Rice Seminar Public Lecture: The Map, the Grid, and the Politics of Space, 1915–2015 by William Rankin

Thursday, April 20, 2017

In the last hundred years, the authority of the representational map has been challenged from multiple directions. On the level of everyday spatial management, the god’s-eye view of the map has been supplemented and displaced by new kinds of coordinate systems that stitch together the urban and the territorial. On the level of spatial imagination, the one-size-fits-all topographic map has been upstaged by new forms of argumentative and activist cartography. This talk addresses both of these turns – the first historically, during World War I and the decades afterward; the second through my own urban mapping work. Please complete your registration. All lectures are free and open to the public but sitting is limited. 

Biography of William Rankin:  http://www.afterthemap.info

This presentation is part of the 2016-17 Rice Seminar Lecture Series.