Critical Cartography for the Coffee Table: Reflections on Writing “Chicago in 50 Maps”

Daniel Block, Chicago State University
Andrea Craft, University of Illinois Chicago

In this presentation, we discuss the theoretical and methodological challenges encountered in our work creating maps for Chicago in 50 Maps, a forthcoming book in Belt Publishing’s “50 Maps” book series. While these books offer broad profiles of various cities in the American Rust Belt, from basic population and terrain maps to creative, place-specific topics, such as the geography of smells, they also, inevitably, represent a thoughtful, even critical, engagement with the complex processes of producing urban space, encouraging readers to think beyond conventional narratives. As critical geographers now writing for a popular audience, we grappled with how to produce a compelling and insightful cartographic representation of our city and its history - one which is both accessible and thought-provoking, despite the constraints of minimal accompanying text. A good map raises more questions than it answers. Therefore, a central concern for us was to select maps that not only inform but also challenge readers’ assumptions and invite deeper inquiry into the city’s past and present, by helping them ponder and develop their own questions about the social, economic, and political processes that lead to the city as they know it. In this presentation, we will discuss our approach to framing the map collection, doing a deep dive into a few representative historical maps from our book that illustrate the diverse strategies employed to provoke critical engagement with Chicago’s geography. We discuss maps on topics ranging from historical population peaks, to deindustrialization and the spatial urban policies meant to abate it, to indigenous infrastructure’s influence on the modern street grid

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 20. Making the West: Spatial Perspectives