simon was right to feel uneasy with Clinton’s wording. “Homeland” planted a seed that sprouted into hedgerows of exceptional powers and curtailed liberties. Are we going to cling to a “homeland” secured by fear and exclusion, forever unstable, or finally become a Republic revered for securing universal law and rights? As long as our rights remain geographically conditional, we all dwell in liability. Reclaiming the Republic, and our freedoms within it, may require transforming the Constitution from a Hohfeldian map of perimeters into a boundless plane of human dignity it aspires to be.
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Street Snatches, Stolen Soil, and the Power of Care
Saturday, January 31, 2026 • Duration 21:48
Hello Interactors,
Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state.
But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied.
SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE
On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force.
Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes.
Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution:
“You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is your daughter, my children are your grandchildren. I leave them all in your care and under your protection. Do not let them suffer; and when my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer for to the Great Spirit.”
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How Cities Loop Us In
Sunday, June 8, 2025 • Duration 22:05
Hello Interactors,
My daughter in Manhattan’s East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.” A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?" The parallels stood out.
In Manhattan’s West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country, students cycle through Starbucks in Seattle’s U-District like clockwork. The drinks are overpriced and underwhelming, but that’s not the point. It’s familiar. It's part of a habitual loop.
Different cities, similar rhythms. One loop is visual, the other habitual. But both show how space and emotion sync. Like an ambient synth track, they layer, drift, and return. If you live in or near a city, you exist in your own looping layers of emotional geography.
FLASH FEEDS
My daughter has been deep into modular synthesis lately — both making and listening. It’s not just the music that intrigues her, but the way it builds: loops that don’t simply repeat, but evolve, bend, and respond. She’ll spend hours patching sounds together, adjusting timing and tone until something new emerges. She likens it to painting with sound. Watching her work, it struck me how much her synth music mirrors city life — not in harmony, but in layers. She’s helped me hear urban rhythms differently.
Like a pop synth hook, the Flash loop is built for attention. It's bright, polished, and impossible to ignore. Synth pop thrives on these quick pulses — hooks that grab you within seconds, loops that deliver dopamine with precision. Urban spaces under this loop do the same. They set a beat others fall in line with, often flattening nuance in exchange for momentum.
This isn’t just about moving to a beat. It’s about becoming part of the beat. When these fast loops dominate, people start adapting to the spaces that reflect them. And those spaces, in turn, evolve based on those very behaviors. It’s a feedback loop: movement shaping meaning, and meaning shaping movement. The people become both the input and the output.
In this context, the West Village girl isn’t just a person — she’s a spatial feedback loop. A mashup of Carrie Bradshaw nostalgia, Instagram polish, and soft-lit storefronts optimized for selfies. But she didn’t arrive from nowhere. She emerged through a kind of spatial modeling: small choices, like where to brunch, where to pose, where to post are repeated so often they remade a neighborhood.
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Creepy Creeps Down Suburban Streets
Friday, May 6, 2022 • Duration 26:39
Hello Interactors,
Do you ever walk through a neighborhood and wonder where all the people are? It happened to me last weekend. What’s worse, it was a 1960s planned development that reminded me of the suburb where I grew up. I don’t remember the streets being this quiet, but maybe these planned communities were meant to be this way. Or maybe we’ve changed. Or both.
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Now let’s go…
A DASH TOWARD THE PAST
There it sat in the driveway, a brawny black pickup truck with an NRA sticker in the rear window and TRUMP plastered on the bumper. The protruding chrome tailpipe was gaping wide. Black exhaust dust clung to its edges. Three late-model cars were parked askew in the front lawn. Two doors down and across the street I saw a pride flag hanging next to a Black Lives Matters sign that read, “WHITE SILENCE IS WHITE VIOLENCE.”
I passed more houses and heard a barking dog approaching angrily. It ran alongside a taco truck parked in a driveway with the name of a Mexican restaurant painted on the side. Two other cars were in the driveway and one in the lawn behind a chain-link fence that restrain the dog. I had walked nearly an hour in this suburban neighborhood and had yet to see a single human being.
I was at my son’s track meet last Saturday in a town near Tacoma called Federal Way. I had some time to kill so I decided to take a walk. I picked a green patch on Google Maps that appeared to go down to the water and headed off to explore. The sidewalk from the High School ended 50 feet from the parking lot and I never saw another. The streets were quiet in this 1960’s neighborhood scattered with single story ranch-style homes intermixed with two-story split-level boxes.
Melancholy reflected off of these beige, white, and brown painted homes. They all featured a yard, a driveway, assorted overgrown shrubs and a tree or two. These homes are identical to the homes I would run in and out of as a kid in small town suburban Iowa. They were all built as part of the post-war building boom during America’s economic heyday when ordinary, mostly White, middle class folks could buy into the American Dream.
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The Synaptic Map of the Cartesian Trap
Friday, April 29, 2022 • Duration 23:21
Hello Interactors,
Beauty may be in eye of the beholder, but it’s also in the brain. We all seem to be drawn to balance, order, and predictable patterns which rulers, T-squares, protractors, and compasses have readily provided. It’s the stuff maps are made of. They’ve brought progress and good fortune to many over the centuries, but have they also lead to our decay?
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HIGH FASHION
I can’t deny it. I’m a sucker for grids. I’m drawn to music, art, and designs that are balanced, orderly, and intelligible. Give me a ruler, a protractor, a compass, and a pencil and I’d happily make art and designs all day. Growing up I’d handcraft lettering on cards using my Dad’s plastic flowchart stencils. What can I say, I’m a product of modernity. A neat and tidy aesthete.
But that attraction was called into question last week as I was watching The Hobbit. The movie’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, lives in an organically shaped earthen home carved into the side of hill. There’s not a Cartesian grid or plane anywhere to be found. Every wall is curved as if bored into the hillside by a giant gopher. I was so smitten that I murmured out loud to my family, “I could definitely live in that house.” Has my planar proclivity passed me by, or has the curving complexity of nature caught my eye?
Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that we humans, perhaps other animals as well, tend ‘like’ and/or ‘want’ aesthetic order and balance. Evidence of elements in oddities ordered by humans abounds in centuries of found paintings, carvings, jewelry, and even cities.
But firm empirical conclusions of this gray-matter matter remain elusive. Although, neuroscientists do agree on one thing: there is no single ‘beauty center’ in our brain. When hooked up to brain imaging machines, scientists observe “activity in the frontal pole, left dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, motor cortex, parietal cortex, ventral stratum, and occipital cortex, among others.” And there is ongoing work trying to tease out the order in which these activities unfold betwixt the vast network of synapsis in a brain containing as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. A task seemingly more complex than the identification of the regions themselves.
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Dynamic Cartography
Saturday, April 23, 2022 • Duration 20:04
Hello Interactors,
Last Sunday I ‘rabbit-holed’ on the origins of Easter. That led me to Passover, and then Ramadan. The origin stories all involve the movement of people, or their ephemeral equivalents, through space over time. And they all share a ‘common interest’ in one of the most ancient cities on the map — Jerusalem. Is there a map for that?
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Now let’s go…
MAPPED OUT
Spring has sprung, Easter Pass(ed)over, and Ramadan lingers on. Last week Christians celebrated the rising of their messiah from a tomb, Jewish people celebrated the exodus of their people from slavery, and Muslims continued to gather, contemplate, and fast. It’s rare these three holidays occur at once. The Islamic calendar of 354 lunar days cycles with the moon through the 365 solar days of the Christian calendar allowing the these three religious holidays to coexist every three decades.
The histories of these religious traditions are all rooted in the interactions of people and place. Ramadan celebrates the night the Quran was passed down from above, Easter stems from the Germanic goddess Ēostre who rises to coax the sun to return, and Passover is from the Hebrew word pasha meaning “he passed over” commemorating the angel of death passing over them.
People pass over terrain every day around the world. As Ēostre rises the sun warms the earth and people begin agitating, moving, traversing, and colliding like molecules being heated by the sun’s radiation. As the earth rotates waves of interactions between people and place rise and fall with the sun, rolling across the earth’s surface in perpetual motion.
And yet our maps sit still. They are static moments of effervescent daily life frozen in time. Google Street View offers snapshots of people living their lives; unforgiving they strive, pixels blurring their eyes. But our world is anything but static. And yet our lives depend on fixed representations of us and all that surrounds.
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Cartography Gets Radical
Saturday, April 16, 2022 • Duration 26:36
Hello Interactors,
I ran into a friend last week who shared a bit of neighborly news. A border dispute is brewing in our neighborhood and you can bet maps are soon to be weaponized. It’s nothing new in border disputes around the world, but do maps really lead to a shared understanding of people and their interaction with place? It may be time cartography gets radical.
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Now let’s go…
COMMUNITIES DEMANDING IMPUNITIES
I step quietly as I near the end of the private lane. Ahead there’s a beige colored fence, barely six feet high, blocking the pathway. It’s attached adjacently to a fence bordering the owner’s yard. As I gently approach the fence I see a dingy string innocently dangling from a small hole in the upper right corner near the fence post. A slight tug on the string and I hear a metal latch release on the other side. It’s not a fence after all, but a secret gate.
I push it open and slither through sheepishly looking around to see if I’d been caught. I’m careful to lift the cold black metal latch to silence it as I gently close the gate behind me. I scurry past the driveway glancing at the house. My pace quickens down the remainder of the private lane before me. I self-consciously scurry by neighboring homes and scamper up a steep hill before triumphantly stepping onto the territory of public domain: a city street.
This secret passage along a private drive is known to longtime locals in the neighborhood like me. The gate sits on private property connecting two private lanes that connect two public parks at each end. Adventurous out-of-towners looking to walk or bike from one park to the other usually see the gate masquerading as a fence and turn around. But for as long as these roads have existed, locals have hastily snuck through the graciously placed gate.
But the fate of this gate is a question as of late. Do they have the right to block a pedestrian route that connects public parks even though it’s on private land? Or do they have the duty to honor the traditions of a community that has relied on this path for decades if not centuries? To answer these questions, governments, corporations, and individuals turn to legally binding property maps. Instead of arming themselves with their own maps in a race to the court, perhaps they should join arms around one map seeking mutual support.
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Maps Made to Persuade: Part 3
Friday, April 8, 2022 • Duration 19:35
Hello Interactors,
This post is part three of my three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.
Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.
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Now let’s go…
THE GIPPER AND CAP MAKE A MAP
On the top of the geography building at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was a high security floor the CIA helped to fund…or so I heard. I never set foot in there, but I know both the CIA and the FBI routinely recruited geography students when I was there in the late 80s. They still do. The geography department was, and still is, buzzing with research in cartography, satellite imaging, and Geographic Information Science (GIS).
I remember learning how to detect a hidden nuclear missile silo camouflaged in the Russian landscape using stereoscopic glasses pointed at two LANDSAT images produced from orbiting satellites. Special imaging software was also being developed at the university to better filter and detect these patterns, and more, in remote sensing imagery.
But the kind of mapping I was most interested in was thematic mapping. I was mostly interested in computer graphics and animation, but I could also see the allure of bending cartography to serve creative means. For my senior project I converted a digital USGS topographic map of Santa Barbara into a 3D model so I could fly a camera over the terrain as a logo rose from behind the foothills. It was used as an intro animation for videos made for the newly formed (NCGIA). This was, after all, the focus of the geography department – and the U.S. government.
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Maps Made to Persuade: Part 2
Friday, April 1, 2022 • Duration 09:34
Hello Interactors,
This post is part two of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.
Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
Both World Wars exemplified the hauntingly prescient title of that 1904 paper by England’s eminent geographer and burgeoning politician, Sir Malford MacKinder – The Geographical Pivot of History. And his most famous simplified world map depicting the Natural Seats of Power inspired derivatives all around the world. That was especially true at the conclusion of World War I and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
Peace preparations by the United States began the same month they declared War on Germany in April of 1917. By November a team of researchers, writers, lawyers, and cartographers moved from the New York City Public Library to the third floor of the American Geographical Society. Surrounded by a collection of maps and books the team set work on what was called the Inquiry.
One of the primary geographers assigned to this effort was Mark Sylvester William Jefferson. He was a professor at the Michigan State Normal School at Ypsilanti and specialized in the thematic mapping of population distribution. He even invented a term for it – anthropography. The distinguished professor emeritus of geography at Southern Connecticut State University, Geoffrey L. Martin says,
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Maps Made to Persuade: Part 1
Friday, March 25, 2022 • Duration 30:46
Hello Interactors,
This post is part of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen. They each can stand on their own (maybe), but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.
Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
Someone posted a map on Facebook recently showing just how close Russia is to Alaska. The post read, “This should make you 😳 America. My kids were not taught as much geography and history as I was growing up. This probably needs to be shared to remind us all. For those who think Russia is all the way on the other side of the world [it is] only 53 miles at the Bering Strait’s narrowest point. Like us driving from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo.”
The comments to the post echoed this worry with words like, “Too many don’t realize this.”; “There are small islands 25 miles apart.”; “OOOOOOOOO scary.”; and “I’ll admit that I didn’t realize this.”
They probably didn’t realize this either: the United States and Russia not only share the largest maritime border in the world – a line stretching 1600 nautical miles dividing the Chukchi Sea to the north and the Bering Sea to the south – but it cuts straight through two islands called the Diomedes. On one side is Russia’s Big Diomede – actually part of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug a federal subject of Russia – and just two miles west is Little Diomede which is part of Alaska. Both have small fishing villages, one settled by Russians and the other Americans.
If folks are scared by the geographic proximity of 53 miles, two miles must really freak them out? And they’d best be sitting down for this little tidbit…there is no ratified treaty in place between the United States and Russia that enforces this boundary.
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This moral failing was part of a larger burgeoning political economy. In 1862, the Twin Cities were still emerging, with mills, river commerce, and infrastructure. Yet the region’s future as an urban, financial, and political center depended on converting Dakota and Ojibwe homelands into transferable property. The spring prior to the massacre, in May 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, handing out 160-acre chunks of stolen land labeled now as “public.” Colonizers and immigrants could occupy this land, and be defended by the US government, if they showed they could “improve” it through five years of occupation.
This act negated all Dakota treaties, seized 24 million acres of Minnesota lands, and mandated removal of what were now called Dakota “outlaws.” This converted communal Indigenous homelands into surveyed “public domain” eligible for homesteading, auctions, and rail grants, directly feeding wheat production for Minneapolis mills. Speculators and railroads exploited the act via proxy filings, reselling “cleared” parcels at profit to European immigrants.
By 1870, non-Native population surged from 172,000 to over 439,000. The “clearing” of land was not metaphorical. It was the prerequisite for surveying, fencing, settlement, rail corridors, and the wider commodity circuits that would bind the Upper Midwest to national and global markets.
That is what Harvard historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism. He argues that global capitalism’s ascent was not a clean evolution toward free exchange. It relied on coercion, conquest, and violence. As his book on the history of Capitalism lays out, state funded war capitalism fundamentally relied on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed commerce, and the imposition of sovereignty over both people and territory.
In this framing, the Dakota and Ojibwe were obstacles to industrialization and commodification. The frontier needed to be safe for settlement and investment of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, as well as railroads and industry. This included these two flour mills, the world’s largest by 1880: General Mills and Pillsbury.
The gallows in Mankato were the blunt instrument that made the state-capital alliance credible. The point was not only to punish alleged crimes, but to demonstrate a capacity and will to kill. The American state needed to show it could override Indigenous sovereignty and reorder space. The subsequent removals and confinement at Fort Snelling completed the transformation. “Home” was recoded from relationship into asset. This land was no longer lived geography but extractable territory, from stewarding real soil to the selling of real estate.
TOPHOPHILIA, TIES, AND TENSIONS
War capitalism is not merely to punish resistance, but to convert a lived place into a fungible asset. But violence plays a deeper role than just legal rearrangement. It has to break this constant of human life: our attachment to place.
Behavioral geographer Yi-Fu Tuan borrowed the term topophilia to describe this attachment — the “affective bond between people and place or setting.” The phrase can sound soft and sentimental but it can also cause friction in projects of political economy.
The state may be able to abolish or rewrite a treaty, redraw a border, rename a river, and issue new deeds, but it still confronts bodies that have been oriented by firm ground. It’s on these grounds that paths are walked, food gathered, relatives buried, stories anchored to landmarks, and seasonal rhythms internalized as a habit of life. The obstacle is embedded and embodied in the physiology, including cognitive, and grounds to location.
Modern neuroscience gives a concrete account of how place becomes part of a person. The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial memory and navigation, and research on place cells shows that hippocampal neurons fire in relation to specific locations in an environment. Familiar surroundings are not only around us they are within us. The brain builds spatial scaffolding that links location to memory, routine, prediction, and emotional regulation.
When cognition is tied to the specificity of place, it becomes hard for a parcel to be made equivalent to another. Commodification demands interchangeability. A home cannot easily be made equivalent to another home when it’s part of the nervous system — not quickly, not cleanly, and often not at all. When the state-capital alliance imagines territory as a grid of extractable value, it is implicitly trying to override how humans experience territory.
That is why “simple” displacement so often produces disproportionate harm. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe the traumatic stress that follows the destruction of one’s “emotional ecosystem.” Root shock is not only grief or nostalgia. It is a stress response to the sudden loss of the social and spatial cues that stabilize daily life. The shredding of a mesh of relationships, routines, and meanings embedded in a neighborhood or homeland.
The root shock of the state violence of 1862 was not just incidental to the project of transformation. It was structurally necessary. If topophilia is a biological and psychological anchor, then a purely legal or economic strategy (bureaucratic coercion) will often be insufficient because the anchor of topophilia holds. To clear land at speed and scale, the state reaches for tools that can sever attachment abruptly. Public executions, mass incarceration, forced marches, and exile doesn’t just relocate people. They’re violent attempts to scramble the conditions under which people can remain attached at all. It transforms topophilia into vulnerability.
Work on social exclusion and “social pain” helps explain why. In a widely cited fMRI study, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during experiences of exclusion. This parallels patterns seen in physical pain studies where distress is tracked with painful activities. The point is not that social threat is “just like” physical injury, but that the brain treats social severing as a serious alarm condition. It’s something that demands attention, vigilance, and behavioral change to overcome.
ROOTS, RESISTANCE, AND REPAIR
Topophilia doesn’t end with the so-called frontier or attempts at ‘removing’ its inhabitants. It reappears wherever people form durable bonds. That includes the streets and schools, churches and parks, language, kin, and the local economies and cultures war capitalism eventually built. The Dakota and Ojibwe were never “removed” in any final sense. Many live and organize in and around the Twin Cities today.
In South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protector Movement, a biproduct of the American Indian Movement, works out of the American Indian Cultural Corridor along Franklin Avenue — an immediate target for ICE. The protectors made their presence known as a form of ongoing place-based care and defense.
It is a living archive of tactics for defending attachment under pressure through direct action, community building, patrols, and the mundane discipline of showing up. What it offers is not merely a critique of state violence, but vigilance without spectacle, care without permission, and solidarity as a daily habit rather than a momentary sentiment.
Other areas of Minneapolis show how when federal enforcement turns public space into a zone of uncertainty, topophilic neighbors often respond by adopting exactly those same “weapons” of persistence — care, documentation, rapid communication, mutual aid — that have long characterized Indigenous resistance and slavery abolitionist networks.
Standing Rock, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies gathered in 2016 to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, demonstrated how quickly infrastructure can scale when a place becomes a shared object of defense.
The #NoDAPL movement assembled a broad coalition of Indigenous nations and allies, over 200 tribes, alongside legal support, medical care, and communications systems designed to withstand state patience.
The 2020 George Floyd uprising in Minneapolis also revealed how love of place can become a platform for organized care rather than retreat. Alongside protest, residents built mutual-aid channels, street-medic networks, food distribution, and neighborhood defense efforts that treated the city as an emotional ecosystem worth repairing. What looked to outsiders like spontaneous eruption was, on the ground, a rapid layering of roles that included medics, legal observers, supply runners, translators, and de-escalators. This ecology of participation made it possible for large numbers of people to act without centralized command.
Social psychology helps explain why these movements generate allies rather than only sympathizers. One key concept is collective efficacy — the combination of social cohesion and a shared willingness to intervene for the common good. It blossoms when people repeatedly see each other act, learn local norms of mutual obligation, and build trust that intervention will be supported rather than punished. All rooted in topophilia.
Place attachment can bridge boundaries that would otherwise keep people separate. Work in community psychology and planning shows that place attachment and meaning can support participation and collective engagement, especially when development or coercion threatens everyday life.In other words, topophilia is not just private feeling. When it’s under threat it can become public motive and an engine for coalition.
The coalition in Minneapolis is being characterized by the federal government as terrorists. This borrows from a long history of resistance to violence because war capitalism has never been only domestic. The United States and its allies refined coercive governance overseas through night raids and “capture-or-kill” operations in Afghanistan, midnight house raids in Iraq, and broader militarized campaigns that treat homes as “searchable terrain” and communities as “intelligence environments.”
Many of the officials, contractors, and voters who authorized or normalized these methods rarely imagined the same atmosphere of violent seizure in their neighborhood. As unimaginable as it may be watching unmarked vehicles, sudden detentions, and public uncertainty coming to American streets — used against the very citizens and taxpayers who fund such operations — it’s not to those victims overseas in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, or even inner city America.
That return is what the poet and politician Aimé Césaire called the “imperial boomerang” effect, the idea that techniques tolerated in peripheral countries can come home to roost. In the U.S., the boomerang has long “landed” first on people of color. It emerges through surveillance and disruption campaigns like the two decades of the covert and illegal COINTELPRO program where the FBI targeted counterculture groups of the so-called New Left.
Or the “Palmer Raids” of 1919 and 1920 targeting largely Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their left-leaning politics. These led to riots in 30 US cities and culminated in the bombing of the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the US attorney general. These programs all reflect the notion that war can come home — just look at the increased militarizing of policing complete with SWAT tactics.
And the same history that produced the scaffold of war capitalism of the past also produced reservoirs of resistance we see here and now. When neighbors anywhere respond to incursions not only with fear but with organized vigilance and material support, they are adapting older strategies of care found in Indigenous, abolitionist, and other movement-based defenses of people and places against infiltration, intimidation, and attempted violent removal.
We can see how war capitalism endures. Mankato’s 1862 gallows aimed to clear Dakota homelands of their people for homesteading, rails, and mills. Meanwhile, today’s Operation Metro Surge includes thousands of federal agents raiding Minneapolis homes and streets, attempting to sever immigrant attachments to allegedly enforce labor control and national security. These militarized spectacles of warrantless entries, tear gas, and shootings echo what Beckert has uncovered. They treat people and place as obstacles to commodification rather than roots of stewardship.
Yet topophilia also persists. These cross cultural rapid-response networks are not new to these lands, even though the US government tried to erase them centuries ago. The inspiring actions we see in Minneapolis reflect the values of compassion, positiveness, and respect for all relatives with neighborly solidarity that the first occupants of that land embraced. They’re now woven with their allied 21st century neighbors in common and shared resistance. As best expressed here by Indigenous studies and political ecology scholar Melanie Yazzie. (and the longer version here)
Minneapolis, like those acts of resistance in the nearby Dakotas, enacts and rehearses an alternative form of civil governance that centers mutual obligation over coercion and extraction. It shows how cities can survive the strain and stay alive — not through fear and gain, but through care that grounds and sustains.
Social psychologist Erving Goffman, writing in the 1950s, called this kind of self-presentation "impression management." He argued that much of everyday life is performance. Not in the theatrical sense, but in how we act in response to what we expect others see. Urban spaces, especially commercial ones, are often the stage. But today, that performance isn’t just for others in the room. It’s for followers, algorithms, and endless feeds. The “audience” is ambient, but its expectations are precise.
As places like the West Village get filtered through lifestyle accounts and recommendation algorithms, their role changes. They no longer just host people, but mirror back a version of identity their occupants expect to see. Sidewalks become catwalks. Coffee shops become backdrops. Apartment windows become curated messes of string lights and tasteful clutter. And increasingly, the distinction between what’s lived and what’s posted collapses.
This fast loop — what we might call spatial virality — doesn’t just show us how to act in a place. It scripts the place itself. Stores open where the foot traffic is photogenic. Benches are placed for backdrops, not rest. Even the offerings shift: Aperol spritzes, charm bars, negroni specials sold not for taste but for tagability.
These are the high-tempo loops. They grab attention and crowd the mix. But every modular synth set, like a painting, needs contrast.
So some people opt out, or imagine doing so. Not necessarily with loud protest, but quiet rejection. They look for something slower. Something that isn’t already trending...unless the trend of routine sucks you in.
