Todos somos Mercator

Cada tanto vuelvo a los mapas con la misma fascinación con la que recorría en mi infancia el gran atlas en la biblioteca de mis padres. Todos ocultamos a un cartógrafo en nuestro interior y lo vamos moldeando inconscientemente a medida que navegamos la ciudad. Nuestra capacidad para contar la propia historia está fuertemente vinculada con nuestra capacidad de mapear nuestro propio espacio, como bien lo refleja este post:

This is remapping, taking a world we know, and reworking how we see it. It's one way to make culture.

We don’t have to work with something as grand as a subway system. Over the course of many walks, I have remapped my little town in Connecticut. I live pretty close to “the old woman who listens to her TV really loudly. She’s 100.” I am up the street from the “the house built by that crazy Swedish guy who eventually returned to Europe and died in a pauper’s hospital.” About a mile from my house is “smuggler’s cove.” Down the street from there is “The Chinese pavilion,” and from there it’s an easy walk to the “Fortress of mystery,” “Where the roller coaster once stood,” and “House of the trapped Brazilians.”

Maps used to belong to faceless bureaucracies and the state. They were literal. They gave up everything beautiful and imaginative to be accurate and clear. (By some miracle, it takes even the most sober map around 15 years to turn into a thing of beauty. We don’t know why. Apparently map makers install secret beauty on time release.) There are cultures in which maps are rich in connotative meanings (see Basso on the Western Apache, below), but usually our maps are an unamused rendering of the world. What you see is what we got.

Tendríamos que enseñarle a la gente a mapear "su" ciudad, su barrio. La magia de la vida en comunidad está en la micropolítica de cada esquina, en el rompecabezas de identidades compartidas que podemos construir en cada cuadra. ¡Y, de paso, también podemos enseñar a jugar!