We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This book argues that this is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. But the rectilinear streets, squares, and public spaces produced in this way leave out people and the entire environmental history of their coming together. How can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans ... More

We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This book argues that this is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. But the rectilinear streets, squares, and public spaces produced in this way leave out people and the entire environmental history of their coming together. How can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans? And how can we redraw the lines maps and plans use so that the qualitative world of shadows, footprints, comings and goings, and occasions can be registered? In short, the book asks why we represent the world as static when our experience of it is mobile. It traces this bias in Enlightenment cartography, in inductive logic, and in contemporary place design. This is the negative critique. Its positive argument is that, when we look closely at these designs on the world, we find traces of a repressed movement form. Even the ideal lines of geometrical figures turn out to contain traces of earlier passages; and there are many forms of graphic design that do engage with the dark environment that surrounds the light of reason. How can this “dark writing” be represented? And how, therefore, can our representations of the world embody more sensuously the mobile histories that have produced it? The book answers these questions using case studies.