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City Spaces: Urban Structure
Thinking Spatially
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from The Power of Maps Somehow we've gotten the idea that maps have nothing to do with time. We'll indicate a date of publication, and perhaps a time frame for data collection, but that's about as far as it goes—and these gestures have more to do with the status of the map as a document than with any issue of map time. We shrug that off, if a bit nervously, because we've learned to make maps in the terms they can resolve: anything that changes fast enough to render the map genuinely obsolete before it can reach its audience doesn't belong in the map in the first place. The map is opaque to these things: it filters them . . . That's partly a function of scale: maps are macroscalar and macroscopic, and, after all, we are mapping mountains and not the pebbles inching down their slopes. But the things we're increasingly interested in mapping don't have this short-term permanence at any scale; they're more in the nature of behaviors than geographic fixtures. These interests may inspire new map forms, but they haven't forced us yet to admit that maps embody time as surely as—in fact because—they embody space. It remains conventional to think of the map as either a snapshot—in time but not of it; something with time evaporated out of it—or as akin to a 3-hour exposure of Grand Central Station in which actions, events and processes disappear, and all that register are objects of permanence (as implied by the durative code of the Geological Survey). We may be aware of emplacing time in the photograph, and even of permanence as the arbitrary consequence of this act, but we refuse to extend these understandings to the map. Time remains a . . . hidden dimension, a cartographic Twilight Zone. But the map does encode time, and to the same degree that it encodes space; and it invokes a temporal code that empowers it to signify in the temporal dimension [p. 126]. [Source]
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