Lecture: Militant Mapping

7 March Department of Landscape Architecture Common Lecture
Britt Eversole:  Militant Mapping
4:00 pm  _ CDL 110

Militant mapping describes a genre of art, architectural and poetic representation created in 1960s and 1970s Italy that envisioned the creative unmaking of the image of the city and the landscape. Confronting the failures of the government to manage explosive urban growth, with its corresponding over development and environmental devastation of the countryside, artists and architects developed new forms of graphic engagement to combat this situation. By appropriating widely available mass media and documentary material they mapped the city as a site of political and economic power. In the hands of Italy?s energetic youth movements and extra-parliamentary activists, this form of cartography became a means of re-mediating the city not as a fixed, homogenous place but as a dynamic, multi-layered imaginary of non-violent, political action. The aspirations of these militant cartographers resonates with today's Occupy Movement, but also demonstrates the limitations of our present situation, in which architects and planners have abandoned the representation of political and visionary mandates in favor of hyper-professionalism and so-called neo-pragmatism.