Cartographic Conference
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Cartographic Conference

On 23 and 24 April 2009, a conference themed ‘Conference on Cartographic Challenges: movement, participation, risk' will be organised in Bergamo (Italy). The conference is an opportunity of encounter among researchers interested in sharing two levels of considerations about cartography: the epistemic one, concerning the communicative role it is playing actually; the empiric one, regarding the production of maps, able to face globalisation challenges.  

 

About the empistemic role, assuming that the information technologies and the world wide web have undermined the elaboration and the basic assumptions of the map, it comes out the need to wonder whether we are in front of a crisis of the "cartographic reason" or, rather, in front of a metric metamorphosis, which does not concern its iconising result.

 

Currently, the cartographic scenario shows a fragmentation of agencies producing maps, which discourages any claim to intervene technically, by coding a multiplicity of languages or elaboration systems. At the same time, it is urgent to define in a semiotic way the hybridity, to which the map is subjected in a multimedia environment, in order to think about its communication results. The goal of the conference is to get awareness of the cognitive limits of our measurement instruments in order to create others, able to cope with new social needs.

 

About the second level of consideration, we focus our attention on globalisation, that has radically changed communication, ideas, scientific and artistic culture, just like life styles, creating the need to re-think and re-conceptualise the idea of space and how it can be transmitted cartographically. In fact, cartography is called to represent types of space - as the one with net asset, requiring metrics able to point out a dimension of flexibility and to reproduce the dynamics of exchange, the pluralism of actors, the time factor in problem solving inside risk situations.

 

Then, the map seems to be the place where we can obtain the knowledge of a World set on flows and networks that, while connecting or disconnecting points on the Earth surface, show a net-shape spatiality able to evocate values and mechanisms of the way society works and, then, of the people inhabiting places. Therefore, movement is the conceptual category to be investigated in its most different and distant meanings, among which the one of virtuality of movement. In fact, the management of complex societies, like the urban ones, needs some cartographic instruments able to represent moving spatialities of their citizens and inhabitants, whose existence is grounded in movement. Then, we need to project appropriate ways of transportation and systems to face the case of connection interruption in real time, due to traffic jam, to a terroristic attack or a natural catastrophe.

 

Furthermore, city-users become, because of their own interests, a complex of subjects, which need to be involved in urban management practices and in decision making through different kinds and governance practices.

 

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