
Contents
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Grids in World War II: Borderless Territory, Shifting Scale Grids in World War II: Borderless Territory, Shifting Scale
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Designing the Universal Transverse Mercator System: The Soldier’s New Regional Horizon Designing the Universal Transverse Mercator System: The Soldier’s New Regional Horizon
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Installing UTM: A New Relationship Between Coordinates and Territory Installing UTM: A New Relationship Between Coordinates and Territory
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Step 1: Europe Step 1: Europe
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Step 2: Asia, Africa, and Latin America Step 2: Asia, Africa, and Latin America
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Step 3: The World Step 3: The World
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UTM Since 1960: Civilianization and Universalism UTM Since 1960: Civilianization and Universalism
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Conclusion: Grids and Global Space Conclusion: Grids and Global Space
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Four Territoriality without Borders: Global Grids and the Universal Transverse Mercator, 1940–1965
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Published:May 2016
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Abstract
Just after World War II, the US Army created a single global grid system that was meant to overlay the patchwork of local and national grids discussed in the previous chapter. This system – the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) – gave every point on earth an easy-to-use coordinate, measured in meters, that could replace latitude and longitude for nearly all tasks. It was quickly adopted for US and NATO military operations, and then its creators – specialists in geodesy at the US Army Map Service – pushed it aggressively as an international solution. By the end of the Cold War, UTM was in use in most non-Communist countries, while the Soviet bloc was unified by its own, very similar, counterpart. This chapter argues that UTM succeeded in creating a transnational space that was practical and consequential in ways that representational mapping projects like the International Map could never be. It was a cartographic technology, but the subjectivity it created was an embedded one, and its larger politics were more about on-the-ground coordination and intervention than the collection of knowledge at a central mapping archive.
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