Making sense: Geographic information technologies, planning, and strategic action

This dissertation examines Geographic Information Technologies (remote sensing satellites, GPS, and GIS), and their involvement in the social practices of planning and acting in the world. It looks at these technologies within the context of the practices of sociotechnical ordering, that is, capturing the world in databases and re-presenting it. As social beings, humans require a shared order (i.e. shared categories of knowledge and action) so that they may communicate with one another and act in concert. There is an inherent contradiction, however, between the Enlightenment dream of universal knowledge (i.e. complete order), and the defiant tendencies of people to seek autonomy and the natural world to stray out of its socially assigned categories.; The dissertation seeks to open up geographic information practices to critical scrutiny. Geographic Information Technologies (GITs) are powerful tools of ordering because they enable the production of objective, factual images; which naturalize social categories and hide the evidence of the (often arbitrary) social decisions that went into their creation. Chapter One examines these technologies from the perspective of people who see their use as unproblematic. From the optimistic perspective of users and vendors, these technologies are simply an objective way of getting at the world. I argue that GITs are in fact a tool that allows the world (populations, landscapes, spaces) to be prepared for strategic action. GITs, just sitting there, thus have a point of view. Chapter Two takes an in-depth look at GIS at work in a city planning office. In this chapter I examine the material practices of “making sense,” and the myriad social decisions that go into the creation of ‘objective’ GIS maps. Chapter Three looks at GIS and natural resource management. It explores the contradictions between the heterogeneous social and natural worlds and their translation into geographic information. The Conclusion, problematizes the use of these technologies—not as a way of arguing that we get rid of GITs, but rather to argue that there are dangers in relying too heavily on these technologies, which often stand in direct contradiction to the fluidity (and autonomy) of the social and natural worlds.