2015 to 2215 c.e.
A blog and home for writing, art, collaboration and conversation on time and our physical and cultural environment.
Future Cartographic began with a series of projects I undertook beginning in 2015 that imagined hyperlocal neighborhood utopias of the year 2215.
These projects involved walks, conversations, maps, writing and art exploring how history and ideology is handed down to us through the language of architecture, urban planning, and landscape — ideas that we absorb involuntarily by living wherever we live.
While many of these explorations took place on the road, in a handful of communities across North America, this work primarily focused on the neighborhoods of Washington, DC where I have been based since 2007. These are neighborhoods shaped by colonization, war, slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, environmental destruction, cultural erasure and exploitative redevelopment. In imagining utopian futures for such a place, we asked what kind of spaces and landscapes would embody a hopeful life for those who will live in our neighborhoods two centuries from now. And what do we need to do today to make that future possible?
These themes of time, urbanism, landscape, maps and exploration are continuing subjects of Future Cartographic’s writing and exploration.
Erik Moe 