PULSING PATTERNS
If Flash is the pop hook, Pulse is the counter-melody. It could be a bassline or harmony that brings emotional weight and keeps things grounded. In music, you may not always notice it, but you'd miss it if it were gone. In cities, this loop shows up in slow friendships, mutual aid, and cafés that begin to feel like second homes. These are places where regulars greet one another by name. Where where hours melt through conversations. It satisfies a need to be seen, but without needing to perform. It’s what holds meaning when spectacle fades.
If the fast loop turns space into spectacle, the counter loop tries to slow it down. It lures the space to feel lived in, not just liked. It’s not always radical. Sometimes it’s just choosing a different coffee shop.
Back in Seattle’s University District, students do have options. Bulldog News. Café Allegro. George Coffee. These places don’t serve drinks meant to be posted. They serve drinks meant to be tasted. They’re not aesthetic first. They’re relational. These are small gestures that build culture.
Social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen describe this through what they call relational self theory. We don’t become ourselves in isolation. We become ourselves with and through others — especially those we repeatedly encounter. Think about the difference between ordering coffee from a stranger versus someone who knows you like sparkling water with your Cortado. It’s a different kind of transaction. It eases things. It reinforces your own loop.
So why do people routinely return to Starbucks? It isn’t just about caffeine addiction. It’s about being part of a socially reinforced rhythm — anchored in convenience, recognition, and the illusion of choice.
Stores like Starbucks are often strategically located for maximum accessibility and convenience. They're nestled near transit hubs, along commuter corridors, or within high-traffic pedestrian zones. These placements aren’t arbitrary. They’re optimized to integrate into daily routines. It's less like a countermelody and more like a harmonic parallel melody. As a result, practical considerations like proximity, availability, and reliability often override ideological concerns.
People return not because the product is exceptional, but because the store is exactly where and when they need it. The Starbucks habit isn’t only about routine, but rhythmic predictability that appears personal. In this sense, it functions as a highly accessible pulse: a loop that’s easy to join and hard to break. It's made of proximity, subtle trust, and convenience, but is dressed as choice.
My daughter's chosen counter loop lives in the East Village — not far, geographically, from the Instagram inspired brunch queues of Bleecker Street. Her loops are different. She carries conversations across record stores, basement venues, bookstores with hand-scrawled signs, and a few stubborn restaurants.
These are Places where the playlists aren't streaming through Spotify. Her city isn’t organized around visibility. It’s organized around presence. Around being seen to be honored and remembered. Like the bookstore dude who knows the lore on everyone, or the cashier who waves her through without paying, or her Brooklyn bandmate friends who fold her in like family.
Sure, this scene intersects with the popular loops — modular synths are having a moment — but it sidesteps the sameness. It stays unpredictable, grounded in curiosity and care rather than clicks. The gear is still patched by hand. The performances are messy and often temporary. And yet, the loops — literal and figurative — keep returning. Not because they’re engineered for attention, but because they allow people to build something slowly...together...from the inside. Especially when done in partnership with another synthesist.
You might see this in your own city. The quiet transformation of spaces: a café hosting a poetry night; a yoga studio turned warming shelter during the storm; a laundromat that leaves a stack of free books near the dryers. These are not accidents. They are interventions. Sometimes small, sometimes subtle...but always deliberate.
They stand in contrast to the churn of the viral. They also offer an alternative to despair. Because the counter loop isn’t just critique. It’s care enacted. And care takes time.
Still, even pulsing care needs structure. It needs floor drains, power outlets, and open hours. It needs a stable substructure.
UNDERCURRENT UNDERTONES
Undertone is the foundational structure on which other elements are built. It's the core of modular synth music. This isn’t just rhythm. It’s the subtle, slow, and reactive scaffolding. These core loops evolve and shift setting the timing and emotional tonality for everything else.
They don’t dominate, but they shape the flow. They respond to what surrounds them to ground the composition. Cities, too, have these base layers. Often imperceptible, they are visceral, ambient, and persistent. They come into focus with the smell of rain on warm pavement. The clink of a key in a front door. These are not songs you hum, they’re the ones your heart and lungs make.
Long before the influencer run clubs, celebrity shoe stores, and curated stoops, there was the mundane sidewalk. Not the kind tagged on a friend’s story or filtered through the latest app. Just concrete. Scuffed by strollers, scooter wheels, boots, and time. The sidewalk doesn’t follow trends, but it does remember them.
Cities are built on these undertones: habitual routes, early deliveries, overheard exchanges, open signs flipped at the same hour each morning. They aren’t glamorous. They don’t go viral. But they are what hold everything together.
Urban scholar Ash Amin calls this the “infrastructure of belonging.” In his work on ordinary urban life, he writes that much of what connects us isn’t spectacular. It’s what happens when people brush past one another without ceremony: the steady hum of life happening without the need for headlines. Cities function not just because of design, but because of everyday cooperation — shared rhythms, implicit trust, systems that keep working because people show up.
It can seem mundane: a delivery driver making the same drop, a retiree watering the sidewalk garden they planted without permission, the clatter of trash bins returning to their spots. These moments don’t make the city famous, but they do make it work.
Even the flashiest loops rely on them. The West Village girl’s curated brunch only happens because someone sliced lemons before sunrise and wiped the table clean before she sat down. The Starbucks habit loop in the U-District clicks into place because the supply truck showed up at 5 a.m. and the barista clocked in on time. They’re the dominant undertone of cities: loops so steady we stop noticing them...until they stop. Like during the pandemic.
A synthesist might point to an LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator. These make slow drones that hum under a syncopated rhythm; a pulsing sub-bass holding space while textures come and go. The mundane in a city does the same: it holds the mix together. Without it, the composition falls apart.
If you’ve ever heard a modular synth set, you know it doesn’t move like pop music. The loops aren’t clean. They evolve, layer, drift in and out of sync. They build tension, release it, then find a new rhythm. Cities work the same way.
Their beauty isn’t always in sync — it’s in polyrhythm. Like when two synth voices loop at slightly different speeds: a saw wave pinging every three beats, a filtered drone stretching over seven. They collide, resolve, then drift again. Like when a car blinker syncs to the beat of a song and then falls out again. In modular music, this dissonance isn’t a flaw. It creates a sonic texture.
City rhythms don’t always align either. A delivery truck pulls up as a barista closes shop; protest chants counter a stump speech; showtimes shift with transit delays. These clashes don’t cancel each other out — they deepen the city’s texture, giving it groove.
Sociologists Scannell and Gifford call this place attachment: the slow accrual of meaning in a space through repetition, emotional memory, and lived interaction. It’s not always nostalgic. Sometimes it’s forward-looking. The act of building the kind of city you want to live in, one relationship at a time.
And beneath all of this, the city continues its own loop: subways running through worn tunnels, trash collected on quiet mornings, someone sweeping a shop floor before the door opens.
Both protest and performance rely on this scaffold. The Starbucks picket line doesn’t just appear. It’s supported by planning, scheduling, and shared labor. The music scene doesn’t just materialize. It's shaped by decades of flyers, friendships, and repeat customers.
The viral and the intentional both need the mundane.
Cities, when they work, are made of all three: the flash of now, the pulse of choice, and the undertone of the necessary. Like springtime flowers, the city creates blooms that emerge at the surface. They draw attention, cameras, and admiration. These blossoms don’t just attract the eye, they draw in pollinators who carry influence and energy far beyond the original scene.
But none of this happens without the rest of the plant. It’s the leaves that capture sunlight day after day, the roots that pulse the unseen through tunnels, the microbes that toil in the grime and dirt to nourish those all around them. Urban life mirrors this looping ecology. Moments that flash brightly, pulses that quietly sustain, and undertones that hold it all together. The bloom is what gets noticed, but it’s the layered and syncopated life below — repeating, decomposing, reemerging — that make the next blossom possible.
This housing development was built to accommodate a booming population drawn to jobs at the Tacoma Port, nearby Boeing factories, lumber yards, and paper mills. As the 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan states,
“…certain areas in King County, such as Federal Way, will have a population boom partially due to the employment opportunities that exist or are contemplated in the Tacoma area.”
Development was happening so fast that in 1958 the State of Washington purchased a 300-acre swath of land at nearby Dash Point for $185,000 to make it a state park. That’s $1.7 million in 2022 dollars and about what you’d pay for a single home near Dash Point today. Indigenous people lived on these shores before being displaced to a nearby reservation as part of the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. The Puyallup people are still fighting for access to surrounding private land to fish; their lawful right as written in the treaty. Most, if not all, treaties fail to honor Indigenous notions of shared use of land and resources that fly in the face of more self-centered and guarded Western ideals and philosophies of individual property ownership and rights.
The state’s 1958 purchase of the Dash Point property was from a company aptly named the “Modern Home Builders.” That same year natural gas pipelines were laid and fire hydrants were getting installed every 600 feet. In 1959 a sewer plan was revised to keep up with the rapid development.
In 1960 a 600-acre “Residential Park” began showing their 650 homes to buyers – many of whom were likely war veterans who were enjoying cheap government subsidized mortgages. Churches were being erected, bowling alleys were being laid, and ‘American Concrete’ had their grand opening featuring “Free Washed Sand for the Kiddies.”
This Federal Way neighborhood I was walking in wasn’t the only one going through this transformation in the 1950s and 60s. It was happening across the country. I grew up in one and benefited from it. It was easy for me to imagine these homes as brand new. I could close my eyes and smell fresh white American concrete, I could see kids riding their bikes, new cars pulling into the driveways, and smoke rising from the backyard barbeques. Life was good.
By 1966, when most of this neighborhood I was walking through was built, the U.S. stock market had peaked. Nobody would have believed it then, but this marked the beginning of a long slow economic decline. The stagflation of the 1970s and the area’s shift toward software in the 1980s and 90s froze much of Federal Way in the past. Beginning in 1990 with the Washington Growth Management Act suburban sprawl was curbed, then much of Boeing left the area, mills closed, and Western Washington jobs shifted from blue collar to white.
Meanwhile, today the tech industry continues to push home values across the region upward while most incomes remain stagnant. The median price of a home in Federal Way is $580,000 and has grown 16% year over year for the last five years. The estimated yearly median income between 2013-2017 was around $62,000 and the per capita income was only $30,288. That’s well below the 2020 median household income in the United States of $67,521 which had dropped from $69,560 the year prior. Federal Way may be lagging economically, but it is extremely rich with diversity. The Federal Way School District reports over 111 different languages spoken in family homes. But not in the streets where I was walking. Not a peep.
This is a common sight in many suburban neighborhoods, and this one was no exception. Though, seeing one to five cars per household led me to believe these people must be home. I can imagine each of these homes filled with people glued to a screen. But should they ever leave, they’ll surely get in a car given the walkability score of 22 out of 100. Besides, there aren’t many places of interest within walking distance. Unless, of course, you’re a walking fanatic like me.
CURVESOUS CARTESIAN CUL-DE-SACS
This area, like so many others, was designed to be anthropocentric – it puts the individual self at the center. Just as cars do. America is made for cars and driving a car conjures a belief that the ‘self’ is most important. This is my car and my road so get out of my way. Automobile advertising repeatedly reinforces the image of being alone in comfort in a climate controlled moving cocoon made of metal and plastic. It’s hard to deny, a good car is comfortable.
And most of them comfortably reside at these single family homes which are also designed to put the ‘self’ and the ‘single’ family first. The handful of Christian churches I walked by also stress the power of the individual. The Bible’s Book of Genesis verse 1:26 states:
“God” said “Man” has “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Does that not sound kind of creepy?
Civil Engineers and Urban Planners were, and still are, the gods who hold dominion over city plans that often encourage cities to creepeth upon the earth. Federal Way itself crept out of sprawling Seattle and Tacoma. Planners made sure to plan for demand and single family homes on a large piece of land is what people demanded…and developers happily lent a hand. These demands have not receded. The 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan addressed ‘Residential Land Use’ with these words,
“Over the years and especially after World War II, the continued construction and upgrading of highway facilities has consistently improved accessibility to major employment centers. Since there has been ample suitable residential land available in relation to the demand, the effect of improved accessibility has resulted in residential development being located farther and farther out from major centers of employment. From the earliest times of the history of King county, a larger percentage of its residents have shown a preference to living in single family dwellings as opposed to multi-family structures. They could always afford this preference.”
They noted that in 1960 Seattle used 36 acres per 1000 persons, but by 1964 were planning to double that to 72 acres per 1,000 persons outside the ‘Urban Area’ of Seattle. They said,
“In the past, the grid iron pattern resulted in more acreage in streets than recent development.”
And since the 1950s and the expansion of freeways and highways there would be less need for the grid and compact development. They said,
“In the future, a large percentage of the streets and highway system acreages will consist of freeway type facilities rather than local streets.”
