The Googlization of Everything

What Google Earth doesn't show you: A small movement of alternative mapmakers seek to revolutionize our understanding of the Triangle and the world:

... Wood, a longtime Heights resident and internationally renowned author of The Power of Maps, produced this (still-incomplete) "narrative atlas" of Boylan Heights from the late '70s through the early '80s with a group of his students. There's also a map of just street signs; one of power lines; one of the stars overhead; one of autumn leaves; another of the underground gas, water and sewer systems. Each tells a different story about the neighborhood by isolating one of its life support systems, each answering the question "Where am I?" in an entirely different way. "I wanted the atlas to read almost like a novel," Wood says. Still unfinished, the maps are the subject of a 1998 interview that remains one of the radio show This American Life's more popular episodes.

Wood minces no words about what's wrong with the picture provided by both our standard street atlas and its virtual counterparts: "Google Maps reduces the world to a bunch of automobile pipes. I don't want to think of my world only in terms of streets." Wood has spent much of his career as artist, writer and educator arguing that maps influence how we think about every aspect of our environment, from natural resources to economic development, from school assignment zones to voting precincts. "Show me anyone's life today, and it's shown on a map, organized by maps and constructed with maps."

The importance of maps is certainly nothing new—even older than writing, maps have been instrumental in everything from laying out simple farming settlements to colonizing the New World. The most obvious recent change in mapping is in the technology. Over the past 30 years or so, software based on the geographic information system (GIS) model has become the standard in professional cartography, changing the kinds and quantity of data that can be made available by a single map interface. At the same time, the digital revolution has made it easier for more people to get involved in mapping through free programs like Google Earth. But most of what's distinctive about today's maps comes down to the same key factors as any form of communication: what they're being used for, and for whom they're being made. ...

... In Chapel Hill, an innovative group of mapmakers is exploring ways to make visual narratives out of the dynamic forces that shape a modern research university. The Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs), a group operating out of UNC-Chapel Hill's Cultural Studies department, refuses to see mapping as a passive process. Says spokesperson Tim Stallman, "We're less interested in making maps that describe the world as it is and more interested in making maps that develop your understanding of the world." Since its inception in the spring of 2005, 3Cs has been using maps to show how the Triangle's major biotech and medical research centers and its universities are taking control of North Carolina's economy, and the effects of these changes on local communities.

3Cs' most notable mapping project so far is entitled disOrientation 2006, which they passed out to incoming first-year students at UNC. Really several maps in one, it displays traffic patterns, the most dangerous intersections for pedestrians, where to find the densest populations of Triangle researchers, local business information, where UNC faculty live compared with where workers live, where students are studying abroad, and more.

The map's unifying concern is to figure out what globalization and the so-called "knowledge economy" look like from the bottom up rather than the top down. As 3Cs member Craig Dalton puts it, "Knowledge requires labor to be produced."

One current project is to outline the development of Carolina North, a controversial new research facility being built by UNC and the Town of Chapel Hill, and what it says about the evolving relationship between 21st-century universities and private research corporations. Studying the planning records of Carolina North alongside the historical development of its model, Research Triangle Park, 3Cs found that the physical layout of the buildings reflect a struggle to adapt to more widespread shifts in the market for scientific research. Old models of planning were designed to support old and increasingly obsolete models of science work. "The Carolina North and RTP ideal comes out of the fact that RTP's growth is dramatically slowing and it's not really the center of new R&D work that it once was." In an attempt to encourage more intellectual independence and collaboration, the isolated compounds of the '50s are being opened up to include decentralized meeting places, making them almost resemble small cities or outdoor malls: "The model now is much more what you'd see at the new American Tobacco district, where the space is designed for things like coffee shops, places to facilitate chance encounters." The work of 3Cs provides examples of the sometimes unexpected ways lived space is transformed to suit the needs of its owners.

Increasing integration with private industry, assisted by local governments, is all part of the race for modern universities to redefine themselves as global institutions. Their local environments can't help but be changed in turn—global universities and global corporations require "global cities." Maps can be used to help mark these changes, usually lumped together under the "gentrification" heading. "If you crunch out the statistics," Stallman says, "the top 1 percent of landowners in Durham County own 50 percent of the land ... and if you include Duke and the City of Durham, it jumps to 75-90 percent. The maps we're working on now are asking, 'Where are these properties, where are they concentrated, where most turnover in home sales is happening, where most new construction is happening,' things like that." According to Wood, an admirer of their work, 3Cs' maps accomplish "what so many [other] maps fail to do—to make a point."

The collective's other plans include a community cartography exhibit for Triangle residents interested in maps to showcase their work, tentatively set for September through mid-October, a reprise of another show they put together two years ago. ...