Tooling up for Complexity - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 15

Urban planning maps also illustrate the emergence of a
new type of governance based on the mix between
quantification and space management. According to Kain
and Baigent [KAI 93], town planning maps have long been
optional as their functions were filled by other objects in
many societies. The absence of this type of map cannot be
explained by a lack of skills either - as they were already
used in some States as early as the 1st Century AD . Kain and
Baigent claim that the rise of urban planning maps can
instead be explained by a desire to centralize the various
administrative structures of the State.
1.2.4. Maps and doctors
In addition to urban planning, medicine is another sector
where the role of thematic maps as a tool for scientific
analysis can be observed. Michel Foucault describes the
passage to modern medicine as the new status given to the
gaze:
The eye becomes the receptacle and source of light;
it has the power to bring to light a truth it only
receives as long as it gives birth to it. By opening
up, it gives the truth from a first aperture; a
bending which marks from the world of the
ancient light, the passage to the “Enlightenment”
in the 19th century. [FOU 03, p.IX]
From that point onward, modern medicine encourages
opening bodies to find the causes of diseases and to abandon
old metaphors and systems of thought. Whereas statistics is
the tool to analyze the social body, the gaze becomes the tool
to analyze the human body: from the 19th Century, modern
medicine uses both.
Gilles Palsky reminds us that the choice of maps to study
a given disease is a medical standpoint. The followers of the
contagion theory for instance will use maps that trace