Mapping mountains

Abstract

tography as a collective that covers both map production and map use, the study of art and cartography, projections and semantics, generalization and cognitive issues, while Edney equates (the ideal of) cartography to the production of maps (considered normative) according to a restricted set of specific practices. Edney has roamed wide for collecting his arguments and, thanks to the extensive bibliographic apparatus he adds, his book is a goldmine for theoretical study. His critique on the various preconceptions of (the Ideal of) Cartography is valid, they are not universal, there are many exceptions, and it is very proper that cartographers should be made aware of them. As such this book is an important contribution to our field. But what he replaces it by, his alternative for cartography as ‘a prescriptive, normative science’ (‘how best to render specific spatial information’) is rather poor: the study of X mapping, X being a description of how specific subjects are being mapped. It is not only a poor substitute for cartography but also for the history of cartography: for instance for thematic maps, we can describe the development of mapping of all spatial phenomena separately, but in doing so we should create an enormous overlap as similar representative and map use techniques would have been applied for the different subject fields. Edney claims map scholars should cease prescribing people how to make maps but instead should try to understand and describe how people produce, circulate and consume maps. This is a rather passive role, and it disregards the contributions cartography can make: the ICA just published a guide how cartography can help reaching the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (Mapping for a sustainable world, ICA and UN 2020) showing best practices (in which the term mapping stands for both map production and map use, and also makes one aware of the dynamics and urgency of the process) and this for me is a more positive approach to our field.