Cartography of the invisible
Subject
2025. The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been marked by events that have transformed our cities and the way we live together. The COVID-19 pandemic not only raised health issues within our communities but also increased social and economic disparities—injustices and racism, aggressions and violence towards minorities and disparities between rich and poor. Tented camps have appeared in our cities making homelessness more visible, and social protests to decolonize our history and space have uncovered deplorable aspects of our shared histories. Although we are reaching new heights of awareness, these issues and events tend to intermittently dissipate, disappear, or be erased from the public realm and spaces, and hence from our consciousness.
An urban site (or any site for that matter) is far from being empty: it is filled with traces of occurrences that are not always readily visible. It is a multi-layered entity. Cartography enables information to be superimposed and condensed into a sedimentation of interrelations—a kind of reverse archaeology. Mapping possibilities are now enhanced by access to digital tools, with the advent of the Global Positioning System and mapping interfaces linked to databases and social media like Google Maps or Strava, which enable the rapid accumulation of information on specific sites, easily accessible by “zoom-ins” and “zoom-outs”, and where the reference scale is the human body.
Design practices can use the data depth and density of those maps to propose better projects responding to those revealed invisibilities. New ways of mapping have never been more present in architecture and design, allowing projects to more fully consider and address the hidden complexities of our cities. Cartography enables “a more detailed reading that can reveal features that are not always explicit or visible on the ground, giving a better understanding of space” and “an ability to describe and set up new fields on invisible traces and hidden, underlying forces of a given context” (James Corner, 1996, 1999).
Challenge / Design proposal
For this charrette, each team must choose a specific public space in Montreal or in their respective city. This can be a public square, a plaza, an intersection, a small park, a street, a train station or any space deemed public, and location of an underrepresented story. Map out these occurrences that happen in the chosen urban public site: visualize the traces, networks or flows, theaters of activity, by superimposing them to the chosen site.
Panel 1: A Map.
How can one map show realities that all too often remain invisible? The first challenge is to produce an original cartography that incorporates information that does not usually appear in conventional architectural or urban drawings. This cartography should overlay the traces and markings of invisible stories onto a chosen place and site, to reveal its hidden complexities.
Panel 2: Leave a trace.
The second part of the challenge should illustrate a scaled, minimal, or ephemeral project designed on the evidence and traces found in the cartography. This visualization should be developed as a perspective drawing, a collage, a photomontage, an axonometry or representation of a digital model.
REFERENCES
The Cartographic Reading Room
MIT SENSEable City Lab https://senseable.mit.edu
QGIS https://qgis.org
Open Street Map https://www.openstreetmap.org
Native Land Digital https://native-land.ca/
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Forensic Architecture https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/tear-gas-in-plaza-de-la-dignidad
Cartography Associates https://www.davidrumsey.com
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Cartographie de base de Montréal
Division de la géomatique, Ville de Montréal
Cartographie du Schéma d'aménagement et de développement
Publié par Ville de Montréal
Archives Montréal
Catalogue des archives de la Ville de Montréal
Documents cartographiques de 1535 à 1983
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
Le territoire québécois depuis la Nouvelle-France
Liste de cartographies utiles pour les recherches sur Montréal
https://www.banq.qc.ca/collections/cartes_plans/ressources_BAnQ/doc_cartographiques/index.html?language_id=1
Carte-index des plans d’utilisation du sol de la ville de Montréal
Atlas of the island and city of Montreal and Ile Bizard a compilation of the most recent cadastral plans from the book of reference, Pinsoneault, A.R. [Adolfe Rodrigue], -1917 comp. [S.I]: The Atlas PublishingCo. Ltd. [1907?]
Atlas of the city and island of Montreal, including the counties of Jacques Cartierand Hochelaga from actual surveys, based upon the cadastral plans deposited inthe office of the Department of Crown Lands. Hopkinsm H.W.[Henry Whitmer], 1838-1920.
https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/2244120
Liste des plans d'assurance incendie de Montréal