Nonstop Metropolis Quotes

“As Joshua Jelly-Schapiro said one day, every map is a story, and by implication every story contains a map. I loved maps for a long time, but it wasn’t until I made them and put them out in the world that I discovered how not alone I was. People love maps. There is a special incandescent joy to how they respond to a good map that is different from the way I’ve seen people to respond to any other art form. They light up. They get greedily engrossed. They start tracing possibilities, thinking, interpreting, measuring: maps demand work, and this kind of cerebral work can be exhilarating. By a good map I mean an aesthetic one, a map that is an invitation to the imagination, a map that offers a fresh view of the familiar or an introduction to the unfamiliar or finds the latter in the former. If every map is a story, most of them are mysteries that invite you to solve them while remaining forever unresolved, in that they indicate more - more past, more future, more adventure, more travelers. They have an openness, indicating more than they depict.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas