Measure, Control and Project: The Urban Mapping of the Enlightenments as a New Field of Knowledge

Abstract

In the mid-eighteenth century the confluence of Enlightenment scientism and modernizing demands of the States gave rise to a radical turn in the cartographic representation of territories and cities. An "intelligentsia" composed by scientists, engineers, geographers, surveyors, etc. produced in less than fifty years many examples of this new way of looking at the world that embodied perfectly the Kantian "Sapere Aude!" This article attempts to outline, through the analysis of some paradigmatic cases, the nature of Enlightenment urban maps as a product of the requirement of a certain knowledge of the environment physiognomy, and as the cartographic expression of the ideas of "progress, public happiness, and wealth of the nation", as well as the utopic face of Enlightenment thinking.