3 ideas
A single geography holds countless simultaneous places, and each one becomes visible only when you map one theme at a time: butterfly habitat, murder sites, Zen centres, queer bars. Pairing two unrelated layers on the same base map shows adjacencies and contradictions that no single 'complete' map can show. The city is best understood as a stack of partial, incompatible truths, not one authoritative picture.
A map shows what its maker chose to include, and every inclusion leaves out something else. Because completeness is impossible, a map works as an argument about what matters. That makes idiosyncratic, subjective mapping a legitimate way to know a place, not a lesser version of official cartography.
Present-day places keep traces of earlier and suppressed lives: shorelines filled in for development, displaced Ohlone and working-class communities, vanished labour struggles, pre-gentrification neighbourhoods. Mapping these erased layers onto the current street grid turns ordinary locations into palimpsests. This exposes how power decides whose history stays visible on the ground.