One of the more interesting websites I occasionally visit is CityLab, which, as you can guess from the name, studies cities. At the bottom of the home page it reads,
CityLab is committed to telling the story of the world’s cities: how they work, the challenges they face, and the solutions they need.
Their articles review new ways that maps can be used, like this one, I Used This Map to Find a Happy Childhood:
My memories of childhood used to begin with this one: I am eight or nine years old, in a carpeted spare room in my grandparents’ house —where my family lived at the time. I am hungry. But my dad doesn’t offer me food.
Instead, he says, “Why don’t you eat some Christian crackers?”
He meant Communion wafers; this was a dig at the expense of my churchgoing grandparents, who’d started bringing me to services. But I was disturbed by my father’s response. I knew you weren’t supposed to eat Communion wafers as a snack, and there weren’t even any in the house. I also knew that parents were supposed to help their children, not make fun of them.
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The instability of my early years must have helped to color my emotional state. By the time I started going to high school, I’d lived in three different states and in six distinct combinations of parents, grandparents, and a stepparent. I knew that my family loved me dearly, spent quality time with me, and in many ways sacrificed to put me first. Yet my memories were hurtful enough that I’d often demur when someone asked about my childhood.
But this has been changing, for a reason I could not possibly have foreseen. Two years ago, I stumbled across a website called Mob Rule, which people use to track which of the 3,142 counties in the U.S. they have visited. Mob Rule is a tool built by and for hobbyists—“county collectors”—who set a goal of visiting as many American counties as they can. Some of these enthusiasts gather annually at meetings of the Extra Miler Club. (Motto: “The shortest distance between two places is no fun.”)
Mob Rule has a confusing home page but it looks like a cool way to chronicle your life.
Another article is The Three Personalities of America, Mapped:
A few years ago, Jason Rentfrow, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, dug into a question that has captivated him for decades: Do different places have different personalities? Do people in Los Angeles, for instance, have measurably different temperaments than the residents of Augusta, Georgia? If so, what does that mean for both places? Rentfrow decided to test these questions on a phenomenon that has captivated all of America lately: The rise of Donald Trump.
Together with his co-authors, Rentfrow analyzed a set of surveys that had been conducted between 2003 and 2015 in 2,082 U.S. counties—about two-thirds of all the counties in the country. The surveys asked three million people 44 questions about their habits and dispositions. Rentfrow and his co-authors focused on neuroticism, one of the “big five” traits that psychologists often use to measure personality, which is a tendency to feel depressed or anxious, and to respond more severely to stress. The study authors compared each county’s level of neuroticism to whether those counties later voted for President Trump in the 2016 election, and whether they had historically voted for Republicans.
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This study and the other work by Rentfrow and many of his colleagues have added some scientific basis to the common inkling that people in different parts of the U.S. act differently. There are already many stereotypes: New Yorkers are always in a hurry; Californians are extremely chill; Minnesotans are unusually nice. While these sorts of characteristics don’t apply to every person in an area, Rentfrow and his cohort quantified some of the personality differences that do exist between states. The effort could, ultimately, help Americans understand themselves a little better.
Apparently, we Californians are chill and creative.
One more I’ll serve up is The Power of Counter-Maps:
Craig Dalton, a professor of geography at Hofstra University, looks for maps that complicate conventional views of the world. He studies and creates “counter-maps,” a term for cartography that reveals the realities and knowledge of marginalized groups in society.
“Mapping has been the tool of empires and governments for 500 years,” Dalton told MapLab, pointing to the days of Columbus and other Western explorers who used geographic tools to colonize civilizations around the globe. “What happens when maps get into hands of people who’ve been victims of cartographic sleights of hand?”
Examples abound. Indigenous people from Indonesia to New Mexico to the Arctic have used mapping tools to advocate for their claims to ancestral lands and legacies. The Anti-Eviction Mapping project, which shines a light on vulnerable tenants in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Million Dollar Blocks, which visualizes the massive social cost of incarceration, are two well-publicized American examples. Counter-mapping groups in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., including Kollektiv Orangotango and Dalton’s own Counter-Cartographies Collective, have produced volumes of maps that push back against the status quo.
Maps are a powerful tool in politics, whether as a way to get your message across or a way to check if your message is effective.
Is there anything you’ve read, watched or listened to lately that’s made you see things in a different way?