Critical cartography

[1] Critical cartographers aim to reveal the “‘hidden agendas of cartography’ as tools of socio-spatial power”.

Critical cartography originated in the 1960s through the works of Brian Harley and others, then was more formally developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[7] Non-academic critical mapping organizations such as Counter-Cartographies Collective (USA), Iconoclasistas (Argentina), and Bureau d’Etudes (France) have also emerged[8][9][10] Since the 1991 death of John Brian Harley, formerly a professor in Geography at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a number of scholars have published theories and writing that identify maps as social issues and expressions of power and knowledge.

He considered maps to be social documents that need to be understood in their historical contexts which include the situations in which they were made and used.

[4] Denis Cosgrove (1948–2008) was a professor of geography at UCLA who was concerned with the role of spatial images and representation in the making and communicating of knowledge.

Since 2018, Jeremy Crampton is a professor of Urban Data Analysis at the University of Newcastle School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape.

He attended the 1993 gathering at Friday Harbor and has written several literature reviews of cartography, critical GIS and social theory.

One is the censorship of information in order to serve defense interests, and the other is to enforce social and political values.

[13] Censorship in the interest of defense may include the omission or obfuscation of military bases or infrastructure, as well as locations that may be vulnerable to attack such as oil pipelines or power substations.

Critical cartographers argue that these names helped establish the territory as being compatible with Western systems of governance and therefore could be conquered and controlled.

[18] Many critical cartographers have engaged in counter-mapping to rewrite the narrative of the history of Israel's expansion into territories contested with Palestine.

Many cartographers argued that, because size is often associated with power and/or importance, Europe being represented as disproportionately large relative to places like Africa and Oceania perpetuates notions of Eurocentrism.