Mapping the Intoxicated City: The Cartographic Construction of Vice in the Nineteenth Century

Since the mid–nineteenth century, thematic maps have been widely used to map what many bourgeois authors and social reformers perceived as social ills and moral lapses. The rapidly growing cities in Europe and North America, in particular, appeared to these authors to be problematic places associated with problematic behavior and populated by problematic people. Alcohol was high on the list of these urban vices, and visual tools were frequently used to problematize and communicate those moral and social matters. This article considers the role of maps in nineteenth-century temperance movements and the social reformers and their politics toward the growing cities. Consequently, this article contributes to a critical cartography of thinking and governing alcohol in public space.