Mappenstance.

Links to higher quality maps: https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/show?/img/maps/calcagno-2001-07-22.gif

https://transitmap.net/post-911-subway/

In large metropolises like New York City, transportation infrastructure is crucial to the function of the city. Public transportation such as metro lines, bus routes, and taxis along with road infrastructure like interstate highways and bridges can make or break the economic success of the city. As a result, when loss of function of these systems occurs, cities attempt to resume service as quickly as possible. This map looks at a comparison of New York City’s subway service and general public transportation systems before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The first map provides background information on the New York City subway system before the attacks, around July 2001, and the second map was released six days after the attacks, on September 17th, 2001, showing the altered service around the lower Manhattan area as a result of the attacks. This post also includes information gathered from a report on the effects of catastrophic events on transportation operations done by the USDOT.

The attack began during the morning rush hour on Tuesday, with the first plane flying into the north tower at 8:46 AM. According to the report on the effects of catastrophic events on transportation operations done by the USDOT, one minute later, the MTA Subway Control Center was aware of an explosion at the WTC and began emergency protocol. Within the next few minutes, both the NYC Transit and NJTransit were aware of the situation and began to evacuate the area using both the subway and the NJ PATH trains. Less than 30 minutes after the first impact, the port authority closed all bridges and tunnels into New York City. Airports in the metro area were grounded soon after due to an order from the Federal Aviation Administration. After the south tower collapsed at 10 AM, the MTA suspended all subway service in the entire city. At this point in the late morning, New York City had ground to a halt. Bridges were closed, the city was gridlocked, and no public transportation was available to commuters. People were getting out of their cars and walking to their destinations, and if they didn’t have anywhere to go, they just walked north, away from downtown Manhattan, and away from the dust cloud that had risen from the collapsed towers. Lower Manhattan’s subway infrastructure had been completely crippled. The World Trade Center station at Cortlandt Street had fully collapsed, cutting off the rest of the 1-9 subway train down to South Ferry near Battery Park. Stations on the A train had also been damaged. Despite the complete shutdown on the island of Manhattan, NYC Transit got to work. By 1 PM, partial subway service had resumed throughout the city, with many trains avoiding lower Manhattan or diverting their routes. By nightfall, two-thirds of the NYC subway systems except those in lower Manhattan had resumed and were beginning to function as normal. In the following days, Manhattan’s public transportation system started the return to normalcy, almost impossible to think about considering what had happened. The second map shown in this blog post was released six days after the attacks, showing how service in lower Manhattan was affected. The 3 train became a de-facto Manhattan shuttle, and the 1 train replaced the 3 train with service into Brooklyn. The E train stopped its service into its World Trade Center station and bypassed that branch of track while repairs commenced. Bit by bit, lower Manhattan repaired and healed from the attack, and more services started to come online towards the end of 2001 and into 2002. Almost a year after the infamous day, NYC transit resumed its service to South Ferry and the World Trade Center on September 8th, 2002. The US Department of Transportation’s report on the response to the catastrophic events of 9/11 found that transportation officials had been prepared well for some level of system failure, but not at this scale. Even though, officials handled the events well and kept the safety of rescue workers and civilians at the highest priority. 

Maps are essential partners to transportation systems around the world. You wouldn’t just hop on a bus or a train without checking a map to make sure you know where it’s going first. As a result, it is imperative that maps of public transportation accurately represent the systems they depict. We take their effectiveness for granted, but a lot of work goes into designing transportation maps to ensure they are accurate, simple, and easily understood by the general public. When events happen that hinder or change the way the systems work, the new maps that are produced quickly become a medium through which the public can adapt to these new changes. 

These maps show the resilience and strength of the New York City community and government as they worked to overcome the greatest challenge the city has ever faced. The New York City subway map changed nine times between the attacks and when the system was finally repaired a year later. Not only does this represent the physical change the city underwent in the rebuilding process, but it also is a metaphor for the healing process – healing takes time- it doesn’t happen overnight. As we all know, maps are not permanent. As the real world changes, the symbols and designs that represent it on a map also change. The life of the New York City subway map went through many changes during the early 2000s, but it never stopped serving its purpose. 

