In 2016, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched a visual campaign about its disputed borders. A poster, entitled “Do you know the shape of Japan?” [日本のカタチ知っていますか], highlights three points of tension—the Northern Territories, Takeshima, and Senkaku Islands, disputed with Russia, Korea, and China respectively.

The following photographs and video-stills take origin from map encounters. They are caught in public spaces or during moments of domestic life.

This constitutes Brenner’s “inside out” approach, which, in part, is his attempt to invalidate the notion of “urban age” and claims like “50 per cent threshold of world population now living in cities” as a starting point for urban study. The investigation of what stands outside cities and of their processes, he thinks, proves to be far more relevant to comprehending the global urban than a demographic threshold that threatens to hide radically different local situations. 

The transformation of GIS into GIScience was a de-reifying move in a succession of moves that have gradually brought geospatial tools and technologies into realms of scholarly reputability. It is now no longer a knee-jerk reaction to assume that the use of GIS as part of scientific, cultural, political, or economic inquiry must be part of a positivistic conspiracy to colonise (and ultimately degrade or destroy) geographic inquiry once and for all.

The map hides the interdependence of regions and countries in many domains, and the ways in which the “developed” and the “developing” world interact with and affect each other. The stigmatization of certain countries suggests that the problem at hand has only “national roots,” narrowing the debate towards “national solutions” in the form of development.