Remapping entails a reexamination of the assumptions underpinning the political and economic regime embodied in the original map.
_R.A. Clapp, Simon Fraser University
The cover of this issue of unlimited remaps the world to more accurately reflect how we see it. With this map we suggest the new ways we are connected; rethink old connections; and draw new ones. It is meant to convey our new world in a way that approximates the modern trajectories of economics, energy, and finance; and that encompasses new forms of personal mobility in terms of human resources and travel. The transit lines indicate the interdependency that is embedded in globalization. Each country and city are little more than a subway stop away from one another. It is possible to play poker with someone from Ghana, Sweden, California and Regina, all at once. You’ve seen the commercials, you know.
More germane to our mandate, the transit lines also represent the reach and capacity of business across borders, time zones and oceans. The sizes of the countries on the maps, as well as their borders, are malleable and overlapping. They are made to grow and shrink with facility. This is the new reality of the world: where countries and economies grow up and shrink down all the time; where no terra is that firma. Many people in the first world born between 1980 and 2000 have never experienced an economic climate other than prosperity. As the world adjusts to its new economic realities, the transit lines are also reminders that if a country, or a station along the lines, should fall into crisis or disrepair, then that affects all the other stations and countries on the line. Borders are negligible, and negotiable. There are no more stand-alone countries. Except, perhaps, one.
On our cover map, America is an island. This change is made in the light of economic geographer R.A. Clapp’s other assertion: “remapping is the moment in which entrenched power and interests are most likely to be dislodged.” Let’s be clear, though. We are not anti-American. But in the new world we have observed, and then constructed, America has made itself an island. An island whose mass has been shrunken, some what, by the harsh new economic, political and social crises that our closest neighbour faces. We do not believe our map anticipates the dislodging of America from the rest of the world, we believe it reflects what has already happened. But the new world, and those who brave it, would be a far better place if the United States set about reattaching itself to the rest. U
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