Luxe Beat Magazine OCTOBER 2015 | Page 83

Book Extract
Book excerpt published
with publisher’s permission.
All photos ©Library of Congress.
By Jeremy Black

C

ities are places of hopes and
dreams, of vision and order,
as well as centers for
destruction and conflict.
Although cities are not
creations of the modern era, for
many people they represent the core
element of life as we live it today,
when most of the world’s population
lives I an urban hub of commerce,
technology, transport, and social
interaction between people, and in
communities of often quite diverse
cultures. Whereas only a century
ago perhaps 10 percent of
humankind lived in a city, now most
people do and the world’s economic
development is characterized by the
relentless, and often unrestrained,
expansion of our ever-growing urban
metropolises.
Globally, cities have become
inextricably identified with this
sense of progress, success and
advancement, whether individual,
social, or economic; cities are
believed to be places where things
“happen.” In fact, historically, this
has long been the case, with cities
impossible to separate from the
evolution of human civilization.
Trade and religion are two of the
oldest practices of humankind,
and cities originated and grew to
facilitate the complex human webs
of exchange involved in both, which

have left their marks throughout the
millennia on the form and features
of our cities—to facilitate the
buying and selling of goods and to
enable people to gather for matters
more transcendent and less material.
And just as civilization grew out of
humankind’s conscious attempt to
control, change, and organize our
environment, so cartography and
mapping arose out of our need for
tools to measure, record,
understand, navigate, plan, and
protect our surroundings. Cities—
centers of spiritual, economic, and
political power—became leading
centers of mapmaking as well as
prime subjects for cartographers.
City maps are among the most
popular, as well as oldest, forms
of cartographic representation.
However, the survival rate of early
maps is limited and most maps date
only from the last 500 years. Early
maps are also fragments; sometimes
literally in the physical sense, but
also because our knowledge of them
is incomplete, based upon a partial
understanding of the cultural
context within which they were
made, though it seems quite clear