Cartographic technologies for territorial governance

The present study draws attention to cartographic technologies as the privileged research field where geography is called upon to meet the challenges of globalization. As a matter of fact, researchers in the field have long matured the conviction that cartographic representation is tightly linked to territory and therefore a rendering of contemporary spatiality necessarily entails skills both in territorial analysis and in cartographic semiology. In modern times, topographic metrics, inherited from Euclidean cartography, had severed the link between geography and cartography. Maps were merely intended to render the referential or quantitative features of territory. Nowadays, instead, having eluded controls of the institutional kind, maps are intended both by territorial analysts and by the various agents involved in emerging online scenarios, as representations capable of conveying the social meaning of territory. Notably, new cartographic technologies prove it necessary to consider two perspectives: the epistemic one, whereby we look at the role maps play nowadays in imparting territorial information; and the experimental one, meant to produce new maps that might meet the needs of a new definition of spatiality and thereby reclaim the issues of social groups who demand direct participation in the decision making linked to the challenge of globalization. The present study outlines theoretical issues touching upon the latter perspective, with methodological examples taken from a number of products assembled at the Diathesis Cartographic Laboratory of Bergamo University.