How a coastline 100 million years ago influences modern election results in Alabama

When looking at a map, we often take for granted the things that the map presents to us. Of course, we can shove a map to our faces to analyze all of its exact coordinates and geometry, travel to the space represented on the map, squint at the sun’s angle in the sky to certify that the tree is exactly where the map claims it is, and finally proclaim, “Nice”, but that really just defeats the entire purpose of the map, doesn’t it? More often than not, when using a map, we draw quick, general inferences between the imagery we see on the map to what we see around us; the map displays an intersection with street names, so we check if the street names and shape of the intersection we’re standing on matches what’s shown on the map. But such a relationship between maps and the reality they represent seems… shallow. From being confined to a certain range of time, to the narrow scope of the map’s purpose, maps really appear to serve a single, exclusive purpose. However, if we look at a map critically, catching ourselves right before the map tricks us into its clutches, we’ll find that, more often than not, a map will have plenty of layers to peel back, many of which we as the reader must decipher and contextualize on our own.

So Starkey’s map does us a favor by relieving us of any detective work, candidly revealing its layers and partialities by cleaving itself into six portions, each delineated by a distinct time period and subject matter. It’s quite refreshing to have a tangible, chronological timeline to follow, when compared to the typical mapping convention of cramming buildings, features, and monuments all belonging to distinct separate eras into the same space for the sake of brevity. Because of its chronological design, the reader is practically guided by hand on where to look and contextualize subject matter, allowing the reader to first build and then read the story the mapmaker wants to tell. And so, with its atypical and novel presentation, the map takes us on quite the journey through its sextuplet Alabama’s, first traveling back one hundred million years to the Cretaceous period to throw dirt in your face, stopping in the 19th and 20th centuries to report Alabamian demographics and farm sizes, and then finally returning to 2020 to smartly present voting preferences for each county of the state. Each of the six sections is focused, featuring an identical Alabama, forgoing any need for the reader to juxtapose maps of differing scale or adjust for continental drift in order to compare the map’s varying subject matters. As a result, only a simple change of color is needed between each section for anyone, from just a glance at the map, to instantly draw a clear relationship between Cretaceous-era sediment deposits to the voting tendencies of Black people in Alabama. 

“So what?”, you might say. True, knowing how the varying fertility of soil in Alabama due to the settling of sediment from the Cretaceous period affected Alabamian counties’ voting doesn’t exactly have a lot of practical applications. But the map, as a rhetorical device, does first and foremost remind us that the streets we walk to get to work, the governments that we pay taxes to, and the dreams that we aspire to achieve were all shaped and derived in one way or another from past wars, natural phenomena, and happenstances, all stacked upon one another as the pillar on which the present world stands on today. With this map and those like it, we are gently retold the stories that built our modern day, stories that we ought to know like the back of our hands. From a first glance, the map’s message behind its narrative is not immediately obvious. One can clearly see the relationships the map presents, but the map is subtle; it doesn’t outright say the underlying context. Well, the map doesn’t really need to scream in your face about why the slave population was most concentrated around that band of particularly nutritious soil, because as the map image is absorbed, turned over in the mind, and digested, everyone sooner or later recalls the reason. That reason alone is why there’s no need for a legend. We know what the colors represent; nobody needs to ask whether it’s the blue counties or the red counties that have the largest farms or the most number of Black people. From just a glance at the map, one recalls their history lessons, how tightly southern agriculture and economy were intertwined with the slave trade, the imagery of Black men, women, and children picking cotton as White men on horses look on forever woven into our nation’s history and culture. One cannot help but recall the abject horrors that are so well documented in our history books. 

Then comes the civil war of our nation divided, then emancipation, and then the long road of struggle that in many ways continues to this very day. The defeats, victories, MLK, race riots, Brown v. Board, all vaguely swim in the back of our consciousness as we look at farm sizes and demographics. As our eyes finally settle on the bottom right, we look upon the map’s curious decision to include which party each county voted for in the 2020 presidential election. The band of counties that just so happened to have the fortune of nutritious sediment deposited in their soil, the largest farm sizes, the largest populations of Black people, also by and large happened to have voted Blue. But why include this last point of information regarding voting preferences? Clearly, this choice alone shifts the entire narrative of the map towards a political tone. The map had just gotten done retelling that tragic struggle for freedom and civil rights, and with such a context fresh in our minds, it almost seems as if the streak of blue, who had fought so valiantly to earn equal footing and are continuing to do so, are encircled by a sea of red, a bastion of Democrats embedded deep within Republican territory. By contextualizing the voting preferences of Black people with such a dark period of history, Starkey transforms his map into something that’s as much of a political statement as it is a demonstration of intertwining relationships between various phenomena, which ultimately defines both the map’s narrative and underlying message. If the election portion was left out, the map would only be a showcase of cause and effect. Similarly, if it was simply a map of Alabama’s county 2020 election results, then there would be no context to build a narrative off of in the first place, and no subsequent message. Combine the two, and well, what we have is Starkey’s map: a story of how a natural phenomenon led to a centuries-long fight for equality that culminated in a distinct band of unified, unwavering Blue counties, and a nod of appreciation towards the Black Americans demonstrating their steadfast support for the Democratic party in the deep, red South.