And to make sure developers, for whatever reason, didn’t attempt to build more dense housing on these sprawling acreages they included language that protected residents who may resist such attempts. They draw special attention to “URBAN CENTER DEVELOPMENT” (their emphasis), They wrote,
“residential densities should decrease at greater distances from an urban center…Some areas of the County should be kept at a lower density even though close to an urban center. These areas include locations where a pattern of large lot sizes is already established or is desired and where residents need the assurance that the character of their neighborhood will be stabilized.” (my emphasis)
There is a discernable distaste for uniform Cartesian grids in the language of this plan. Part of the modernist post-war vision was to move away from compact urban development of the 19th century that favored neighborhood stores, modest property allocations, and use of public transit. Multi-family structures had connotations of poor, often ethnically diverse, residents which by today’s standards are read as thinly veiled racist and classist biases. The 1950s and 60s pushed for more rural and pastoral land use that attempted to blend a growing middle class into a natural landscape connected to a freeway.
They wrote,
“The grid form of layout, while easy to design on the drawing board, can result in inharmonious relationships with the site. It can, however, add clarity to an otherwise confusing street pattern, but should be used judiciously to avoid monotonous rows of houses.”
They instead called for more organic street and lot layout saying,
“Depending on topography or other natural features affecting street design…an infinite number of variations exist in the arrangement of lots and houses and can be used to take advantage of natural features of the landscape.”
The cul-de-sac is called out in the plan as one example to follow.
“A third general form may be called a court, cul-de-sac, or cluster, and features a grouping of buildings which have service orientation at the street but privacy to the rear.”
I grew up on on a cul-de-sac and can vouge for the design goals these planners set out to achieve. But we now know that these dead ends can lead to overly circuitous routes should people choose to walk, bike, or bus to their destinations. They were planning for the automobile as the only viable and desirable choice of transport.
“residential neighborhoods should be designed with long blocks in order to avoid excessive cross streets which are costly to construct and maintain…Pedestrian crosswalks should be required only where necessary such as through blocks over 900 feet in length or where access to a school, park, or shopping area is essential.”
While they did recommend providing a sidewalk on at least one side of the street, it read more as a suggestion than a requirement. Under a section titled, “Street Design Factors” they said this about sidewalks,
“Even though sidewalks may be used less for walking in residential than in business areas, their hard surfaces provide children’s play areas close to home.”
THE APPRAISAL OF THE SOCIO-SPATIAL
The words “close to home” say a lot about these city plans and the desires and demands of home owners and builders. These places were designed and engineered by professionals from ‘above’ using maps and diagrams. They remained detached from the people and places they were planning for. And the very ‘townscapes’ these people were designing were intended to detach the occupants of these spaces from the larger, messy, and complex society that surrounded them.
They made plans for homes with ‘privacy in the rear’ where children play ‘close to home’. Architects and builders designed structures that insured privacy – in the words of ‘High Modernist’ Le Corbusier – they were “machines for living.” These properties included ‘service orientation at the street’ that included a driveway leading to a garage where the other ‘machine for moving’ could be stored.
This methodically mapped, measured, and mechanized ‘mecca’ is the making of well meaning men dating back to Mercator. The 17th century father of Cartography used techniques of triangulation to turn the earth into a scientific measuring instrument. The centuries old Mercator projection, which distorts northern land masses to give priority to the Dutch sailing distances between them, is still the most popular and familiar projection used today.
Then came Newton who saw the entire universe as a kind of machine – “a container for objects and facts.” He married his Newtonian physics with Euclidean geometry. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also taught physical geography, argued “space and time were inner conditions of the human…ordered by logical categories.”
Starting in 1747, and over the course of 50 years, the Cassini family drew a highly precise map of France using geodesic triangulation – the first of its kind. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) expanded on these techniques to measure and delineate land across the United States. But theses topographical maps were also used for the erasure of certain natural elements and to eliminate certain people. After all, their primary purpose was, and still is, to wage war or defend against it. These maps also remain the basis for mapping, planning, and ordering urban areas in the United States to this day.
This Western anthropocentric, mechanistic, objectification of spaces, and the use of maps and drawings to represent them, is alluring and seemingly addictive. It’s also part of the reality of everyday urban life. Ali Madanipour, a Professor of Urban Design at Newcastle University, separates urban spaces into two dimensions: physical and social.
The ‘physical’ is what garners the most attention, probably because it’s most visible and easy to understand. The arranging and grouping of buildings is at the scale of an urban planner and politician, the form and function of buildings are the domain of architects and developers, and the patterns and construction of spaces in between these structures, like streets, alleys, highways, freeways, and parking lots, is the domain of the civil engineer.
These objects are arranged in space creating places where people interact with each other and the natural and built environment – the interaction of people and place. But these interrelationships extend to the people who build them and those who control how, when, and where they’re built. This complex, multi-dimensional, interconnected social dimension over space and time is hard to see, harder to visualize, and thus hardest for us all to understand.
Madanipour summarizes,
“A study of urban form therefore refers to the way physical entities, singly or in a group, are produced and used, their spatial arrangements, and the interrelationships, and also how monetary and symbolic values are attributed to them.”
The way men mapped and arranged the physical entities in that Federal Way neighborhood were produced for the monetary gain of developers, the city, county, and state. The symbolic values were codified in that 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan that encouraged interrelationships between individuals to be in the home, close to home, or in a car – all while guaranteeing the ‘character of their neighborhood’ would be stabilized.
It was all planned on a map that men loomed over like a god or a general staging a battle over territory. But they were also giving people what they wanted. Weyerhaeuser wanted trees for paper and profit, developers wanted stolen land in exchange for money, and people wanted what many believe is entitled to them: individual ownership of their land. After all, it’s written in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution – to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".
The GPS I used to navigate these quiet curvilinear roads, carved into the earth then cauterized with concrete, is rooted in the same Western history of cartography, science, and philosophy that assisted in building its physical urban form. But the space I was visiting was not designed to be used as I was using it. That is why, to some degree, I didn’t see a single person. This environment was not built to foster interactions between people and place, but for cars to move individuals through space.
This place was designed for these people to be ‘close to home’ and in the home. These residents were probably socializing and forming interrelationships, but in a virtual environment. There were being entertained on a screen in their hand, on a desk, or on a wall. The culmination of combined technologies as old as their homes.
And when they did finally decide to leave their home, they likely tapped their destination on their phone. They climbed into their ‘machine for moving’, and were instructed to drive to clusters of physical structures of their choosing. They then glided on surfaces of ‘in-between’ spaces across America’s concrete places. The American dream financed by a loan. Blessings of liberty, that has left them alone.
If aesthetically pleasing ordered intelligibility is indeed a universal mammalian trait, getting to that cognitive state is complex – understanding it even more so. Some scientists believe another reason concrete evidence is elusive is because the visual stimuli used across studies varies considerably.
Designing and administering cognitive research requires rationalizing inputs across studies to achieve more predictable outcomes. This ‘streamlining’ of the scientific method is not only applied to studies, but to the design and manufacturing of products, and the planning, mapping, and administration of our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states.
Political scientist and legal anthropologist James C. Scott once alluded to the similarities between designing observational studies and the design of our modern urban environments writing,
“The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”
Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, is critical of what he calls High Modernismwhich is an over-reliance on Cartesian principles, the scientific method, and unfaltering faith in technology. While he admits these advances improved – and continue to improve – the human condition, he believes blind adherence to these aesthetic, bureaucratic, and technocratic principles may have also put us on a path toward what we now see as potential human extinction.
The list of ‘High Modernists’ in art, science, design, and politics is long, but Scott created a “Hall of Fame” of geo-political modernists like former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Cold War strategist Robert McNamara known for his ‘scientific management’ style, New York commissioner-cum-urban planner and power broker Robert Moses, founding head of Soviet Russia and dictator of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin, the Shah-of-Iran who sought to modernize and nationalize his entire country and industry, and the influential architect and urban designer Le Corbusier who advocated for standardized inhumane design and erasure of historical and cultural tradition – especially in the aftermath of war.
Scott’s full list includes people of not any one political persuasion. He reveals how both conservatives and progressives are capable of “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” He notes they all use “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” And he observes the public really has no recourse, nor often the desire, to resist it. He says,
“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”
That ‘desire’, as it were, I suspect is partially driven by the aesthetics found in the uniformity, balance, and order of ‘High Modernists.’ Parsimony, the reductive removal of redundancy, is what persuades people to purchase overpriced but simplified products like Prada. It’s what spurred Tom Wolfe to observe in his book From Bauhaus to Our Housethat elite modernists want to fill cities with “row after row of Mies van der Rohe.” The German architect was known for his stark rectilinear buildings made of what he called ‘skin and bone.’
In addition to fashion and architecture, modernist desire was (and still is) embodied in many elements of society and popular culture from literature, to industry, to transportation. Much of this progress occurred during the Industrial Age of the 19th century. I can imagine the exhilaration of high speed movement through space over time on a bike, car, or train surely began with fright but ended in delight. Even desirable.
As Scott points out, the state provided the means for this desire to manifest. He invites us to,
“imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly what designers of locomotives had in mind with ‘streamlining.’ Rather than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.”
FROM CRAWLING TO SPRAWLING
It was locomotives that brought many colonizers to my home town, Norwalk, Iowa in the late 1800s. But the first was Samuel Snyder in 1852. He built a log cabin near an area called Pyra. He was likely on the land of the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je) people, or as neighboring tribes called them ayuhwa “sleepy ones” otherwise known as Iowa. Pyra was a few miles south of the state capital, Des Moines (Hartford of the West) that was incorporated just one year earlier.
By 1856, four years later, Pyra had a post office and a new resident, George Swan, who made his presence known by “putting up a pretentious edifice, to be used as a hotel.” Swan was a politician and newspaper publisher who moved from Norwalk, Ohio but was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He became postmaster in part to change the name of the town from Pyra to Norwalk.
The renaming of Indigenous place names to Western names is another common act of the ‘High Modernist’, as is laying out a town in your vision. Which was the next thing Swan did.
The county and the township had already been gridded and platted as part of Thomas Jefferson’s squaring of a nation, but it was Swan’s ‘authoritarian’ vision that allowed for the ‘social engineering’ of the town I grew up in. He was aided by a handful of settlers including Jesse Huff and Mary Huff. One of my best friends came from the Huff family, his uncle was our baseball coach, and his grandpa was the long time Norwalk city manager. That’s three generations of city administration aided by the modern state’s ‘means of acting on the desire’ to ‘level terrain’ so they may build their ‘utopia.’
It took until the 1950s and 60s before Norwalk become a true suburb of Des Moines – an expansion beyond what Swan could ever have imagined. Its population sputtered growing modestly between 1900 and 1950 from 287 to 435, but then grew 205% between 1950 and 1960 to 1,328. The town didn’t expand beyond Swan’s initial footprint until 1969 and it’s been sprawling ever since. It’s now hard to discern the border between Des Moines and Norwalk. When I lived there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s corn and soybean fields provided a visible gap.
Despite these well-intentioned ‘High Modernists’ sprawling attempts around the world at carefully planned and engineered social utopias, scholarly literature reveals what Scott suspects. Research across economists, geographers, and planners suggests this general consensus:
“urban sprawl as a multidimensional phenomenon [is] typified by an unplanned and uneven pattern of urban development that is driven by a multitude of processes and which leads to the inefficient utilisation of land resources. Urban sprawl is observed globally, though its characteristics and impacts vary.”
The words ‘uneven’ and ‘multitude of processes’ and ‘inefficient utilization’ resulting in ‘varying impacts’ don’t fit the exacting premise promised by enlightened ‘High Modernists.’ This study I’m quoting was done in reaction to the fact that despite the populations of European cities declining, their footprints have continued to sprawl since the 1970s. They say, “There is no sign that this trend is slowing down and, as a result, the demand for land around cities is becoming a critical issue in many areas.” This is the essence of urban sprawl.
The ordinal origins of sprawl are synonymous with their historic modernist and economic origins – the Central Business District. The shape and pattern of the impending sprawl in the United States and Europe is like a spider spinning it’s web from the center out. Causes are often oversimplified by a focus on the economic trade-off between housing prices and commuting costs. Importantly, this economic function is a result of the modern state’s role in ‘providing the means of acting on the desire’ of select individuals to live ‘elsewhere.’
There are other factors that determine the shape, resolution, and scale of sprawl. A 2006 study determined that
“sprawl in the USA between 1976 and 1992 was positively related to groundwater availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralised employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth and the low impact of public service financing on local taxpayers.”
