No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control
by Mark Monmonier

Reviewed by Jordan Wingate

In “On Exactitude in Science,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of a fictional empire so devoted to the art of cartography that its citizens constructed “a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire,” corresponding “point for point” with reality. When the following generations, finding the creation “useless,” deliver it up to the vicissitudes of the desert, we see the irony of the 1:1 map: the impracticality of its perfect data, of utterly objective replication. Indeed, contemporary cartographic “[s]imulation,” Jean Baudrillard has written, “is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance,” but rather “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality…[the] territory [neither] precedes the map, nor survives it.” Free of the onus of exact representation, the map must serve more subjective agendas. The question of just whose agendas – be they legal or political – is the subject of Mark Monmonier’s No Dig, No Fly, No Go.

In this sense, the work’s subheading – How Maps Restrict and Control – improperly centers the book’s discussion. It is not how maps control society, but rather how social forces shape maps, that primarily concerns this work. As Monmonier points out, “[d]raw a boundary on a map, stick a label on it, and people think it’s real,” but No Dig is less concerned with the social significance of “restrictive cartography” than with the question of whose hands in fact are drawing the boundaries. After all, our acquiescence to those boundaries’ legal, if not ontological, reality is in direct proportion to our respect for the consequences of transgressing them.

Post-structuralist attention to the powers expressed in the reciprocal control of knowledge and populations underwrites much of the contemporary discipline of critical cartography, headed in the 1980s by the late John Brian Harley. Assumed to be subjective constructions of (usually imperialist or nationalistic) politics, maps today are subject to new questions: What epistemological claims does cartography make about the world? What was, and is, the metaphorical purchase of maps and mapping? Where, in other words, does subjectivity creep in? These questions hold equal relevance to modern “spatial databases” – geographic arrays of relational information – and general theories of the codification of information, though these are not addressed by No Dig.

As Monmonier tells it, the arrow of time has shifted the map’s organizing purpose: once a tool of imperial exploration and navigation, maps now reify and solidify the various legislations protecting and structuring the contemporary world’s comparatively static bodies politic. Avoiding abstract treatments of power and territory, No Dig is flush with (quite literally) on-the-ground contemporary applications of what the author terms “prohibitive cartography,” an increasingly complex and pervasive phenomenon reflecting the growing intricacies of 20th-century cities, governments, and corporations.

Much of No Dig takes up the task of puzzling out the politics of international borders. But Monmonier begins by recounting two coterminous narratives: that of “American” colonization and westward expansion, and that of the evolving divisions and subdivisions of the New World landmass. Tracing an increasingly regulated land surveillance system in the move to settle the west, Monmonier shows the pragmatic origins of orthogonal properties, as well as the contemporary applications of rendering land ownership legible in maps: the development of lot-and-block subdivisions; the equalization of legal standing for all properties; the creation of a reliable tax base for local government; and the resolution of questions of encroachment and “ambulatory boundaries” (such as waterfronts). Helpfully covering concepts of easement, right-of-way, and avulsion (the principle that state and property boundaries stay where they are, regardless of transformations of the natural landscape), Monmonier familiarizes lay readers with the vernacular of his discussion, highlighting their use in actual legal battles for contested territory.

Though Monmonier avoids overtly theoretical biopolitical discussions, No Dig calls attention to the significant legal pressures dictating both the laying out of cities and the movements of their inhabitants. More acutely, jurisdictional boundaries regulate a surprising portion of habitual life. The placement of every store, school, plant, and site is “zoned” for specific purposes by city planners to promote, in principle, our efficient, convenient, and comfortable interaction with the world around us. But city planning is nothing if not political. Those zones with less immediately visible consequences, such as voting districts, are often the most perversely manipulated, as highlighted in the discussion of various strategies of gerrymandering (conversely, “redlining” – using ZIP codes to determine, for example, whom to offer loans – manipulates demographic data to partition geographic areas). Additional discussions of the controls foisted upon airspace and cyperspace reveal just how continuous are the manipulations of our movements, our navigation of the world.

Because political and ethnic boundaries rarely coincide perfectly, the relationship between maps and delimitation – the diplomatic word for boundary-making – is in fact, as No Dig shows, fraught with complications. Draw what politicians might, the practical attempt to actually inscribe borders upon the landscape often resists the best efforts of legislators to lay claim to the land. Historically, the fact that “natural boundaries” like mountain ridges and streams have proven far easier for nations to protect than artificially imposed lines, such as the Great Wall of China, is often inextricable from issues of international war and peace. Territorial claims based – in the wake of imperialism or the name of equal distribution – upon geometrical or longitudinal measurements often overlook ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious differences within populations. If spurious mapping policy has very real political consequences, as Monmonier claims, a better political map would simply trace the territories of preexisting communities, as accomplished, to a certain extent, in T.E. Lawrence’s WWI map of the Middle East. But to do so retroactively, Monmonier points out, amounts to “soft partitioning” at best, and ethnic cleansing at worst.

As Monmonier notes, we are each subject to the surreptitious monitoring of what Peter Fisher has termed “geoslavery,” the control of our physical location by an (often-remote) “geomaster.” But such sweeping declarations are rare for No Dig. This primarily legal – as opposed to theoretical – deconstruction of political maps will find receptive audiences in scholars of urban planning, social work, and sociology seeking better understandings of the precise ways American cities and states harden their borders, how modern nations jostle for contested territory, and how to begin addressing their more partisan agendas. Accessibly written and occasionally anecdotal, one could find less welcoming introductions to the subject than Monmonier has presented.