Introduction

Speculative Mappings of an Invented Territory

The following represents the cumulative work for the Autumn 2023 quarter of Introduction to Critical Spatial Media, an experimental methods course in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. For the final course project, we composed sections for a collective, heterodox atlas of an invented territory we call the “3/4 Coast.”

The “3/4 Coast” comprises the watery geographies of Chicago and the Great Lakes– the so-called “Third Coast” of the United States– and their conjuncture with the Mississippi River watershed– the “Fourth Coast.” By choosing this fractional (and admittedly awkward) form, we invoke its ambivalent, contingent, and always-incomplete figuration.

This geographic character points toward what we mean by an “invented territory.” On the one hand, it is “invented” in a material and historical sense: the diversion and ultimate reversal of the Chicago river (1848-1900) conjoined the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basins, geoengineering a new, anthropogenic hydrography out of two previously disconnected watersheds.

On the other hand, the 3/4 Coast is invented insofar as we must break cartographic conventions to imagine it as a coherent (if always in-process) whole. The 3/4 Coast does not exist on any administrative map, even as its invented geographies shape landscapes and lives within and beyond its territories. Learning to see, trace, and reimagine the histories and spaces of 3/4 Coast opens us up to unexpected connections between different landscapes, objects, protagonists, and struggles.

In this sense, the 3/4 Coast is also a narrative device that allows us to tell different geographic stories than those constrained by more conventional territorial boundaries. These “geo-stories” not only require new maps, but experimental approaches to “mapping” broadly construed. Where mapping becomes an expansive mode of geographic storytelling, we must creatively and critically engage geospatial data alongside archival materials,  alternative artistic methods, and other forms of spatial media. In so doing, we seek to explore how different kinds of bodies, places, landscapes, and geographies bring new territories into view.

The following six chapters combine original text, maps, animations, and drawings with archival media to tell a distinct geo-story. Each one develops a narrative of urban, environmental, and planetary change through alternative accountings of the Anthropocene-- the geologic epoch determined by the ubiquitous impact of human activity on earth systems-- by refocusing on other forces, spaces, and agents of transformation, e.g., the legacy and logic of plantations, technology and infrastructure,  urbanization, plastics, mass extinction, and global capitalism.

Each story traces varied geographic themes and events that sketch out possible versions of what an atlas of the 3/4 Coast might look like. Each one includes media developed through lab- and studio-based exercises challenging students to experiment with what count as “maps” and practices of “mapping.”  Some geo-stories are composed in essay or booklet form, while others use interactive, web-based media to construct non-linear narrative architectures. Each one traverses the 3/4 Coast in different ways, offering a unique-- and forever partial-- perspective on this invented territory and the processes through which it remains in-formation.

   -- Alexander Arroyo, Grga Bašić, Sol Kim (Instructors)

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