Other studies include another big factor in the United States, ethnicity: that same 2006 study found “that increases in the percentage of ethnic minority populations within cities and rising city centre crime rates both led to a growth in urban sprawl.” Curiously, a similar study focused on Europe “confirmed the positive impact of higher crime rates on sprawl, but observed the opposite effect for the impact of ethnic minority populations.”
I HAVE A CITY IN MIND
Sprawl isn’t just happening in the U.S. and Europe, but in developing countries as well. Since opening up in 1979, China has seen unprecedented sprawl in conjunction with their rise in socioeconomic development. Urbanization increased “17.92% in 1978 to 59.60% in 2018, and scholars predict it will reach 70% in 2035 and 75% in 2050.”
As is the case in the United States and Europe, “the expansion of urban land mainly sacrifices rural land, especially cropland, which produces negative effects such as ecological degradation, water and land loss, and soil pollution.” This study concludes that “urban land expansion has garnered much attention, and studies have focused on land transition monitoring, effects analysis, and mechanism identification. However, discussions on suburban development and its subsequent effects remain insufficient.”
These researchers draw attention to three commonly used dimensions in studying sprawl:
* Administrative - Administrative boundaries such as towns close to a city.
* Spatial - Location, Density, and Spatial Activity adjacent and within commuting distance of the city.
* Social - Attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.
A primary thrust of ‘High Modernism’ are found in those first two dimensions. ‘High Modernists’ seek to ease the ‘administrative’ costs through the reduction of ‘spatial’ complexity. There’s actually nothing modern about that, really. Unless you consider the 5th century BC Greek polymath Hippodamus ‘modern’. He is considered the ‘father of European urban planning’ beginning with his grid plan of the Greek port city Piraeus that remains today. But being a mathematician, he no doubt was seeking spatial parsimony for city administrators.
The economist Herbert Simon (who studied decision making in large organizations) describes the ‘administrative man’ this way:
“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.”
Simon elucidates how the first two dimensions of the effects of ‘High Modernist’ urban sprawl, – ‘administrative boundaries’ and remote measures of ‘spatiality’ – are ‘gross simplifications’ of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.’ This ‘real world’ may be better evidenced in the third dimension of measures, ‘social attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.’
But even these attributes can remain removed the real world if viewed from a map or table of data. We need only look at Redlining as an example of how ‘social’ dimensions can be used to negate, subjugate, frustrate, dictate, alienate, arbitrate, automate, and attempt to eliminate certain classes, races, and ethnicities through actuated, calculated tax rates, interest rates, and loan rates through a slate of mandates from magistrates of the city-state, state-state, and nation-state.
The French Philosopher, Michel de Certeau, observes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life how Walking in the City, despite its gridded plans, results in people defiantly deploying practical and tactical shortcuts despite attempts by centuries of ‘High Modernism’ to control them. He writes that ‘the City’,
“provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.”
But he also wonders if this concept of the city is decaying. He reflects on the strength, resiliency, and tenacity of humanity despite the potential erosion of ‘High Modernism’ and asks,
“Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well?”
He invites us to not turn our “bewilderment” of ‘High Modernism’ in ‘catastrophes’” of its undoing but instead,
“analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay…”
As much as I like the ordered, gridded aesthetic, I’ve come to better appreciate the beauty in our ‘microbe-like’ natural world. Modernity may be defined by the analytical geometry of Descartes, but I can’t help but wonder if the work of another 17th century mathematician may come to shape our future.
His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who invented, perhaps along with Isaac Newton, calculus. Leibniz is also credited with discovering self-similarity which forms the bases for Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Mandelbrot’s geometry, his ‘Art of Roughness’, describes the mathematics behind branching systems found in fern leaves, cauliflower, trees, and coastlines as well as our circulatory system, nervous system, bronchial system, and maybe even Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit home in the hill.
If it wasn’t for the fractal-like nature of the gray-matter of our brain, it wouldn’t be able fold upon itself to fit within the small cavity of our cranium. Even its network of neurons, and the synaptic patterns they form as we fawn over beauty, follow the mathematical laws of Leibniz and Mandelbrot. Our world may not need be ordained by Cartesian order because it’s already organized. We just need to understand it and follow its lead.
As neuroscientists continue to map the brain in search of what draws us to order and balance in objects as well as cities, perhaps they could consider the conjecture of British physicist and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West when he writes:
“…because the geometry of white and gray matter in our brains, which forms the neural circuitry responsible for all of our cognitive functions, is itself a fractal-like hierarchical network, this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks…
…In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.”
Take electoral district maps as an example. Every ten years, when the U.S. census is taken, the federal and state governments are required to reapportion the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and State Legislatures to match the current population. Accordingly, they’re also required to map numerically equal districts in the spirit of neutrality in a process called redistricting. Here’s an interactive redistricting map from FiveThirtyEight.
It is seemingly impossible to be impartial in the remapping of these districts. Various subgroups of the general population are advantaged while others lose out. The system tends to bias regions with economic vitality because they typically attract the most people. Those people most advantaged economically are also those who are most mobile. Those less mobile tend to be more economically disadvantaged and are usually low-income, minorities, less educated, and skilled laborers in declining industries and geographies.
The rich get richer, the poorer get poorer. Those who are mobile, move; and those stuck, are out of luck. One piece of research from 2019 by two political geographers reveals that “that districts with the fastest rate of growth have a higher level of affluence.” This means the ‘winners’ will gain house seats while the ‘losers’ lose seats. Their research looks at the 89 U.S. House seats that have shifted due to redistricting since 1960. Their results shows that,
“Rewarding population growth means rewarding certain interests that produced it, the converse is true for punishing population loss. This is an underappreciated point among the many who think that a population basis for apportionment is problem-free and self-evidently superior to any other scheme.”
WIGGLE ROOM
There are many rules applied to generating electoral district maps by the states, but according to the Loyola Law School the most common is Contiguity. There are 45 states that stipulate districts must be contiguous. In other words, a district can’t have an island floating inside another district. Borders must be adjacent.
The next most common rule is adherence to Political Boundaries “to the extent practicable”. Thirty-four of the states have this as part of their state constitution or statute. This means a district map has to attempt to align its boundaries to county, city, or town lines.
Compactnessis another rule or guideline. They say, “scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness” and that, “32 states require their legislative districts to be reasonably compact; 17 states require congressional districts to be compact.” Idaho appears to have the most specific definition of ‘compactness’ stating officials, “should avoid drawing districts that are oddly shaped.” I honestly have yet to see an electoral district map that is not oddly shaped. It turns out ‘compactness’ is a matter of opinion. Just look at Texas!
Communities of interest also commonly show up in districting rules. There are 15 states that consider keeping “communities of interest” whole when drawing state legislative districts; 11 states do the same for congressional districts.” Those with a ‘common interest’ are people who share the same interest in a given piece of legislation. Just last May Kansas reinstated their guidelines and criteria stating:
“There should be recognition of similarities of interest. Social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area…should be considered.”
Given these popular rules, it’s not hard to see how poor people and ethnic and racial minorities are literally excluded from representation. It’s also easy to see how redistricting amplifies political partisanship. The U.S. Constitution says little about how to limit these powers. And while the Supreme Court have stated excessive partisanship is unconstitutional, they’ve also “explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage” Moreover, they’ve said they will not consider claims of extreme partisanship claiming there is no legal way to determine how much is ‘too much’.
But I’m not certain there is a fair way to map representation using static maps that assume constituents somehow live, work, pray, or school within an electoral district. Perhaps it’s possible in some rural areas, but I go through three congressional districts and four state legislative districts just to get to the airport. To be ‘contiguous’ and ‘compact’ the district lines go down the middle of Lake Washington. Do the people I see on the other side of the lake really have different ‘community interests’ than mine?
It was Thomas Jefferson who pushed to violently displace or exterminate Indigenous people, possess their land, and then grid it up to be sold (or given for free to homesteaders), farmed, and then taxed. After all, he was a farmer with an agrarian vision of colonial settlements across the country featuring schools, churches, and a government seat within ‘political boundaries’. You can read just how easy it was for settlers to grid their own property in a piece I wrote last year called, Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day.
While these people mobilized across the country, farmers and settlers were not that mobile relative to today. Early settlements were naturally ‘compact’. ‘Common interests’ were instilled through fear. Settlers banded together despite their ethnic or religious differences because they fretted over when and where the original occupants of the land they were farming may return hostile and violent demanding their stolen land be returned. And ‘contiguity’ would have been easily achieved given the rectilinear plots they platted.
Territorial and electoral mapping became more complicated the more complex American societies became. Trains, streetcars, and bicycles made it easier for people to travel longer distances to live and work. The ‘common interests’ became more diffuse with each advance in transportation and wave of immigration. I can see how a politician might wish to squiggle the square on a map to wriggle toward voters to tap.
Wriggle as they may, their constituents wiggled more. Now we have evidence that mobility and affluence are linked to partisan political maps that advantage the advantaged at the expense of ‘others’. We also know that lower income people are often priced out of affluent areas to suburbs, exurbs, and even rural areas. They are forced to live in areas often very different than where they work. Are their ‘common interests’ really relevant to their legislative representation?
For example, if poorer people must rely on public transportation to get to and from work or school, are local, state, and congressional politicians in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas really going to listen to their complaints about equitable transportation? Will they get fair ‘legislative representation?’
And increasingly, for some, the pandemic has made it possible to live and work in wildly different places. What does ‘compactness’ or ‘communities of interest’ or ‘contiguity’ look like on a map under these dynamic conditions? Mapping for the purpose of political representation, taxation, and even urban and transportation planning assume built environments are as permanent as the physical earth in which they arrange themselves. Even a decennial census admits to a certain pace of life that is inconsistent with the increase in mobility, technology, and, unfortunately, climate change and economic inequality.
“It is possible to conceive of cities as being clusters of `spatial events', events that take place in time and space, where the event is characterized by its duration, intensity, volatility, and location. There may be interactions in time and space between events, leading to clusters and other aggregations, but the dominant way in which these descriptions are characterized is clearly temporal.”
He defines duration as being as short as ‘trip making’ — measured in minutes or hours, to ‘living at a residential location’ — measured in months or years. Intensity could the intensity in which an event impacts people or place. It may be correlated with the ‘compactness’ of people involved in ‘common interests’ relative to those around them. Volatility is the variation in intensity and may be correlated with duration. A white collar worker with a predictable routine (or working from home) would measure as less volatile than a gig worker taking part-time jobs across a given region, country, or the world. Location, then, is the traditional measure and mapping of the terrestrial as well as population scale, size, and density.
In his 2018 book, Inventing Future Cities, Batty dedicates a chapter to The Pulse of the City. Here he talks of a,
“’liquid city’: a place where physical desires, face-to-face contacts, and digital deliberations provide a new nexus of innovation. Flows, networks, and connections, rather than inert structures, dominate this physicality as infrastructure comes to represent this new liquidity built on layer upon layer of flux and flow.”
He isn’t the only voice challenging traditional static notions of place, Doreen Massey was another. She was a British social scientist and geographer and Professor of Geography at the Open University in the UK. She began her career in the field of economic geography where she focused on social and economic inequities that create stark divisions between regions and social classes. This led her to reconceptualize the sense of space.
In a 2013 interview, she talked about how space is often the afterthought when considering ‘time and space’ in the social sciences. Time is given much attention as ‘the dimension of change and dynamism’ and space is relegated to inert earth ‘out there’ that we ‘cross-over’, ‘devoid of temporality.’ She points to a well held historical position in academia that if the field of history is about time, then geography must be relegated to space. Throughout her career, she worked to change that.
Her research and writing aimed,
“to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live.”
She offers this scenario as an example: When we are ‘crossing-over’ ‘inert land’ ‘out there’ in a car or train and glance out the window, we acknowledge we are moving through space and the physical geography is indeed part of it. But our eyes and brains also capture snapshots of people walking across a street, ordering food from a street vendor, or strolling in a park. These moments, like those on Google Street View – these interactions of people and place – are also part of the space.
She surmises that,
“Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.”
Mapping these concepts and phenomena is as complicated as explaining it, but dynamic mapping continues to make strides in mapping complex spatial processes.
One of the most visceral examples is this 2014 video of 30,000 airplanes flying in Europe’s airspace over the course of a single day.
And there are tools that help analyze air traffic flow data like this.
Companies like INRIX have been studying traffic flow data on the ground for decades. Their software allows for traffic flow analysis and visualizations using real-time data from vehicles.
