Reflecting on J.B. Harley’s Influence and What He Missed in “Deconstructing the Map”

Why Map Deconstructions Mattered to Us

We never met Brian Harley, nor heard him speak, but his ideas deeply influenced our thinking, writing, and teaching about maps and mapping. His argument that maps function as social texts has a powerful force: after all, maps clearly do much more than simply store spatial data and communicate information. Harley’s writing, along with work by Denis Wood, John Pickles, and Matthew Edney, opened up many routes for map studies beyond the technical, the cognitive, and applied functionalism. This body of scholarship, which we now recognize as “critical cartography,” was important as it helped to integrate the map as a significant object of inquiry back into the intellectual mainstream of the social sciences and humanities.

Harley’s early death in December 1991 almost certainly encouraged greater attention to his work. The fact that “Deconstructing the Map” was published two years before his demise has led to a kind of veneration and timelessness. He did not have the chance to publish less timely or hard-hitting subsequent pieces, and as a consequence “Deconstructing the Map” stands out. The sudden raid into alien disciplinary territory offered in the article provided a fashionable critique, and drawing on Foucault and Derrida strongly encouraged a reorientation of a previously largely empirical and acritical field. The article offered a challenge to accepted ways of writing about maps and was written in a style that caught the zeitgeist, at once accessible and also fashionably different.

Dodge came across Harley’s body of critical work and “Deconstructing the Map” as the “must-read” piece in the late 1990s, as he began to switch his scholarship away from data-driven mapping work using geographic information systems (GIS) software toward interpreting the social politics of cartographic representations. The central tenet in Dodge’s eventual PhD thesis deconstructing cyberspace cartographies was a framework around the levels of power and social rules of cartographic production that leaned heavily on Harley’s 1989 article.

Perkins read “Deconstructing the Map” when the piece was first published. His research before that date had focused on the production and design of maps, and in particular on national variations in official mapping. Harley’s paper touched a nerve, inviting him to ask much more critical questions around the role of maps as social constructions. Building on Harley’s earlier book chapters on “Maps, Knowledge, and Power” (Harley 1988) and iconographic critiques of mapping, “Deconstructing the Map” offered a deeper series of explanations for what Perkins saw in contemporary mapping at the start of the last decade of the twentieth century. His interests shifted toward a much more critical focus, and as a direct consequence of reading the article he proposed a new third-year undergraduate course called Maps in Society that was strongly influenced by Harley’s ideas.

More recently, many of Harley’s ideas have almost become a taken-for-granted tenet in any interpretation of cartographic forms and meaning, and the 1989 article certainly now enjoys a classic status and continues to collect citations. It has been a central citation and is oftentimes quoted in what we’ve written on mapping over the past 15 years. As an overt endorsement, we selected it as a must-have inclusion in two anthologies we edited, which included paying a licensing fee to the University of Toronto Press for the privilege (Dodge 2010; Dodge, Kitchin, and Perkins 2011). We also continue to find the Harleyian approach, set forth with such power in “Deconstructing the Map,” an essential foundation for building our work in retheorizing mapping as a practice.

We have also subjected multiple generations of undergraduate geography students at the University of Manchester to Harley’s article as they struggle to engage with cultural interpretation and the politics of geographical knowledge. Sometimes students are quite resistant to thinking beyond the obvious surface appearance – “a map is just a map, why should I be bothered with deconstructing it?” Many practically-minded geography students, who take a didactic view of learning and value the applied skills offered by GIScience courses, have...