Where Maps Fall Silent

I

Landscape is a point of view. Habitually paraphrasing the Italian urban planner Francesco Careri’s claim that territories have to be read as much with the feet as with the eyes, I sit and smoke beside someone who, only an hour ago, was a complete stranger, listening to the story of how this place inspired him to dream up the wildest superhero adventures, stories that his physically restricted body would never have allowed him to live out.1 We are on the banks of the river Llobregat, somewhere in what locals call the “deepest inland” area of Catalonia, the adjective merging remoteness with what I feel is a slightly smirking pride in being overlooked. As a geographer, I am there striving to identify locals’ favorite places that are deemed too trivial to show up in spatial planning considerations. The river moves past us with a slow, indifferent weight, not picturesque or authentic enough to attract tourists; not degraded enough to arouse public concern. It is simply there.

After the long walk through the overheated mid-summer afternoon, I see to the right a deteriorated industrial complex dating from the early 1920s: grayish brick, concrete, broken windows; an early modernist attempt to create the new world order by following the orthodox rules of geometry and order. Some voluminous white flowers punctuate the transition from the compound to the muddy water. The Llobregat once channeled into turbines, the main driver of Catalonia’s ascent to becoming the most industrialized and wealthiest regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Now the same water, reduced by drought to a greenish, hesitant flow, carries other uses. A group of young boys has turned the nearby bridge into a temporary diving platform. They take turns jumping into the river, contradicting the silent heat and the indifferent river. Their giggles, lighter than the air, add another layer to the sedimented histories around them.

I wonder how these boys conceive the surrounding landscape: as a post-industrial legacy, an ecosystem, a greenfield site to be developed, or simply a vast playground? To them, it might unfold as the forests beside my house once did for me: a magic wonderland, bravely entered with a friend, brimming with enchantment and secretly transported chocolate. Years later, revisiting that same wood, I found only a well-maintained timber stand, calibrated for the fuel needs of the average rural household of 3.5 inhabitants and featuring a decent level of biodiversity common for the northern latitude. I had “grown up,” my disenchanted gaze focusing only the forest’s blunt utility and ecosystem value. Yet in moments of absentminded drifting on my forest walk, those old emotions, past electric laughter and attachments, flickered back, elusive as shadows. 

Landscapes materialize emotions, memories, and attachments. They are maps of how societies bind themselves to their surroundings. But these affective threads strain against the economic forces that orchestrate today’s territories. Capitalism does not merely structure (and destroy) relations between people; it etches enduring marks into the earth itself: green growth urbanism, agro-industrial sprawl, relentless land grabs, and the quiet erasure of more-than-human life histories. Far from timeless or placeless, global capitalism has rendered twenty-first-century spaces and perspectives ever more flattened and tamed by market logic, where places like this riverbank stand out like a stubborn weed.  

II

A couple of hours later, the sun has set, and I find myself in a poorly lit, multi-purpose room in the municipality, at the end of another long day of planning. We—the local administrative staff, the mayor, the spatial planner, and myself—are speaking about how these beloved places I’ve been identifying on numerous walks and talks with locals could influence and eventually shift prevailing planning paradigms. These are places that matter deeply to people, but are irrelevant to economic objectives. The urban planner, her gaze as weary as mine, gestures to the different categories on the map (residential, commercial, public space) that the municipality uses to determine its spatial plan for the next ten years. I have to squint, my eyes tired after glaring at the sun and the riverbank’s overfilled landscape all day. I am trying to see which of the contrasting, color-coded zoning polygons could best contain the man’s superhero daydreams. 

Contemporary spatial planning follows a deeply obedient rhythm of established practices that have turned into numbed routines. Path dependencies dominate every regulation and zoning code, clinging like ivy to every small pocket of possible agency, not because they are better but because they were here before. Meanwhile, the river and her stories move seemingly unconcerned along these durable, engineered courses traversing industrial or energy plants, wastelands, and endless wheat or maize fields. 

However, each of the small colored polygons on the map before my weary eyes is defined by its boundaries—where one shape ends, another begins. The map delineates the territory under municipal jurisdiction, its dense interior filled with functions that maintain the routines of our economic order: built environments, roads, commercial infrastructures, and spaces of recreation. Yet not all spaces on the map experience the same economic relevance. Towards the municipality’s built-up margins, the tightly packed polygons begin to loosen, dissolving into broad and vaguely defined patches of “other uses”: green-shaded, non-specific areas interrupted only by the blue line of the river as it meanders through the landscape. It is in these loosely defined zones on the map that something else begins to take shape, both in lived space and in cognitive and political imaginations. The flowers by the river, the boys leaping from the bridge, the man who dreamed of flying: none of them have engaged in any rent-extracting activity within this landscape in which no real estate agent has shown any interest.

III

In rural municipalities, discussions about the planning and development of landscapes is rarely neutral. It arrives as economic pressure—to attract investment, increase tourism, expand renewable energy projects, intensify agricultural productivity, or simply make space economically “viable.” Even here, in this remote municipality by the river in Catalonia, the future is expected to show up through growth, functionality, and spatial optimization. Yet even institutional understandings of landscapes suggest something broader than functional land use. The Council of Europe’s European Landscape Convention (2000), for instance, defines landscape as “an area, as perceived by people,” reframing Francesco Careri’s poetic invitation to walk and see from one’s own position into the bureaucratic language of governance.2 In this regard, walking remains a fundamental form of knowing what planning on the grid cannot decipher. As Careri reminds us, to walk is to think with the body: to search, wander, and realign one’s coordinates with the place itself.3  

I pace back and forth across the municipal room, struggling to keep up with my own thoughts while hastily explaining how being in the landscape unsettles the monofunctional and one-dimensional logic of the planning grid. The sand my shoes have gathered throughout the day accompanies my explanations with a faint grinding sound—not unpleasant, merely out of place. 

For much of modern planning, development has meant distance: distance from the untamed, the irrational, the sensual. To develop was to discipline uncertainty, to organize space into geometric order rather than patchwork relations; to render territories legible, manageable, and productive. Walking unsettles this distance. It returns the body to landscapes that exceed the categories through which planning attempts to contain them. Unstructured walks through unstructured spaces return us, however briefly, to forms of relation from which modernity’s gridded order has detached us. Perception becomes practice: walking, listening, lingering, until the map begins to blur and the place begins to speak.

When the map starts to soften, the riverbank, the old ruins, the encroached forest, and the overgrown agricultural terraces become something other than marginal land. It is where the dreamers, the morning flâneurs, and the children sustain non‑commodified relations with their surroundings. In spite of the unexamined faith in planning offices that space can be rationally determined by a happy few for the lives of many others, interactions such as these persist thanks to the unspoken indifference and disinterest of the municipality in what happens at these places. The urban‑style antifascist graffiti scrawled across the sun‑bleached concrete of the riverbed are neither planned, nor legal; neither are the self-constructed wooden planks we were sitting on that afternoon. Barely registered in the eyes of authorities, they mean so much to the lives of its young visitors who gather here to argue about pop songs and the meaning of life. A long time from now, those same people might pass by and smile back at these memories, trying to explain the place to their grandchildren. These places hold together the tangible and non-tangible elements of everyday attachments across generations.

The question, then, is not whether these spaces are meaningful, but how planning can recognize and protect that meaning without flattening it into yet another category of managed space. Perhaps this can be done not through more intensive planning, but selective restraint: municipalities choosing not to organize and order every marginal patch, but to allow certain spaces to remain loosely defined, accessible, and open to unplanned forms of use. Municipalities could prolong these little informal shared spaces by halting their conversion into built environments or sites of resource extraction. This would allow place to emerge not as a product of deliberate design, but as the result of an accidental interplay between given conditions and pragmatic creativity. What often results is an economy, one that does not accumulate, but circulates—laughter, stories, smoke, patchworks of graffiti, improvised infrastructures that refuse to show up on a balance sheet. 