When I take the bus I use an app called OneBusAway that shows in near real-time the location of a bus on route from origin to destination.
There are also companies like StreetLight Data who buy anonymized and aggregated location data from mobile phone providers that probabilistically determine traffic flows generated from cars, bikes, and pedestrians.
These are examples of dynamic cartography that approach articulations of Batty’s ‘liguid city.’ They are baby steps toward representing the dynamism Massey sought to better understand our relations and connections with each other. But they lack the richness census data provides and we’re a long way from trusting governments to track us 24/7 365 days a year as part of their routine census collection. Many people already view the census as a personal violation of privacy.
At the same time, our methods are stuck in the past. When Jesus was believed to be rising from his tomb, the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or Muslims fasting as the Quran was handed down it was all happening in cities they believed to be as permanent as the religions they birthed. In the case of Jerusalem, it was. That certainty came under question during the dawning of the Enlightenment and the spread of colonialism. The Industrial Age accelerated the pace of change and innovation in technology and urban design. Society’s pace quickened and cities, and connections to them, acted as civic accelerators.
In 1914 Scottish cartographer and geographer John Bartholomew created an Atlas of Economic Geography for King George V. It included a map that showed how long it would take to get to various places around the globe. It would have taken King George several weeks to traverse the boundaries of his British Empire. You can now do it in a day.
There is a disconnect between the open-ended superexponential growth of ‘political boundaries’ that accelerate our pace of life and the process of determining who governs them. Representative governments are determined by methods of mapping from a bygone era. What does this say about our future?
I’m with Michael Batty when he says,
“I think there is much we need to say about cities as we come to terms with a world that is intricately connected and where information underpins our every act.”
The word map is a shortened version of the 14th century middle English word, mapemounde. That’s a compound word combining latin’s mappa, “napkin or cloth”, and mundi “of the world” and was used to describe a map of the world that was most likely drawn on an ancient cloth or papyrus.
This etymology resembles cartography from latin’s carta "leaf of paper or a writing tablet" and graphia "to scrape or scratch" (on clay tablets with a stylus)”.
Given modern cartography’s reliance on coordinates, the word cartography easily could have emerged from the word cartesian. That word is derived from the latin word cartesius which is the Latin spelling of descartes – the last name of the French mathematician, René Descartes. Descartes merged the fields of geometry and algebra to form coordinate geometry. It was a discovery that, as Joel L. Morrison writes in the History of Cartography, formed the
”foundation of analytic geometry and provided geometric interpretations for many other branches of mathematics, such as linear algebra, complex analysis, differential geometry, multivariate calculus, and group theory, and, of course, for cartography.”
This two dimensional rectangular coordinate system made it easy for 17th century land barons and imperial governments to more easily and accurately calculate distance and area on a curved earth and communicate them on a flat piece of paper. The increased expediency, accuracy, durability, and portability of paper allowed Cartesian maps to accelerate territorial expansionism and colonization around the world.
But rectangular mapping of property, Cadastral Mapping, dates back to the Romans in the first century A.D. Cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,
“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration...”
Even as Descartes was inventing analytical geometry in the 1600s, European colonizers in the Americas were using rectilinear maps in attempts to negotiate land rights with Indigenous people. For example, between 1666 and 1668 a land deed clerk filed a copy of a map detailing a coastal area in what is now as Massachusetts near Buzzards Bay. The original map was drawn by a Harvard educated Indigenous man named John Sassamon who was also a member of the Massachusett tribe.
Sassamon was respected by colonizers because he represented the ideal of an assimilated native but he was also held in high regard by local tribes…including the Wampanoag for which this map served as a legal document. He was an asset to both populations and served as an interpreter in a wide range of negotiations between tribes and colonizers.
This map was used by the Plymouth colonists to negotiate terms over Wampanoag land with their leader Metacom (or as he was also known as, King Phillip). It shows a rectangle featuring a river on the left side of the map labeled, “This is a river”, a line drawn at the top and the bottom labeled, “This line is a path”, and on the right side is a vertical line that encloses the rectangle. Surrounding the area are names of tribes and a body of text at the bottom describing the terms of the deal.
Herein lies a controversy, the intention of the map, and the fate of the mapped land. The text can be read one of two ways:
“Wee are now willing should be sold” or “Wee are not willing should be sold”.
The full statement in the records reads:
“This may informe the honor Court that I Phillip arne willing to sell the Land within this draught…I haue set downe all the principal! names of the land wee are not willing should be sold. ffrom Pacanaukett the 24th of the 12th month 1668
PHILLIP [his mark]”
Nine years later, in January of 1675, Sassamon warned the governor of the Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslow, that Metacom (King Phillip) was planning an attack. The Wampanaog, and other tribes, had become frustrated and threatened by encroaching colonists. Days later Sassamon’s body was found in a pond.
At first many thought he had drowned fishing, but further evidence revealed his neck had been violently broken. A witness came forth claiming to have seen three Wampanoag men attack Sassamon. The three men were tried before the first mixed jury of Indigenous people and European settlers. They ruled guilty and all three men were hung.
This created increased tensions and mistrust between Metacom and the Puritans leading to the King Phillips War in the summer of 1675. The battle lasted three years, most of which was without Metacom. In August of 1676 he was hunted down and shot by another Indigenous man who had converted, forcibly or voluntarily, to Puritan ways. Metacom’s wife and children were captured and sold as slaves in Bermuda. Metacom was cut into quarters and his limbs were hung from trees. His head was put on a post at the entrance to the Plymouth colony where it remained for two decades.
LABORERS MAPPING WITH NEIGHBORS
Violence against and dispossession of Indigenous people by colonists and industrialists usually involves a map. That’s as true today as it has been at least since the Romans. But it hasn’t stunted attempts over the years to reduce or eliminate these injustices. For example, at the end of World War I, while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and his Inquiry team were remapping Europe at the Paris Peace Conference, the League of Nations was born.
Out of this organization came the International Labor Organization (ILO) with representatives from Belgium, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was chaired by the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers. Founding members were made of representatives from government, employers, and workers. In the interest of creating a peaceful, safe, and just world, they intended to establish fair labor practices around the world, including fair pay for women – a provision Gompers brought to the table himself. Two lines of their founding preamble stand out amidst today’s international social disorder,
“Whereas universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice…
Whereas also the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries.”
Social justice and historic income inequality are conditions that need improved among most countries today as they did in 1918. But when it came time to ratify the permanent ILO members, the U.S. Congress voted to deny Gompers a seat at the ILO table. U.S. politicians were suspect of the League of Nations and many feared these international labor rights may interfere with privatized labor in the United States. It wasn’t until 1934 that the U.S., with the urging of FDR, was allowed to take a seat at the ILO by the U.S. Congress.
Nonetheless, during the 1920s the ILO conducted several studies concerning labor conditions around the world. That including the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples as a result of widespread colonization. In 1930 ILO 29 was passed drawing much needed attention on forced labor of Indigenous and Afro-descendant people.
For the next two decades the ILO continued to conduct research and create programs throughout their conventions. In 1951 the ILO Committee of Experts on Indigenous Labour devised a 20 year blueprint that addressed land and labor rights of Indigenous populations. They brought together various UN organizations like the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. It culminated in the publishing of a 1953 report on the core social and economic conditions facing Indigenous Peoples in the Americas.
“in various independent countries indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations which are not yet integrated into the national community and whose social, economic or cultural situation hinders them from benefiting fully from the rights and advantages enjoyed by other elements of the population…”
This was the world’s first attempt to codify Indigenous rights into international law through a binding convention. These conventions included government made maps that were used as legally binding documents. Up to this point in history almost all legally binding maps were produced by governments. But with the spread of neoliberalism around the globe in the 1950s, mapping efforts began to be outsourced from governments to private firms and corporations. This shift was amplified by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s Point Four Program that offered technical assistance to developing countries, especially Latin America, and was largely funded by private institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Neoliberal economists out of the University of Chicago, Chicago Boys, were also embedded in Latin American governments in hopes of spreading neoliberal policies that favored U.S. industries. Conservative politicians, emboldened by the Cold War, also feared these countries may turn to socialism or communism; especially given the majority of the founding members of the ILO and the League of Nations favored social programs as a means of protecting and providing social justice and stability. The U.S. stood alone in opposition to these principles and policies, but remained influential nonetheless given the U.S. military and monetary domination.
But the privatization of legal and technical documents by neoliberals, including maps, resulted in unintended consequences. If within the ILO trifecta of “government, employers, and workers” governments and employers could provide legally binding maps and documents, so could workers. This opened an opportunity for Indigenous communities, and their advocates, to provide their own maps that countered centuries-old border claims and land rights made by expansionist governments and industrialists, both of which are inextricably linked.
The language in ILO 170, while groundbreaking, was still drenched in paternalistic chauvinism and assumed assimilation of Indigenous Peoples as the binding element. One example is shown in the preamble above, “not yet integrated into the national community.” Over the course of the following 40 years Indigenous Peoples worked with the international community to revise the language. In 1989 the ILO passed ILO 169 which “takes the approach of respect for the cultures, ways of life, traditions and customary laws of Indigenous and tribal Peoples who are covered by it. It presumes that they will continue to exist as parts of national societies with their own identity, their own structures and their own traditions. The Convention presumes that these structures and ways of life have a value that needs to be protected.”
However, the word IndigenousPeoples was footnoted. In a compromise to include language of Indigenous self-determination, the ILO asked that the United Nations take up the matter on self-determination claiming it was beyond the scope of the ILO.
Indigenous people continue to advocate for their rights as “workers” through labor organizations in the ILO trio of “government, employers, and workers.” Only 23 of the 187 countries in the ILO have ratified ILO 169 and the United States and Canada are not among them. Most all are in Latin America and one of the most lethal legal weapon Indigenous people have continue to be counter-maps – maps that counter centuries of exploitive hegemonic colonialism.
FROM FALLABLE MAPS TO TANGIBLE RAPS
After decades at successful attempts at counter-mapping, it may have run its course. Governments and corporations have come to use maps to gain further legal control over Indigenous lands through abundant resources and political maneuvering. If the courtrooms of international law were a knife fight, governments and corporations show up with laser guided missiles. Labor unions in those 23 countries that ratified ILO 169 struggle for leverage, representation, and a voice – especially unions representing Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. And if they’re suffering, imagine the masses of unrepresented workers in the remaining 164 countries who have not ratified ILO 169.
Meanwhile more and more natural resources are sought in increasingly sensitive environmental areas, like the Amazon forests, where the majority of biodiversity and CO2 sucking vegetation is protected by Indigenous communities and their way of life. And as global warming increases, their living conditions will likely lead to more dispossession and even extinction.
Mapping technologies since 1989 have also become progressively democratized. They’ve empowered even more people to take to cartography to get their voices heard, claim their land, and their way of life. There has also been a steady increase in members of these Indigenous populations earning degrees in science, social science, technology, and law. They’ve also found increasing numbers of likeminded scholars, intellectuals, activists, and practitioners from the around the world to help.
Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale are four such examples. They are editors of a recent book called Radical cartographies : participatory mapmaking from Latin Americapublished by the University of Texas Press. It “sheds light on the innovative uses of participatory mapping emerging from Latin America’s marginalized communities”. It’s a “diverse collection” of maps and mapping techniques that “reconceptualize what maps mean”. They argue what is missing, even in counter-mapping, are “representations of identity and place”.
The lead editor, Bjørn Sletto, is a native of Norway, was educated in the United States, and has lived and researched in Indigenous communities and border cities in Latin America. He writes in the introduction that
“Beyond making claims on the state, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities appropriate participatory mapping technologies to strengthen self-determination, local governance, and resource management within their own territories…”
What he’s found over decades of experience is that,
“This fundamental rethinking of the role of maps and the different ways they can be created, analyzed, and remade is driven in large part by inhabitants of the territories themselves, rather than by Western scholars or NGOs.”
These scholars have compiled a book that gives these Ingenious people voice and representation through their own methods of cartography. They’ve been allowed to describe geographies “in their own language and on their own terms.” By “describing and depicting the natural and built environments emerging from Indigenous, Black, and other traditional groups in Latin America” they are able to “demonstrate that these radical mapping practices are as varied as the communities in which they take place”.
