Food, water, shelter. The tripartite of basic needs. Without these no living thing can survive. Not a spider, not a badger, not a tree, not a human. The first two — food and water — are obvious; without them, sustenance is impossible. The food we eat gives us energy through calories, vitamins, minerals, protein, fats, and carbohydrates. Water regulates our body temperature, cushions our joints, protects our spinal cord and muscles and cleanses our body. Food builds our bodies and water maintains them.
And shelter protects. Shelter buffers us from harsh elements — high heat, extreme cold, rain, snow, and wind. Shelter is also a home. A place to feel safe and to be safe.
One can live a few days without water and a few weeks without food. But how long can one live without shelter? Not as long as you might think. In fact, in an extreme environment like a frozen mountain top, one can only live for about three hours without shelter, rendering food and water useless.
It is not just the comfort of a rigid structure that allows some people to live longer than those that don’t have shelter. The unhoused have lower life expectancy, in part, because the stress, isolation, loss of dignity, and inadequate health care that comes with being unhoused and unsheltered can bring on physical and mental health issues that might never have developed if the person had been sheltered. Or, they develop the health issues they were destined for, but about twenty years earlier because those without shelter age faster in a phenomenon known as weathering — literally being worn down by weather. Not having access to adequate health care, these people succumb to diseases they might have managed or cured if they had a home.
Human shelter in its most basic form — a home — sustains life just like food and water do.
Community as shelter
When Guerrilla Cartography crowdsources an atlas, there is only ever a one-word prompt. Food. Water. Migration. Community. This is because we want our collaborators to have the freedom of thought to imagine the prompt as broadly and loosely as possible. Food gave us maps as diverse as A Tomato’s European Tour and Threats to Indigenous Food Traditions in North America. Water gave us maps about Managing Shared Waters in the Nile Basin and Locating Atlantis.
Shelter, of course, inspired maps about housing and the lack of housing, as well as pandemic sheltering in place. But it also brought us maps about tax shelters, emotional shelters, and an imaginary map: The Rhizosphere, a shelter for microorganisms.
With the shelter atlas in process since the summer of 2019, Guerrilla Cartography devised the scheme of building an atlas in just one day. We had proved — with Food: An Atlas — that we could build an atlas in a few months. The food atlas went from idea to a printed volume in about seven months. We had similar aspirations for the water atlas but it ended up taking much longer because of the sudden death of my husband. We aimed to get back on the fast track of atlas production with shelter. And we were. Until the pandemic.
On October 5, 2019, the subject of the first Atlas in a Day project — migration, broadly defined — was announced via live stream at 9 pm PDT, Friday night. The following day, some 35 collaborators met at Oakstop in Downtown Oakland, California, and began sharing ideas and working on maps. We had guest speakers and shared a meal and we collaborated. Another 28 challenge participants worked on their maps remotely, representing nineteen other locations in four nations. Creating on computers, paper, and boards; using ones and zeros, crayons, watercolors, embroidery thread, and other media; the challenge collaborators submitted 43 maps by the 7:30 pm map deadline with subjects like Patterns of Involuntary Migration and Migration of the Word ‘Honey.’ A single electronic file was compiled and one rough print on a scrappy printer was attempted by 9 pm, fulfilling the challenge.
All of our atlases (like all maps and atlases) show us a picture or story of the time they were created. The shelter atlas came along, ironically and coincidently, at a time when shelter was top of mind for everyone on the planet as we sheltered against an invisible pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The Guerrilla Cartography board decided on the theme of shelter in the summer of 2019 and announced the call for maps in February of 2020, about three weeks before it became clear that everyone should take shelter against the virus by staying home — from school, from work, from every activity that usually had us moving about in the world.
During the first weeks of the pandemic lockdown and with a proof of concept for Atlas in a Day published, plus Shelter in the works, we decided to create another Atlas in a Day event to help us (and the whole Guerrilla Cartography community) deal with the social and professional isolation that was sinking into our collective psyche. By necessity, this would be a wholly virtual event. We settled on a theme — community — and set to work creating a program. We had speakers from New Zealand, Germany, England, Argentina, Massachusetts, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Washington State, Berkeley, and Oakland. Hosted from our homes (for me, the makeshift workstation in my bedroom), we built community across the virtual divide. Together apart, from twelve nations and nine U.S. states, we created 44 maps, including: My Parallel Communities of Chiang Mai, Viral Creativity: COVID-19 Murals on Seattle Storefronts, and Fishing Communities of the Tonlé Sap are Under Threat.
Shelter: An Atlas is is currently in press and will soon be available for distribution and free download. In this volume, Guerrilla Cartography expands a community of cartographers, researchers, and designers, expands the community of map readers and knowledge seekers, explorers of ideas. All fulfilling Guerrilla Cartography’s founding ideal that a “new paradigm for cooperative and collaborative knowledge caching and sharing could have a transformative effect on the awareness and dissemination of spatial information.”
Our collaborators share their geographic knowledge, talents, and inspirations; through their maps they shed light on the inequalities inherent in definitions of race, gender, economics, habitat, environment, and climate. These maps describe experiences and phenomena of privilege or lack of privilege. Shelter, in whatever context, is an attribute of privilege. Together, we share these maps in the spirit of community, that all may find shelter.
