Carbon + Carbide #2

Carbon + Carbide #2
By Lisa Cassidy
hipped.net
Quarter sized.

“This is interesting” I thought, reading what I thought was the introduction, “but when is the narrative or real content going to kick in?”

Then I realized that the whole zine was going to be random musings on cities and maps, with brief glances into Cassidy's life. There wasn’t going to be any narrative flow, just a thematic one.

Not that this is a bad thing, I love cities and maps. They play a part in several of my zines, and I even made a guide to Vancouver, Canada that was a huge map of things to do and places to go.

Despite this, I’d never realized that while many maps are about showing boundaries and borders, city maps are about showing “passages and routes between”. For whatever reason, that idea kind of blew my mind. Seeing a map as the roads and paths instead of buildings makes a lot of sense considering we’re more likely to walk or drive along one of those then go into any of the buildings that appear. A map reduced solely to the places you go into would be mostly empty.

Carbon + Carbide isn’t a zine about places, it is about the journeys between places. About getting from point a to point b, whether by bus, bicycle, or foot. About how maps affect our view of a place before we have even seen it.

Now I want to make more maps.