ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to the period in which ‘cartographic reasoning’ became dominant in Western thinking and Western understandings of the urban – viz. the Renaissance period. With the term ‘cartographic reasoning’, we refer to a mode of understanding and acting in the world which relies on reason in much the same way that we rely on maps to study the physical world. Cartographic reasoning presupposes a hierarchy of thought in which the intellect is contrasted to the senses, the mind to the body and consequently thinking (and later design) to making and producing. Alternative visions are mostly in line with Actor-Network Theory and new materialism and assemblage approaches to urban planning, which call for a perspective in which sociality and materiality and knowing and making are not seen as separate, but rather as produced jointly. Building on that, our chapter advocates conceiving urban planning as a craft. While craftsmen have always had a role in city-building, both the conception of the city and the conception of craftsmanship were fundamentally contingent on the emergence of cartographic reasoning. Our aim is to shed light on these processes by looking at both craftsmen and cities as bodies, thus presenting a conceptual and historical retrieval of the craftsmen's views.