The task for rural planners, perhaps, is to let these little patches of land push back against the perspective that renders them “underused” in the language of real estate investment. What appears vacant from the standpoint of productivity is rarely empty. The absence of formal function creates room for other forms of attachment, experimentation, and life—riskier perhaps, but no less valuable for that.

IV

The urban planner has listened patiently to my slightly erratic musings on intentional land abandonment. She concedes that these messy, singular experiences unfolding at the edges are valuable, even moving—but her concern lies elsewhere. The grid is what she has to work with. I argue that self-organizing forms emerge precisely where management recedes, that these spaces are not empty but filled by other kinds of order. She meets me with the tired gaze of someone who has heard this before, many times over. From within the institution, the storyline appears far less open-ended.

Municipal governance, she insists, has other options than simply stepping back. It can intervene, carefully, to redirect entrenched development trajectories. Not by abandoning planning, but by reworking its terms: steering space away from monetary valuation and toward shared forms of use and responsibility. This would mean easing the hold of capital over land while placing greater trust in the capacity of communities to organize themselves.

In practice, keeping landscapes democratic and non-commodified is decidedly unheroic and unfolds in a far less prosaic manner than I had suggested. It entails the municipality funding the local hiking association that keeps trails open, legible, and accessible for all; supporting the self-organized cultural center that hosts theater, reading groups, and a small distillery; sustaining the annual town celebration, where people briefly step out of their routines and back into each other’s lives. It is the participatory budget that draws residents into the upkeep of public space, making them livable, not through obligation, but through attachment.

Working within the constraints and possibilities of regulations, the planner looks for small openings. Based on environmental regulations, she negotiates with private forest owners to remove fences, allowing both wildlife and people to move more freely. She persuades farmers to delay their harvests so pollinators can linger longer in the fields. She pushes (so far unsuccessfully) for streets to remain unpaved, reducing soil sealing and the risk of flooding. None of this escapes the grid entirely, but bends it toward other forms of living on this planet. For her, landscapes are an intrinsic political project, and spatial planning is a tool to negotiate the multiple voices that shape them.

The meeting dissolves without ceremony. Chairs scrape, papers are gathered, the fluorescent light lingers a little too long. I step outside and begin my walk home, the air cooler now, the sharp chirping of bats cutting through the evening sky. I linger with what the evening has taught me. The municipality is anchored in the territory—knowing, known, and knowledgeable. Because it falls beneath the radar of dominant economic attention, they can begin to recalibrate the larger imperatives that shape contemporary planning.

For decades, prosperity concentrated in cities while many rural municipalities became places that were treated as if they no longer mattered in the dominant economic imaginaries. Measured against urban ideals of expansion and competitiveness, they increasingly appeared as redundant annexes to the “real” centers of economic life. Yet this perceived failure also reveals the limits of a model that equated development with growth, mobility, and distance from the so-called untamed. Perhaps rural municipalities, so often dismissed as lagging behind, can help cultivate a planning paradigm oriented around other needs: the need to rest, to play, to dream, and not merely to extract ever-increasing value from every parcel of land.

Such a shift begins with a reorientation—of mind first, and then of politics and space. To see landscapes differently is to spend time with others in and across them: walking, listening, lingering, and searching for ways to render their meanings intelligible to those who plan and govern them. It means learning to work with what is already there, to build from existing relations rather than against them, and to leave room for forms of life that fall out of mono-functional categorization. What allows these spaces to flourish is a balance between neglect and support: enough distance to avoid enclosure; enough municipal care to keep them accessible. If planning is to loosen its attachment to the paradigms of progress and development that have long defined it, it might begin not by speaking over these places, but by learning to listen where maps fall silent.