Farewell to maps. Reformulating critical cartography in the digital age.

International audienceFor decades, representations of space have been the subject of analyses that decipher their construction and their socio-spatial effects from a political point of view. Critical cartography, a research trend that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, was thus decisive in the adoption of a denaturalizing approach to maps. Today, however, the changes brought about by the digital transition have not yet been sufficiently integrated into this analytical framework. The time when maps were only approached as mediators of relations of domination seems to be over, in favor of diversified approaches that question the complex interactions between cartographic production, the forming of territories, processes of spatial visibilization/invisibilization, etc. The thesis of this chapter, however, is that the changes brought about by digital technology have disrupted the objects and questions of critical cartography to such an extent that the concepts, methods and objects to which attention is given must evolve in unison. Although, as early as the 1990s, many researchers were quick to perceive that the world they were studying was changing, political analyses of the new digital issues have remained scattered and fragmentary. Our purpose here is therefore manifold: it will be to draw up a reasoned assessment of the new conceptual and methodological challenges of digital technology for critical cartography (first section), to point out some of the historical shortcomings of the discipline that have made the analysis of the new phenomena more difficult (second section), and finally, to propose methodological aggiornamento avenues that can better account for the new ways in which power and representations of space interact today (third section). In short, we propose to reformulate critical cartography in the digital age