Administration of Spaces - A Primer of GIS: Fundamental Geographic and Cartographic Concepts - page 234

mental, maps have created the world we know and continue to be key parts
of how we understand and engage that world. The chapter next considers
the significance of land ownership recording—the cadastre—for capitalist
economies and societies. The third section examines how administration
activities have influenced the development of GI technologies. The closing
section examines various sources of geographic information.
Administration of the World We Know
Through geographic and cartographic representations governments create
spaces. The external boundaries and internal administrative divisions of the
United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, Poland, India, and
every other country have been created by many government administrations.
Laws, regulations, and procedures rely on coordinate and locational systems.
Administrative activities in the 50 U.S. states provide both positive and
negative examples of map use. From the settlement on the Eastern Seaboard
and along the southern and western coasts by Europeans to relentless
attempts to create advantageous election districts through gerrymandering,
examples from the United States highlight the role geographic and carto-
graphic representation play in our lives.
The history of the settlement of the colonies on the Eastern Seaboard
shows that Europeans worked to create the illusion that the land they were
settling was relatively “unoccupied.” As William Cronin describes the devel-
opment of European settlements in Changes in the Land , setting boundaries
for private land ownership and creating villages that could be readily
mapped (in contrast to indigenous practices of sharing knowledge mainly
through narratives and rituals) was a key part in establishing European
administrations in North America.
The westward expansion of the United States points to the political
importance of administrative activities that relied on geographic and carto-
graphic representations. By failing to require surveyors of the lands brought
under U.S. control to record existing indigenous habitation, early geo-
graphic representations rarely showed existing settlements and land use.
This geographic representation suggested that vast areas of land were vacant
and freely available.
The sharp angles of roads and agricultural land in these parts of the
United States have always been interpreted from various points of view. For
some people, they indicate the rational underpinnings of the American
economy and society. For others, the geometrical abstractions further
remove traces of indigenous communities and much of the natural attrac-
tion of the land, subordinating it to calculative economics of gridded space.
Finally, the complexity of U.S. governmental administration results in
short-term consequences being given priority over long-term. In the hierar-
chy of public administration across the 50 states, there are some 3,200 coun-
ties, further subdivided into 31,000 special departments (e.g., water, sewage,
trash collection, fire protection). This makes local government in the United