Cartographies Of Danger

No place is perfectly safe, but some places are more dangerous than others. Whether we live on a floodplain or in "Tornado Alley," near a nuclear facility or in a neighborhood poorly lit at night, we all co-exist uneasily with natural and man-made hazards. As Mark Monmonier shows in this entertaining and immensely informative book, maps can tell us a lot about where we can anticipate certain hazards, but they can also be dangerously misleading. California, for example, takes earthquakes seriously, with a comprehensive program of seismic mapping, whereas Washington has been comparatively lax about earthquakes in Puget Sound. But as the Northridge earthquake in January 1994 demonstrated all too clearly to Californians, even reliable seismic-hazard maps can deceive anyone who misinterprets "known fault-lines" as the only places vulnerable to earthquakes. Important as it is to predict and prepare for catastrophic natural hazards, more subtle and persistent phenomena such as pollution and crime also pose serious dangers that we have to cope with on a daily basis. Hazard-zone maps highlight these more insidious hazards and raise awareness about them among planners, local officials, and the public. With the help of many maps illustrating examples from all corners of the United States, Monmonier demonstrates how hazard mapping reflects not just scientific understanding of hazards but also perceptions of risk and how risk can be reduced. Whether you live on a faultline or a coastline, near a toxic waste dump or an EMF-generating power line, you ignore this book's plain-language advice on geographic hazards and how to avoid them at your own peril. "No one should buy a home, rent an apartment, or even drink the local water without having read this fascinating cartographic alert on the dangers that lurk in our everyday lives. . . . Who has not asked where it is safe to live? Cartographies of Danger provides the answer."—H. J. de Blij, NBC News "Even if you're not interested in maps, you're almost certainly interested in hazards. And this book is one of the best places I've seen to learn about them in a highly entertaining and informative fashion."—John Casti, New Scientist

An innovative critique of the way historians and political scientists study war. How can we resist a nation-state vision of the globe? What is needed to "unmap" the familiar world? In Violent Cartographies, Michael J. Shapiro considers these questions, exploring the significance of war in contemporary society and its connections to the geographical imaginary. Employing an ethnographic perspective, Shapiro uses whiplash reversals and bizarre juxtapositions to jolt readers out of conventional thinking about international relations and security studies. Considering the ideas of thinkers ranging from yon Clausewitz to Virilio, from Derrida to DeLillo, Shapiro distances readers from familiar political and strategic accounts of war and its causes. Shapiro uses literary and film analyses to elucidate his themes. For example, he considers such cultural artifacts as U.S. Marine recruiting television commercials, American war movies, and General Schwarzkopf's autobiography, elaborating how a certain image of American masculinity is played out in the military imaginary and in the media. Other topics are Melville's The Confidence Man, Bunuel's film That Obscure Object of Desire, and a comparison of the U.S. invasion of Grenada to an Aztec "flower war". Throughout, Shapiro draws attention to the violence of the colonial encounters through which many modern nation-states were formed, and ultimately suggests possible directions for an ethics of minimal violence in the encounter with others. The overall effect is of a complex, cumulative, and layered analysis of the historical and moral conditions of the current use of violence in the conduct of international relations. A fascinating andchallenging work, Violent Cartographies will interest anyone concerned with the connections between war and culture.

Maps were at the heart of cultural life in the Americas from before colonization to the formation of modern nation-states. The fourteen essays in Early American Cartographies examine indigenous and European peoples' creation and use of maps to better represent and understand the world they inhabited. Drawing from both current historical interpretations and new interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection provides diverse approaches to understanding the multilayered exchanges that went into creating cartographic knowledge in and about the Americas. In the introduction, editor Martin Bruckner provides a critical assessment of the concept of cartography and of the historiography of maps. The individual essays, then, range widely over space and place, from the imperial reach of Iberian and British cartography to indigenous conceptualizations, including "dirty," ephemeral maps and star charts, to demonstrate that pre-nineteenth-century American cartography was at once a multiform and multicultural affair. This volume not only highlights the collaborative genesis of cartographic knowledge about the early Americas; the essays also bring to light original archives and innovative methodologies for investigating spatial relations among peoples in the western hemisphere. Taken together, the authors reveal the roles of early American cartographies in shaping popular notions of national space, informing visual perception, animating literary imagination, and structuring the political history of Anglo- and Ibero-America. The contributors are: Martin Bruckner, University of Delaware Michael J. Drexler, Bucknell University Matthew H. Edney, University of Southern Maine Jess Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University Junia Ferreira Furtado, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil William Gustav Gartner, University of Wisconsin–Madison Gavin Hollis, Hunter College of the City University of New York Scott Lehman, independent scholar Ken MacMillan, University of Calgary Barbara E. Mundy, Fordham University Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University Ricardo Padron, University of Virginia Judith Ridner, Mississippi State University

Critical and Clinical Cartographies rethinks medical and design pedagogies in the context of both the Affective and Digital Turns that are occurring under the umbrella of New Materialism. This collection is framed through Deleuze's symptomalogical approach which creates the ideal terrain for architecture and medical technologies of care to meet with robotics, alongside the newly emerging 'materialist landscape'.

Making Threats is designed to make students, scholars, activists and policymakers think critically about how environmental and biological fears are implicated in the construction of threats to local, national and global security. Writing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the authors contribute to scholarship on environment and security that engages with some of the more potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

For more than thirty years, the History of Cartography Project has charted the course for scholarship on cartography, bringing together research from a variety of disciplines on the creation, dissemination, and use of maps. Volume 6, Cartography in the Twentieth Century, continues this tradition with a groundbreaking survey of the century just ended and a new full-color, encyclopedic format. The twentieth century is a pivotal period in map history. The transition from paper to digital formats led to previously unimaginable dynamic and interactive maps. Geographic information systems radically altered cartographic institutions and reduced the skill required to create maps. Satellite positioning and mobile communications revolutionized wayfinding. Mapping evolved as an important tool for coping with complexity, organizing knowledge, and influencing public opinion in all parts of the globe and at all levels of society. Volume 6 covers these changes comprehensively, while thoroughly demonstrating the far-reaching effects of maps on science, technology, and society—and vice versa. The lavishly produced volume includes more than five hundred articles accompanied by more than a thousand images. Hundreds of expert contributors provide both original research, often based on their own participation in the developments they describe, and interpretations of larger trends in cartography. Designed for use by both scholars and the general public, this definitive volume is a reference work of first resort for all who study and love maps.

Cartography and geographic information (GI) are remarkably appropriate for the requirements of early warning (EW) and crisis management (CM). The use of geospatial technology has increased tremendously in the last years. ICT has changed from just using maps created in advance, to new approaches, allowing individuals (decision-makers) to use cartography interactively, on the basis of individual user's requirements. The new generation of cartographic visualizations based on standardisation, formal modelling, use of sensors, semantics and ontology, allows for the better adaptation of information to the needs of the users. In order to design a new framework in pre-disaster and disaster management safety/security/privacy aspects of institutions and citizens need to be considered. All this can only be achieved by demonstrating new research achievements, sharing best practices (e.g. in the health area) and working towards the wider acceptance of geospatial technology in society, with the help of education and media. This book will outline research frontiers and applications of cartography and GI in EW and CM and document their roles and potentials in wider processes going on in information/knowledge-based societies.

"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required." —John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA "Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression—this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave." —Ben Highmore, University of Sussex "This is what a ‘public geography’ should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again." —Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University "A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the ‘War on Terror’ have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’ places as well as ‘black holes’ within and between which we all struggle to live." —Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture