Mapping for regions
Wil Zonneveld (TU Delft - Spatial Planning and Strategy)
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Abstract
The most dominant form of visualization in regional design is mapping. This chapter seeks to unravel why and how maps are used in regional design and what sort of techniques may give maps agency. The chapter seeks to explain how the textual and visual languages of regional design are interconnected, in particular through the use metaphors. The chapter also discusses what may be called ‘cartographic anxiety’: the deliberate search to define a region through clear and exact perimeters. Claiming that this is a sort of dead-end street, the chapter presents various examples of how regions have been mapped and in what way maps have contributed to the acceptance of (new) public norms about ‘possible or desirable futures’. The overall claim of the chapter is that in regional design maps form the hinge between institutional and spatial design. It is for this reason that in discourse analysis there is a need to integrate a proper analysis of the sometimes bewildering visual language of maps.