ABSTRACT
Research into map use has largely focused on cognitive approaches and underplayed the significance of wider contextual concerns associated with the cultures in which mapping operates. Meanwhile, cartography is being popularized and people are creating and employing their own maps instead of relying upon cartographers. Critical cartography has begun to offer new ways of understanding this cultural and social change, but research into map use has so far not engaged with this critical turn. In the 1960s and 1970s, cartographic research focused upon communication of information. The chapter shows how different insights into the nature of map use can flow from rethinking mapping, using case studies of community mapping, the mapping of golf courses, map collecting and mapping art. It concludes that networks of practice of map use depend upon relations between many different artefacts, technologies, institutions, environments, abilities, affects, and individuals.
