Human cartography: when it is good to map

In recent years quantitative geography and cartography have been devalued within human geography. This process has often been led by writers who have questioned the extent to which researchers who analyse numbers about people ignore other ways of studying society. Often examples of the 'unsympathetic' mapping of people's lives or the conspiratorial creation of particular statistical social landscapes are given as reasons to avoid quantitative research. In this paper I concentrate on some visual approaches to understanding society, in particular, the view of 'human cartography'. I argue, through a series of examples, that there is much more to mapping society than simply reinforcing an image of the status quo. There are many people involved in alternative mapping, few of whom would see themselves as geographers. Perhaps human geography should consider why mapping is now so popular, how mapping is changing, and the part geography could play in redrawing the world, before dismissing mapping as a means to understanding?