Terra infirma: On the base map in urban cartography and GIS

This article investigates the ways in which base maps are a fundamental, but under-recognised, starting point for planners, architects, cartographers and geographic information scientists in urban spatial planning and decision-making contexts. Focusing on the case study of a collaborative mapping project with the Wood Street Commons, an unhoused community in West Oakland, it contends that base maps create a cartographic terra infirma, fundamentally shaping the process of negotiations over urban space in ways that reinforce possessive logics and normalize property as central to the function of the city. Base maps do so by paradoxically absenting all people – with the effect of absenting the occupation of land by unhoused people, while shielding property owners from view while enacting their possession through infrastructure, parcel boundaries and land features. We argue this privileging inherent in the urban base map ultimately fuels a process of “unbecoming” ( Fraser, 2018 ) – a simultaneous invisibilizing and reproduction of spatial inequality – and in response, call for attention towards the politics of base maps from urban cartographers, planners, architects and spatial scientists alike.