Maps, Memories and Manchester: The Cartographic Imagination of the Hidden Networks of the Hydraulic City

The largely unseen channelling, culverting and controlling of water into, through and out of cities is the focus of our cartographic interpretation. This paper draws on empirical material depicting hydraulic infrastructure underlying the growth of Manchester in mapped form. Focusing, in particular, on the 19th century burst of large-scale hydraulic engineering, which supplied vastly increased amounts of clean drinking water, controlled unruly rivers to eliminate flooding, and safely removed sewage, this paper explores the contribution of mapping to the making of a more sanitary city, and towards bold civic minded urban intervention. These extensive infrastructures planned and engineered during Victorian and Edwardian Manchester are now taken-for-granted but remain essential for urban life. The maps, plans and diagrams of hydraulic Manchester fixed particular forms of elite knowledge (around planning foresight, topographical precision, civil engineering and sanitary science) but also facilitated and freed flows of water throughout the city. The survival of these maps and plans in libraries, technical books and obscure reports allows the changing cultural work of water to be explored and evokes a range of socially specific memories of a hidden city. Our aetiology of hydraulic cartographics is conducted using ideas from science and technology studies, semiology, and critical cartography with the goal of revealing how they work as virtual witnesses to an 1 unseen city, dramatizing engineering prowess and envisioning complex and messy materiality into a logical, holistic and fluid network underpinning the urban machine. 1

Feminist geographies of digital work

Feminist thought challenges essentialist and normative categorizations of ‘work’. Therefore, feminism provides a critical lens on ‘working space’ as a theoretical and empirical focus for digital geographies. Digital technologies extend and intensify working activity, rendering the boundaries of the workplace emergent. Such emergence heightens the ambivalence of working experience: the possibilities for affirmation and/or negation through work. A digital geography is put forward through feminist theorizations of the ambivalence of intimacy. The emergent properties of working with digital technologies create space through the intimacies of postwork places where bodies and machines feel the possibilities of being ‘at’ work

Drawing like a state: Maps, modernity and warfare in the art of Gert Jan Kocken

This article attends to the work of Dutch artist Gert Jan Kocken, one of the foremost arts practitioners to have drawn on geographical mapping for formal and thematic substance in recent years. Discussion focuses on his series the Depictions, in which found maps, made in pursuit of conflicting ideologies during the Second World War, are combined digitally into composite representations of cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin and Rome. Layering together hundreds of different cartographies, the artworks provide a concentrated exploration of the connections between maps, states and warfare. To grasp these connections, I read the Depictions in conjunction with Zygmunt Bauman’s conception of the modern state as a ‘gardener’ of society and space. In doing so, I highlight Kocken’s vivid demonstrations of not only the transformative potential released in state military mapping but also unevennesses and dialogic complexities with which even apparently totalising state gardening projects are fraught. My study of the Depictions builds an image of modernity as a contested garden; the article concludes by suggesting the commensurability of this vision with the social present