In the opening of The Power of Maps, Wood establishes mapping as a persuasive cultural practice rather than an innocent representational technique. The iconic idea is that maps do not simply show the world; they make propositions about it, organising attention, authority and belief through graphic conventions that conceal their own rhetorical operations. Its theoretical contribution lies in revealing the map as an argument embedded in signs, omissions, classifications and institutional contexts. Methodologically, the chapter works through close reading of cartographic form, exposing how legends, boundaries, titles, projections and absences manufacture the appearance of objectivity. Its conceptual operation is rhetorical cartography: spatial representation becomes a language of power whose grammar must be deciphered. The bridge to the wider field connects critical cartography, semiotics, visual studies, geography, design and epistemology.
URBANISM MEETS ART