How to Map Nothing

It might seem that anyone who could disregard all this labor and expertise and affective engagement and see nothingness is alarmingly self-absorbed and willfully oblivious, but we have to admit that essential systems — our public infrastructures and networks of care — are often designed to fade into the background.

Consider some of those dispatches from the Great Pause: What if we took each sourdough selfie, each Zoom class, each Peloton ride, each Netflix binge and mapped the ecology of resources and services that have made it possible for some of us? And at the same time impossible for others? Our Everlane austerity, lo-fi authenticity, and seamless connect... See more

the pandemic has merely accelerated a years-long descent into negation and sensory deprivation, a “desire for nothingness” that embodies the exhaustion of optimism and the embrace of nihilism.

Yet the perceived suspension of quarantine — like the horror vacui of the sea or the terra nullius of the wilderness — tends to obfuscate all the vectors converging at our homes and in our neighborhoods

The multidisciplinary collective BlackSpace has drafted a manifesto calling for designers and planners to “reckon with the past as a means of healing … and deepening understanding”; to center Black joy and lived experience; to take the time to build trust and deconstruct hierarchies; to ensure that designers act as “humble learners” who “walk with ... See more

Social media, mainstream news, and an explosion of Substack newsletters often painted pictures of cities quelled and hibernating, in some ways diminished, and of urbanites either turned inward toward self-betterment, or outward, toward their local communities or country homes.

The pandemic has demonstrated how legacies of racism and colonialism and patterns of inequity continue to pervade our urban ecologies, and how those ecologies extend well beyond the city limits.

embodied mapping can offer insight into “desire lines,” all those paths people carve through the city that might not align with official transit routes and pedestrian conduits.

But when we looked out our own windows — or through the newsfeeds on our screens — we witnessed not only suspension but also decline, and at a much grander scale. Maps and graphs showed stilled air traffic and transit systems, depressed economies, shuttered businesses, sheltering communities. Those downward-trending graphs were juxtaposed with risi... See more