No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control (review)

No Dig, No Fly, No Go is the latest installation of a larger series by Mark Monmonier addressing the history and social significance of maps. He describes it as an extension of his more foundational and, likely, more familiar work, How to Lie with Maps (1991), but it leaves behind the assumption that maps distort or simplify reality to more concretely illustrate how mapped boundaries become reality. He regularly invokes the term “prohibitive cartography,” pointing to maps that channel courses of action to protect interests we may not recognize or experience as our own, but the term “constitutive cartography” might be just as applicable and more neutral. Monmonier’s basic argument is that “boundaries matter,” and that maps as both artifacts and rhetorical tools reflect specific boundary conditions that generally go without notice. Where the intent behind the map is to protect certain interests over others, this inscribed strategy works because standardizing boundaries are themselves naturalized. Even more, certain maps constitute as much as they reflect boundary conditions: “Maps can both help and hinder boundary making” (p. 39).

The book seems to unfold around the author’s own situated relationship to cartographic boundaries and the technological changes he is personally navigating or witnessing. A subtle narrative charts struggles over national sovereignty, starting in the early twentieth century with the implementation of the standardizing tools used to legalize prohibitive cartography, up through innovations in digital and satellite technology in the present. Along the way we encounter the challenges associated with restrictions, predominantly in the United States, as diverse as voter registration, mortgage risk assessment, no-fly zones, and limitations on the movements of convicted sex offenders.

The taxonomy of maps presented here appears most relevant to a particular realm of experience: individuals suspended in a dense web of invisible boundaries that correspond to or lend themselves to shared forms of standardization. These are boundaries constituted through the historical extension of modern, impersonal state-formation, administered from a distance, and necessary to a model of power that must simultaneously equalize and centralize to maintain legitimacy. However, the author describes some voter registration maps as inefficient and wasteful, mortgage and homeowner’s insurance risk-assessment maps as blatantly discriminatory, and the use of buffer maps to deter sex offenders as deceptive. Yet, he concludes, “In many contexts, a prohibitive map is not just an order but a plea for common sense” (p. 179). It is therefore difficult to connect these diverse uses and assessments of prohibitive cartography to broader debates on whether such tools should be actively engaged or even understood by the public.

One such example is the debate that inspired participatory planning and the deepened sense of obligation at the municipal level to include the public in the production or implementation of everything from zoning changes to bridge design. At one point, Monmonier refers to our relationships to maps as a form of “naïve faith” (p. 51): “Draw a boundary on a map, stick a label on it, and people think it’s real” (p. 129). But he also claims “maps provide an efficient framework for organizing evidence and settling disputes” (p. 29). Thus, there is no clear or unified theoretical position with regard to the power of maps here. There is no critical engagement with the theoretical literature, such as James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) where we clearly engage the ways in which prohibitive maps and the standards on which they are based obfuscate agency and intent in a way that more embodied and personal forms of knowledge, and even coercion, do not. Implicit in Scott’s book is a sense that a more reflexive public, a public savvier to the ways in which state-centered strategies like prohibitive cartography affect its life, is a public better equipped to protect its own interests. Monmonier takes no such political stand. Instead, he offers interesting and even amusing case studies illustrating the...