(Specialization Master in Urban Planning's Thesis )
Cartography has played a central role in urban planning since the institutionalization of the discipline. The creation of maps, by its very nature, requires a certain degree of abstraction. This abstraction inevitably leads to a vision of a place, a representation, and not a reproduction. The endeavor to describe a territory through cartography, the manifestation of the first projective act, places the map beyond analysis. This thesis aimed to analyze the real impacts of contemporary urban cartography after studying its historical emergence.
The first representations of cities in Antiquity were not yet intended for planning purposes. However, they opened up the field of urban cartography and had an impact on representations in the centuries to come. The study of these representations has shown that advances in projections and geometric knowledge, used in city maps and plans, are not linear. It was during the Renaissance that the first detailed city plans were observed, made possible by surveying and placing cartography as an objective tool for describing a territory for the first time. The geometric advances of the Renaissance allowed urban cartography to evolve towards analytical representations of the fabric of cities in the 19th century.
The sanitary needs of the large cities of the time initiated the beginnings of social cartography, developed for hygienic purposes. They use the survey as a tool to develop so-called scientific maps, intended to be objective and quantifiable. However, analyzing this principle has allowed for the nuance of the alleged objectivity of this type of representation. Social surveys, beyond being analytical, are intrinsically projective. The series of choices made by the urban planner at the time of cartography constitutes the first projective action of a project. Maps are representations of urban space and cannot be exact reproductions of the subtleties of lived spaces. Thus, the choice of codifications for each cartography influences the reading of the space they represent. It is in order to explain this phenomenon that the thesis identified different types of maps, illustrating the variations in the perception of space generated by cartographic representations. These differences are evidence of the subjectivity inherent in this type of drawing.