99% Invisible: the truth and lies of maps

Maps are used for a lot of different reasons – they’re often seen as official, useful, practical ... but, loveable? Are maps really loveable? Roman Mars, producer and creator of KALW’s newest radio program 99% Invisible, has a few thoughts on the lovability and power of maps.

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ROMAN MARS: I’m sorry, but if you don’t love maps, I don't think we can be friends anymore.

REBECCA SOLNIT: I think there are people nowadays who’d admit that they don’t love puppies and kittens and children, but nobody’s going to admit that they don’t love maps.

Maps are awesome, as art, as story, as representation of truth, as representation of lies.

SOLNIT: Really interesting visual information, it’s a little bit like a puzzle. You’re solving it, really engages your brain. But it’s also an invitation in a way. Nothing else is … you know, music is, someone else is playing it. But the map – it’s a score for you to live your own life, to go there and do that, even if you’re looking at twelfth century Siberia or something, which is a kind of map I really like along with maps of my own neighborhood.

And if your only experience with maps is a AAA road atlas, then Rebecca Solnit’s new book will blow your mind.

SOLNIT: This is Rebecca Solnit with Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. It’s both a collection of maps and a proposition that any city is infinite because it can be described infinite ways.

“No one map tells you everything about a region.”

SOLNIT: It’s 22 maps that want to be beautiful and want to celebrate old-fashioned mapmaking with paper, with drawings, with old cartography, with a sense of wonder and with practical information, you can actually go to.

We each contain multitudes of maps.

If I said to you there were 99 murders in San Francisco in 2008, like, you’d think it was deplorable before the three seconds before you completely forgot about it. But if I show you the actual map, it makes you think, “This person died here and that one over there.” You see a pattern, you see that most of them are in the east side of town. You know, it becomes particular and specific. It becomes places you could have been. It could have been, it could have been you, you can go to them, you can bring flowers…

And in the San Francisco Infinite City Atlas, these murders are represented on the city map as red dots. But alongside them is an array of cream dots that represent all of the living Monterey Cypress trees in the city. It’s new, ugly death and old, beautiful life, side by side, sharing a map because … I mean, just because. Because you can make a map do anything.

SOLNIT: My story is my story, but a map is also your story because you can literally enter what’s shown on the map. You can go there, you can walk it, you can be there. And so maps give you a different sense. They quantify and locate and invite in a way that no other medium does.

“Would you like any other maps that show other kinds of information?”

“Sure!”

One of the Infinite City maps is a treasure map with a panoply of treasured sites in San Francisco.

SOLNIT: You know, the Mission Dolores graveyard, Mona Caron’s murals, African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane, some labyrinths, the nesting site of the great blue herons on Stow Lake. We have treasure. And this is the map to help you find it.

But the most curious feature about this map is that San Francisco isn’t depicted as that, you know, little thumbnail at the end of the Peninsula’s thumb that it actually is. San Francisco is drawn as an island.

SOLNIT: On the treasure map, San Francisco not only has the north coast, east coast and west coast you all know and love; it has a south coast.

A fictitious blue ribbon of water just north of San Bruno Mountain.

SOLNIT: There’s a lot of ways San Francisco really is an island in terms of its difference from the rest of the country ecologically, geographically and culturally.

Before the bridges, you basically came in and out of San Francisco by boats as though it was an island. And I just wanted to make that literal. In a wonderful way, maps always are literal. So Shiz, the cartographer Ben Pease’s wife, Shizue Siegel, obliged me by making San Francisco into an island.

Maps are powerful objects. They give direction, they hide secret places. They can support imperialism and oppression. A newly designed map can create a nation state and present a false sense of absolute truth. They change the way we see the world.

SOLNIT: I joked to some of my friends when I was working on this project that owning race horses and castles is as nothing to commissioning maps when it comes to a sense of powerful and luxury. It’s pretty amazing.  

99% Invisible is produced by Roman Mars with support form Lunar. It’s a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. Hear more at 99percentinvisible.org.