María Laura Nahuel is one contributor in the book. She is a resident of the Mapuce Lof (Community) Newen Mapu, Neuquén, Argentina and received her undergraduate degree in geography from the Department of Humanities at the National University of Comahue, Argentina. She writes that,
“the current political, economic, cultural, and judicial context of our work has led us to think carefully about how the state’s historic monopoly over cartography has served to subjugate the ancestral and millenary wisdom of our people, the Mapuce. In particular, new multinational resource extraction projects, which are endorsed by the Argentine government, threaten our livelihood and subject us to a constant state of tension and uncertainty. This reality has led us to develop territorial defense strategies as well as plans for achieving kvme felen, or a state of good living. Mapuce participatory cultural mapping plays a key role in this process.”
Co-editor Joe Bryan is another contributor in the book. He is the associate professor in geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he focuses on Indigenous politics in the Americas, human rights, and critical cartography. He asks in the book’s concluding commentary:
“What is a territory? The question pops up repeatedly across the chapters in this volume. After all, what are mapping projects if not attempts to define territory? The problem, as several of the authors suggest, is that mapping affords a partial understanding of territory at best. At worst, mapping runs completely counter to Black and Indigenous concepts of territory with potentially devastating results. That outcome makes the question of what a territory is all the more pressing...”
He goes on to observe that,
“We are used to thinking of territory as a closed object, a thing that can be mapped, recognized, and demarcated. The dominance of this concept is reinforced by mapping, beginning with the use of GPS units and other cartographic technologies to locate material instances of use and occupancy... Legal developments reinforce this approach, pushing titling and demarcation as a remedy to the lack of protection…”
The owner of the property on which that gate I sometimes sneak through wants to build a new home. Their plans don’t leave room for a gate nor are they particularly interested in maintaining a right of way for the public. It’s caused a kerfuffle in the neighborhood. Home owners on this private lane want their privacy while their neighbors want to maintain access between parks.
It’s a battle of territory and maps are the weapon. Individual home owners show title maps that reveal there is no public easement on the private lane. The city acknowledges there is no easement in their maps either, but are acting in the interest of the majority and asking owners to grant easements so the path may remain. It may come down to the courts to decide and you can bet maps will be involved. But as Joe Bryan says, maps afford only a partial understanding of territory.
I’m not suggesting the problems of affluent suburban property owners are of equal consequence to the existence and rights of Indigenous and Black communities or the protection of vanishing natural resources. But what they do have in common is the insufficiency of traditional Cartesian maps to adequately represent interests of governments, corporations, and individuals in battles over borders and territories. Especially when their weaponized.
A primary trigger of the King Phillip War in 1675 was the encroachment of European colonizers. This led to misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication of territory use and rights on a Cartesian map drawn by an Indigenous member of the Massachusett tribe supposedly seeking shared understanding between cultures. Here we are in 2022 where technology and enlightened cultural sensitivity abounds, and rigid Cartesian maps are still leading to dispossession and violence of under-represented and vulnerable communities.
But like the Europeans that colonized these lands over 500 years ago, we are turning to Indigenous people for guidance on how best to map and understand territories. We are again asking them to use maps as a way to best interact with people and place through what the editors of that book call radical cartography. Perhaps it’s time we put down our weapons of maps destruction and draw a map together. It just may draw us all closer together. How radical is that?
The influential chief geographer for the U.S. State Department from the 1920s through the 1940s, Samuel Whittemore Boggs, had settled on this cartographic dichotomy I was experiencing as a student. He surmised maps could be either rhetorical tools of delusion and propaganda (like fancy 3D animated video bumpers) or scientific instruments of knowledge and understanding (like Geographical Information Science). These two sides of a single coin were present 40-odd years later as I was studying geography at UCSB.
By the time I was studying cartography as an undergrad the Cold War was well embedded into the culture of all Americans, including institutions and universities. Some of my youngest memories as a kid were nuclear fallout drills at school. They weren’t all that different from tornado drills common to Iowa kids, but the films they showed us of the effects of nuclear blasts made me wish tornados were our only worry.
I also have memories of propaganda making its way into our school work as well. I remember math problems that compared missile lengthy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – a nod to male anatomical one-upmanship.
Our culture was infused with geopolitical agendas and competitions pitting Americans against Soviets. I recall the ‘Miracle on Ice’ when the U.S. hockey team unexpectedly beat the U.S.S.R. in the 1980 Olympics. That was when the U-S-A chant was popularized. I was 15 and remember having a basketball game that day. The gym was electric with pride.
We all lived under constant fear and threat that the Soviet government could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at any minute, so anything that felt like a victory was celebrated.
The fear was all well communicated and orchestrated using cartohypnotic techniques Boggs had warned of. This fear mongering wasn’t unique to the United States. University of Richmond professor Timothy Barney writes,
“An ominous arrow-filled 1970 map forecasts the logistics of a Greece and Turkey invasion, while another encircles Denmark and Northern Europe. The secret Warsaw Pact exercise ‘Seven Days Over the River Rhine’ from 1979 used cartography extensively to chart, complete with red mushroom clouds strewn about the continent, an all-too probable nuclear clash between Cold War powers.”
The United States has a long history and practice of thematic political cartography dating back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This inspired the formation of a thematic mapping division in the State Department. After World War II, in concert with the Department of Defense, Cold War propaganda elevated to a new level — including in cartography. It was cartohypnosis through government sponsored osmosis that created widespread prognosis of Soviet-American neurosis.
When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he had campaigned on increased military spending to ward off what he believed to be encroaching communism and military threat from the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense was his California friend, businessman, and politician Casper Weinberger, or ‘Cap’ as he was called. Weinberger shared the same fear Reagan did over evidence that cash-starved Russia was pouring much of their GDP into military spending.
To convince the American public that Reagan’s so-called ‘small government’ required ‘big spending’ on defense, he pulled a page from the 1918 State Department assembling a team of researchers, artists, illustrators, and cartographers to build his own ‘Inquiry’ into Soviet military weaponry and strategies. They produced a 100-page pamphlet called ‘Soviet Military Power’ out of the U.S. Defense Department that was intended to ‘alert’ the public to the ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Armed Forces.
The first publications were distributed in 1981 across the country and were sold in Post Offices for $6.50 or $20 today. These were printed every year from 1981 to 1991 as what some government officials refer to as ‘public diplomacy’. However, scholars use ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘propaganda’ interchangeably because it’s often hard to discern which is which.
The fact is, these publications worked. They were a perfect compliment to Reagan’s public speeches that routinely referred to his Reagan Doctrine which was “to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” This included funding overt and covert anti-communist resistance groups around the world – many of which illegally used acts of terror.
The Iran–Contra affair provided ample evidence of the malicious intents and actions behind Reagan’s Doctrine – funneling money from Iranian missile sales to fund militant guerilla fighters overthrowing the government in Nicaragua. Fourteen people in Reagan’s administration were indicted. Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges including accusations he lied to Congress and obstruction of investigation. Another four charges were brought against him but his cases were never tried. He was pardoned by then President George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s former Vice President.
Many of these sovereign nations the United States involved themselves in were seeking independence from reliance on foreign powers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, because their forms of government often leaned toward social and communal inspired governments, Reagan assumed they’d fall under the control of the communist Soviet Union. It also meant Western corporations could lose out to state sponsored corporations.
The U.S. State Department had been attempting to spread Western economic and political propaganda around the world from at least the 1950s. President Truman’s Point Four Program (funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) and the Chicago Boys (programs involving neoliberal University of Chicago economists, including Milton Friedman) were efforts to spread right-wing libertarianism around the world. That included backing a military dictatorship in Chile.
REVERSING CARTOHYPNOSIS
By the 1980s these strategies helped instill fear in Americans that the Soviet Union could one day envelope the world. Decades of claims that communism spreads like a disease – Latin America today, Anglo America tomorrow – laid the groundwork in the 1980s for the ‘Soviet Military Power’ propaganda publications to have maximum impact. The fear in many is still there to this day and is heightened by Putin’s aggression via the Kremlin. Another example of an imperialist state department aggressively meddling in the business of a sovereign nation seeking their independence from an all-powerful overlord.
Author Tom Gervasi spent years in the late 80s researching the government’s claims made in these publications. He read the CIA’s annual reports to Congress, Military Posture Statements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sworn testimony from chiefs of the military services and Defense Department officials before the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of Congress, as well as documents provided by NATO governments. He also consulted the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
In 1988 he republished the 1987 issue of Weinberger’s ‘Soviet Military Power’ with annotations in the margins debunking many claims made by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. He also highlighted salient examples and techniques of propaganda, including cartohypnotic maps.
One shows the land mass connecting Europe with the former Soviet Union. The Soviet territory is covered with a blue blob overlaying its boundaries. Flowing south into Europe are massive arrows encroaching on Europe. The map gives the impression the U.S.S.R. not only has the opportunity to expand by land into all of Europe but that they also have the means to do so and a plan to do it.
Gervasi comments in the margins asking us to
“Imagine opening a book and seeing the arrows going the other way, thrusting deep into the Soviet Union. The average American or West European reader would feel surprised and quite possibly indignant, finding it a complete misrepresentation of our intentions. That is how the average Soviet citizen would feel opening this book to this page. But this is powerful propaganda, immediately imprinting on our memory the vision of one possibility, without imprinting the reverse possibility, and so reinforcing allegations of Soviet intent made repeatedly, without any evidence to support them.”
And in echoes of Boggs’ suggestion that cartohypnosis can be reversed, Gervasi reminds us that
“Indeed, images like the ones below are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that if the propagandists can ever be silenced, it will take several decades of raising clear-sighted new generations to erase all our artificial fears and suspicions of the USSR.”
Another map shows the entirety of the former U.S.S.R. in a simple outline with radiant cones stretched in every direction emanating from Moscow and other major cities. The title of the map is Ballistic Missile Early Warning, Target-Tracking, and Battle Management Radars. It suggests the U.S.S.R. had advanced radar systems ready to defend against attack.
Gervasi notes,
“This may give the impression that only the Soviets have such radars. A splendid map could be drawn of the U.S. radar system, stretching from Scotland to Hawaii, including the 12 large phased-array radars of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the four large phased-array radars of our PAVE, PAWS system, the 75 radars of our DEW Line and North Warning System, our Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System, the three radars of our Navy’s Space Surveillance System, the 16 radars of our Air Force Spacetrack and other systems, and of course, our over-the-horizon backscatter radars. All of these are already fully operational, whereas the Soviet system shown here, as the text below acknowledges, will not be operational until the mid-1990s at the earliest.”
Gervasi isn’t the only one to critique claims made in these publications. Even the conservative think-tank, The National Interest, debunks the ‘Pentagon’s exaggerations’ made in the these publications. In 2016 they took aim at what became Reagan and Weinberger’s pride and joy, the Strategic Defense Initiative – or as its was commonly referred to as, Star Wars. This was a space and ground-based laser program envisioned to obliterate threatening Soviet nuclear missiles. They write that Weinberger’s,
“Soviet Military Power made ominous predictions about Soviet lasers, lasers powerful enough to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles, or disable satellites in orbit…[the publication stated] ‘in the late 1980s, (the Soviet Union) could have prototype space-based laser weapons for use against satellites.’ It went on to imply that there were working anti-satellite lasers at [a] Soviet research complex…”
In 1989 a group of Americans, including engineers and physicists, visited this research site. They concluded the Soviets could only produce a two-kilowatt laser beam. For comparison, experts claim 250 kilowatts are needed to destroy a weapon. It took until last year, 2021, for the U.S. to demonstrate a 300 kilowatt laser weapon. But means to consistently control this device keep it from being deployed.
The representative from Virginia, Jim Olin, a former electrical engineer at GE was on that tour in 1989 and said,
“It seems to me it pretty clearly is not a power laser and doesn’t represent any threat as a weapon.”
In 1942, the librarian at the American Geographical Society, John Kirtland Wright, who is an authority on the history of geography, wrote on the power of maps:
“Like bombers and submarines, maps are indispensable instruments of war. In the light of the information they provide, momentous strategic decisions are being made today: ships and planes, men and munitions, are being moved. Maps help to form public opinion and build public morale. When the war is over, they will contribute to shaping the thought and action of those responsible for the reconstruction of a shattered world. Hence it is important in these times that the nature of the information they set forth should be well understood.”
We live in a time when someone can go to their favorite search engine, type ‘map of Bering Straight’, copy and paste the image into an image editor, type in big red letters “RUSSIA” on one side of the maritime border and “USA” on the other, and voila…a map made to persuade public opinion. They can then feed it into the social media mass distribution machine and off it goes through a global network to be seen by more eyeballs than Casper Weinberger and Ronald Reagan could ever have imagined. If Boggs thought maps could be weaponized as hypnotic mind benders in the 1940s, imagine what he’d say now?