After viewing Starkey’s map, we might momentarily forget that maps are rarely as interdisciplinary, covering such a wide range of subject matter across an equally wide range of time. Maps simply just don’t divide themselves into organized layers, neatly separated by distinct time periods, in order to tell a succinct story. But thanks to Starkey’s map, if we are to ever come across a map of Alabama’s voting preferences again, we’ll see a streak of Cretaceous-era sediment deposit and farm sizes rather than just counties colored red or blue. We’ll be reminded  that just because a map (e.g. “The Physiographic Map of Mars”) may only have one defined purpose (e.g. to showcase the riveting geographic features of Mars), it rarely, if ever, is confined to that singular purpose of visual representation. For all we know, a million years of rich extraterrestrial history and technology lie only a thin layer under tedious contour lines and dull, gray shading, patiently waiting for their story to be told.

https://automatingbanishment.org/map/

This map is an interactive map titled Automating Banishment and its goal is to uncover “LAPD’s data-driven policing programs that control, displace and criminalize people and places”. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office implemented a program in 1997 titled the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program. The program utilizes LAPD surveillance and community policing in order to be enforced and effective. 

This specific map focuses on other programs that implement LAPD surveillance. This map was created by members of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and they have been researching LAPD surveillance programs and their effects on Black and Brown communities in Los Angeles. With their research, the coalition was able to uncover four tactics or programs other than the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program that use LAPD surveillance as a means of control and intimidation. The Operation LASER program was active from 2011to 2019 and operated by marking areas “LASER zones” which were targeted by the City Attorney and LAPD. This program more than likely was a program within the CNAP program because the areas that were targeted were targeted for increased nuisance abatements as well. In addition to LASER zones, the LAPD focused on areas marked as Anchor Points. Anchor Points were areas that were marked for increased police surveillance and nuisance abatements. These Anchor Points could include specific addresses, landmarks, and intersections. In addition to using surveillance to gather data on places to target, from 2011 to 2020 the LAPD used a system called PredPol. This system was a “predictive policing” system powered by algorithms that guess places where crime happens. The last tactic that is highlighted on the map is the Community Safety Partnership Sites which are locations that are targeted by the LAPD for a “community policing program”. These sites were launched in 2011 and were recently expanded citywide in 2020. 

All of these tactics are displayed on the interactive map with detailed incidents caused by the tactics and programs. Things that are displayed on the map include “People shot or killed by LAPD in or around LASER zones”, “2018 central division PredPol hotspots”, “Community safety partnership zones”, and “Anchor Points”. Within the map, the members of the coalition use language like “pigs” in order to describe the LAPD and they also try to humanize the victims of LAPD shootings in their descriptions of the shooting incidents. Displaying the various tactics and programs on a map while using rhetoric that affirms their position allows the members of the coalition to be strong counter mappers and stand firm on their position. The coalition makes it very clear that the LAPD is a problem in their communities and that the issues move far beyond what any average citizen may be able to see. Their map is able to illuminate problems that require years of research and dedication to uncover. Maps aren’t mad in a day and neither are counter maps. One important distinction between countermapping and conventional mapping is that the cartographers of conventional maps don’t have to disclose their position whereas counter mappers must disclose where they stand on an issue because they are mapping the issues as well as the respective area. 

The political discourse surrounding police surveillance can be daunting for those involved but the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition doesn’t seem to be bothered by the backlash they will receive because of their brave way of mapping. The counter mappers of this map want their viewers to understand how vast and widespread the issue of police surveillance is and it goes way past patrolling a neighborhood. The tactics and programs implemented by the city attorney’s office and the LAPD are so unethical but still lawful so trying to deconstruct these programs using counter-mapping may seem pointless. However, grassroots efforts are successful and this organization seems to have a good grip on the issues and the powers that be.