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NO DIG, NO FLY, NO GO

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments...................................xi1 Introduction: Boundaries Matter.............................12 Keep Off!...................................................63 Keep Out!...................................................304 Absentee Landlords..........................................515 Dividing the Sea............................................706 Divide and Govern...........................................867 Contorted Boundaries, Wasted Votes..........................1048 Redlining and Greenlining...................................1179 Growth Management...........................................13010 Vice Squad.................................................14611 No Dig, No Fly, No Go......................................16012 Electronic Boundaries......................................180Notes.........................................................189Selected Readings for Further Exploration.....................217Sources of Illustrations......................................223Index.........................................................229

Chapter One

BOUNDARIES MATTER

Maps exert power in two ways: by shaping public opinion and by telling us where we can't go and what we can't (or must) do in specific places. This book examines the second type, which I call imperative maps because of their similarity to imperative sentences—the bossy ones that often end in an exclamation point. Whether blatant or subtle, the imperative map is usually intended either to stifle movement or to restrict an activity with a spatial dimension. Examples include aeronautical charts with "no-fly" zones, world political maps, and municipal zoning maps, backed up, respectively, by military aircraft, border guards, and code enforcement officers. The genre also embraces floodplain and fault-zone maps, enforced jointly by environmental agencies and Mother Nature. Whether the penalty for defiance is explicit or implied, an imperative map is a geographic threat that warns of unpleasant consequences. Not surprisingly, most restrictive maps are blatantly prohibitive.

Prohibitive cartography emerged as a distinct dimension of map use sometime after 1900, when restrictive maps increased markedly in variety, pervasiveness, and impact to reflect the growing complexity of cities, governments, and corporations. Although this intensification has roots in Roman property maps, partly intended to thwart trespass, any map with boundary lines delineating a territory as small as a farm or building lot, or as large as a nation-state, is fundamentally a restrictive map. Longstanding public acceptance of property maps and other boundary maps quite likely underlies an expectation by government officials that a wider, more intensive use of prohibitive maps would be understood and accepted. Prohibitive elements are now apparent in most cartographic modes and institutional practices.

Factors underlying this expansion include advances in transportation technology and public administration as well as an increased wariness of urban growth and hazardous environments. While maps portraying historic districts and marine protected areas are necessarily prohibitive, nautical charts and many recreation maps include restrictive elements but largely address other, more important concerns. And even the comparatively nonauthoritarian topographic map shows municipal and state boundaries, which can separate marked differences in tax policy, criminal codes, zoning laws, and environmental regulations.

Perhaps the quintessential prohibitive map is the aeronautical chart, which defines and regulates navigable airspace. Complex and often ephemeral restrictions embedded in contemporary aeronautical charts reflect a historically significant transition from the map as a tool for exploration, discovery, and navigation to the map as a comparatively complex instrument with roles that include public safety, growth management, and environmental protection. Among the diverse roles of prohibitive cartography, the no-fly zone has become a tool of humanitarian intervention, and map-based regulations are indispensable in wildlife conservation

Prohibitive cartography has its own graphic rhetoric. Because efficient enforcement depends on well-defined territorial restrictions, the primary symbol on most prohibitive maps is the boundary line, underscored perhaps by labels and contrasting colors. By convention, small-scale political maps printed in color rely heavily on dissimilar hues—when France is green and Germany is purple, there's less need for the prominent dot-and-dashed "international boundary" symbol common on graytone maps. The mapmaker can emphasize national sovereignty with thick, solid black lines—the most prominent symbol on many State Department maps—or underscore disputed or otherwise tentative boundaries with equally thick dashed lines. By contrast, the thinner, less prominent dot-and-dashed line is a convenient, readily understood code useful with less strident atlas maps, on which political boundaries have a weaker claim to continuity than roads, railways, and rivers. By chance, line symbols with periodic gaps afford a more accurate representation of boundaries like the U.S.-Mexico border, which is far more permeable than an unbroken line might suggest.

Just because a boundary is mapped is no reason to assume it's accepted by the neighbors it separates or by the world at large. Indeed, of all features shown on maps, boundaries are by far the most contentious. While most boundaries signify peaceful sovereignty or undisputed ownership, more than a few assault national pride or personal dignity, often with tragic results. Aggrieved nations declare war, feuding neighbors go to court, and parents upset over reconfigured school attendance zones elect a new school board or pick up and move. Any sudden, unexplained change to a mapped boundary can incite spontaneous resistance, and festering resentment of an old boundary can evoke a forceful reaction.

No less controversial are boundaries tied to zoning ordinances and wetlands regulations. In much the same way that lot lines confirm a property right to sell land and exclude trespassers, boundaries that restrict the owner's use of a parcel transfer some of that property right to the public at large. Imposing these restrictions can be enthusiastically embraced as responsible government or vigorously condemned as an "unconstitutional taking."

Boundary maps have a rich history, with ancient roots and a modern resurgence. Some of the earliest maps no doubt portrayed property boundaries, but the cartographic record here is spotty at best. Because primitive drawings rarely survived, archaeologists can only assume that ancient Egyptians diagrammed the painstaking measurements used to reestablish boundaries after the Nile's annual inundation. Historians trace the modern property map to the Roman Empire, where boundary stones were altars to Terminus, the god of boundaries, and anyone who destroyed or moved one was subject to death or a large fine. Roads, aqueducts, and other engineering works required maps, to be sure, and Roman town plans described the layout of streets and structures. By contrast, national frontiers were comparatively vague and mapped largely by military commanders, whose topographic maps focused on rivers, mountains,...