We’ve reached a point where making your own map has never been more accessible. And it’s only going to get easier. I’ve dwelled on the negative aspects of maps as propaganda, but I’m inspired by Boggs’ notion of reverse cartohypnosis. The threat of physical war has never been more real than it is today as the West continues to push an unpredictable dictator into a corner. A corner defined on territorial maps drawn in 1919 by American’s that defined boundaries between Russia and Ukraine. Maps that were made to persuade.
Putin is a man deluded by attachments to past maps that drew borders around a union of socialist republics. He has grown hateful of those who challenge that past, him, or his beliefs. His delusions are so grand that he may only be satisfied when he ‘wins’ or everyone else ‘looses’.
Like Biden and most presidents before him, he is both a victim of and an contributor to decades of cartohypnotism and through waring propaganda between two super powers seeking imperial domination.
With maps as weapons of war in an global battle for information superiority, I ask that we check our own delusions, aversions, and desires before becoming entranced by the seduction of a map. Arm our self-made mental radar and defense systems that warn us of intentions to exaggerate, placate, and sedate our vulnerability to bombs of persuasion. And should we decide to become a cartographer and make our own map one day, make sure we’re doing our best to reverse the effect of cartohypnosis.
“His maps were accurate, attractive, and invariably ingenious in design.”
These maps for the Paris conference were to convey reams of physiographic and demographic information regarding Europe and surrounding regions. Martin notes,
“Jefferson had the remarkable ability to simplify complexity, to inspire ingenuity of cartographic expression, and to display such manual dexterity with economy of line that his leadership, long hours, and indefatigable fascination with the enterprise insured success for the mapping effort.”
Jefferson, and his team of cartographers, joined a select group, including President Woodrow Wilson, on board the USS George Washington headed to France in December of 1918. By the middle of December the Inquiry team assembled in a hotel in Paris, including Jefferson and his twenty-five draftsmen. The team grew in size requiring them to knock down a wall at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of Paris’ finest hotels on the Champs-Élysées.
Martin, pulling from Jefferson’s diary writes,
“By February of 1919 Jefferson’s team of cartographers spanned five rooms, an engraving apparatus was provided, and armed guards were posted at the door.”
During the proceedings, Jefferson sat on the geographers’ commission. Other geographers and attendees were impressed and overwhelmed by the cartographic prowess of the American delegation. Chatter in the halls, parks, and hotels centered on the role maps played during the convention. They were not only the common denominator amongst a diverse delegation, but also the premiere communicator and persuader.
Martin concludes,
“The value of maps had been recognized prior to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, yet at Paris the map suddenly became everything.”
The momentum from this event followed those involved in the Inquiry back the United States. The State Department experienced firsthand the influential power of cartography and established their own geographic division and the Office of Geographer. The division’s maps and collections started with those made during the Paris Peace Conference. They were organized by Colonel Lawrence Martin who served under Woodrow Wilson and became the first head of the department in 1921.
Martin retired in 1924 and selected Samuel Whittemore Boggs to replace him. Boggs came to New York in 1914 and worked compiling and editing maps. In 1921 he began a Master’s program at Columbia studying under two professors who were also cartographers at the Paris Peace Conference. These men, like many of those involved in preparing for the conference, left idealistic that maps could lead to a fair and just conclusion of international territorial disputes.
Boggs embodied that spirit coming out of college and combined it with imaginative approaches and highly academic, technical cartography skills. It made him well positioned for the role political geography and cartography was about to play as territorial pieces continued to shift around the earth’s spherical chess board.
That proverbial board was also shrinking as the airplane became an increasingly important element of war and travel. The Library of Congress map librarian and geographer, Walter Ristow, called this ‘air age geography.’ The war, and the proliferation of maps, inspired interest from the public in world geography.
In 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio in a Fireside Chat he called “On the Progress of War”. Pearl Harbor was a vivid reminder to the American public that air-age globalism had clearly arrived. He said,
“This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world.”
But then he did something I suspect no other president had done prior or since and asked the American public to pull out their own world map and following along with him. It’s an indication of just how pervasive and commercialized mapmaking had become. He continued,
“That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you (the) a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me in the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war."
Maps as a tool of communicating geopolitics had hit the mainstream. By the 1940’s Boggs had recognized that maps he and others were producing could do one of two things: either ‘delude the public’ or ‘inform them.’ Being the idealist he was, he worried most about the risks of delusion.
He wrote an article in 1947 in The Scientific Monthly titled, Cartohypnosis. Referring to maps he used in territorial disputes in the deserts of Afghanistan he says,
“Map-conscious people, however, usually accept subconsciously and uncritically the ideas that are suggested to them by maps. In part because maps appear to represent facts pertaining to mother earth herself, veracity and authority are frequently attributed to them beyond their deserts.”
He continued,
“In what might be called ‘cartohypnosis’ or ‘hypnotism by cartography,’ the map user or the audience exhibits a high degree of suggestibility in respect to stimuli aroused by the map and its explanatory text.”
In what could be seen as now as a critical indictment of the U.S. government by an employee of the U.S. State Department he says,
“And frequently a sort of mass hypnotism is practiced by men who attempt to delude the public.”
All the while, he seemed to remain idealistic reminding us that,
“Sometimes self-hypnotism and illusion occur quite innocently…[and] may also be used effectively to dehypnotize people…we should therefore consider what maps may be made, and how they may be used to awaken people to an intelligent understanding of the world and the problems of our times.”
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The last attempts made to negotiate a deal with Russia was in 1991. The person who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was none other than Senator Joe Biden from Delaware.
Biden addressed the committee with these words,
“…today the subcommittee meets to consider a measure that constitutes one small step down that path of cooperation. This measure, the U.S.-Soviet Maritime Boundary Treaty, represents the attempt of the two sides to resolve an important dispute through negotiation, compromise, and mutual pledge to abide by the solemn obligations of a bilateral treaty and international law.”
The dispute this treaty would lay to rest concerns the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of the United States and the Soviet Union in the seas between Alaska and Siberia. The treaty would govern each country’s right to manage fisheries and to conduct oil and gas exploration and development in a vast maritime area.”
In 1990, then Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to resolve the ordeal. But the Russian parliament believed he was acting in haste. The Soviet Union was beginning to crumble and they believed Gorbachev was giving away too much fishing, sea passage, and oil and mineral rights to the United States in exchange for other provisions. The USSR collapsed in December of 1991. This left Biden’s sixth month old efforts under the George H. W. Bush administration unanswered. No administration since has attempted to ratify the treaty and I doubt Putin is in the mood for Biden to resume talks.
The area maps referred to as Russian America, a piece of land nearly the size of Texas, is what we now call Alaska. It had already been colonized by Siberian fur trappers in the 1700s and the Russian Orthodox Church was already busy trying to convert Indigenous people to Christianity. By 1800 the Russian-American Company was established – organized by Emperor Paul I of Russia. By 1850, 300,000 sea otters were hunted to extinction. Seventeen years later, in 1867, amidst a fur market slump from over hunting, the end of the U.S. Civil War, a Russia battered by the Crimea war ceded Russian America to the United States as part of the Alaska Purchase. It didn’t become a U.S. state until 1959.
Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million or $134 million in 2022 dollars. Russia feared they couldn’t defend the territory from the British who were busy trying to colonize Canada and had just defeated the Russians in the Crimea war with the help of the French. So, they expressed interest in selling it to the then U.S. Secretary of State William Seward who had already offered to buy it just a few years prior and was happy to negotiate the purchase.
“the 1867 Convention, by which Russia ceded Alaska to the United States, made it possible for Mr. Murkowski to become a U.S. Senator.”
The Maritime Boundary Agreement this committee aimed resolve, but never did,
“these conflicts by: One, declaring that the 1867 Convention line is the maritime boundary between the United States and the Soviet Union; two, establishing a precise geographic description of the line; and three, providing for the transfer of jurisdiction and Russia rights in four special areas.”
The first American to map the new state of Alaska may take issue with Biden’s use of the words ‘precise geographic description.’ Land wasn’t the only thing the U.S. got for their $7.2 million, they were also handed maps and charts of the region drafted by Russian mapmakers. These were promptly handed over to the man who was soon to become the head of the Pacific branch of the Office of United States Coast Survey, and premiere geographer of the time, George Davidson.
He excelled at geodesy and astronomy coming out of Girard College in 1845. By 1850 he was on the California coast determining accurate latitude and longitude of coastal features. He worked his way up the Pacific coast to Oregon and Washington mapping much of the Puget Sound and naming many of the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. Mt. Ellinor is named after his soon-to-be wife, Ellinor Fauntleroy. The Fauntleroy ferry in Seattle takes you from the Fauntleroy Cove to Vashon Island. Mt. Constance is named after her sister, and the two side-by-side mountains, The Brothers, are named after her two brothers.
His triangulation and astronomical observations were regarded as the highest precision geodesy recorded to that date. The baselines required to accurately triangulate and map the Pacific coast states are named after him – the Davidson Quadrilaterals. And before those Russian maps had been handed over to him, he had already been asked to make maps of the physiography and natural resources of Alaska by the U.S. Congress.
Most maps were copied from Russian maps and others drawn by an Indigenous Chief who knew more about the land than the Russians. A 1937 biography claims “Davidson always got on with Indians—he treated them as men.” These maps were included in a report to a congressional committee that resulted in a unanimous vote for America to purchase Russian America from the Russians.
Davidson was mapping Alaska at 51° to 71° latitude north amidst the mosquitos in August of 1867, but less than a year earlier the Office of Coast Survey had sent Davidson down to 5° to 7° latitude north, in January of 1867, to map a potential site for the Panama Canal.
The Office of the Coast Survey was started by Thomas Jefferson in 1807 and still publishes the nautical maps of the U.S. – including the annually published 10 volume publication, United States Coast Pilot. Historically, these guides relied on local mariner knowledge and newspaper articles. They were a practical necessity for private, commercial, and governmental mariners. But in 1858 George Davidson was the first to provide his own accounts making this issue the first official United States Coast Pilot by the Office of the Coast Survey.
Davidson went on to become the president of the California Academy of Sciences, a University of California Regent, and the University of California, Berkley’s first geography professor. He was the department chair from 1898 until 1905.
Davidson defined the essence of what map making was at the time. It served the desire and need Jefferson had for precision, utilizing the best surveying and geodesic instruments and techniques of the time. Naturally these were used for exacting territories for colonizing, capitalizing, and exploiting. The United States had become an exuberantly expansionist, empire-building country. But by the middle of the 19th century through the start of the 20th another kind of map was entering its golden age – thematic mapping.
Thematic maps use information not readily observed but are nonetheless part of the geography. For example, maps depicting the weather or statistical information like demographics. They can also include strategic and political information.
The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the start of the decline of England’s dominance. New territories, like Alaska, were not only getting mapped but were also helping to shift geopolitical dynamics. The world was sufficiently mapped such that world leaders need not send ships afar to determine political strategies.
One of the first and most influential of these geopolitical thematic maps came from England’s equivalent of George Davidson, Sir Halford John Mackinder. In 1904 he wrote a paper that included a map in The Geographic Journal called “The Geographical Pivot of History.” In the introduction here he writes,
“In 400 years the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy…But the opening of the twentieth century is appropriate as the end of a great historic epoch…The missionary, the conqueror, the farmer, the miner, and, of late, the engineer, have followed so closely in the traveller’s footsteps that the world, in its remote borders, has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation.”
His map is an oval shaped Mercator projection that puts continental Europe, Africa, and Asia in the middle. Its shape gives it a spherical illusion. The map’s title is The Natural Seats of Power and features three crescent shaped concentric zones. At the center is what he called Pivot Area – which is most of continental Europe, some of Asia and what became the Soviet Union, the next ring is labeled Inner and Marginal Crescent – which is more of Europe, the British Isles and Japan, and furthest from the center are the Lands of Outer or Insular Crescent – which include continental America, most of Africa, and Australia.
Part of Mackinder’s goal was to not only illustrate to an island country — that came to power by sea — just how connected the world is by land. He also simplified the complexities of detailed coastal charts and topographic maps into easy to understand centers of power. Timothy Barney, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Richmond (and self-proclaimed map-nerd) wrote in the Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography that, “Mackinder was prefiguring a social, economic, and political shift in the twentieth century towards a globalized world, all on the flat page of the map.”
Mackinder would not have known it then, but his ‘Pivot Center’ indeed became the focal point of not one, but two world wars that drew powers from all three of the Natural Seats of Power on his map. But he also put thematic geopolitical mapping at the center.
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