This book began life with the worki

This book began life with the working title of mapping and social theory as one in a frontiers in human geography series with the express intent of synthesizing for students and general readers the rapidly emerging role being played by social theories of one kind or another in reshaping and revisioning thematic areas of geographical thought and practice (see Agnew 1998). The book still does this, but it has also mutated, as social theory itself has, into a much more immanent reading of the practices and ideas of spatial thought, mapping and map-making. Throughout, I have drawn on a wide range of social theorists and theorists of maps and cartography in an effort to flesh out some of the many ways in which we can think of the ways in which cartographic reason has coded our world.
The title of book captures precisely its content.'A History of Spaces' refers to michel foucault's(1986) suggestion that 'a whole history of spaces has still to be written'. I have not attempted to write a whole history of spaces or a comprehensive genealogy of maps and mapping.Such a task is beyond the reach of a single book or author. The history of maps and mapping itself is a massive topic, as the ambitious history of cartography project-now in six volumes in twelve books with about 7,000,000 words-amply demonstrates. Instead I have tried to write a history of spaces. I take my starting point with social theories from Heidegger to Adorno and my starting point with social theories from Heidegger to Adorno and beyond by putting in question all representational epistemologies and logics. In this task, 'mapping' is my central concern . I draw on maps and mapping as my point of entry into a consideration of the ways in which 'Cartographic Reason' can-as Gunnar Olsson, Franco Farinelli and Tom Conley have variously suggested - be seen as the missing element in social theories of moderinty. In using 'the Over-Coded Word' I explicitly associate my reading of the role of mapping in shaping social, spatial and natural identities with Althusserian notions of overdetermination, Gibson-Graham's argument against essentialism, and a Deleuzian and Guattarian project of immanent materialism. The book point, above all, to the ways in which our lives have been and are being shaped and constituted throgh myriads of intersecting and overlapping mapping in use every day. Over-coding thus point to the ways in which the formation of identities can be seen, in part, as a kind of spatialized historical process of mapping occurring at many scales simultaneously. In this sense the book takes up Henri Lefebvre's (1991:85) question: 'How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents?'. He answers:'It is doubtful whether a finite number can ever be given to this sort of question.' These multiple and overlapping inscriptions are also spaces of slippage in the process of identity creation, signalling possibilities for other readings and practces of mapping. The book concludes with these slippages and the opportunities for rereading maps and mapping they seem to provide.