On the Danger of GIS: Nature is Not a Layered System

On an architectural scale, thinking may still be able to operate in terms of discrete objects, independent elements, and segregated components to be deployed, assembled, and manipulated. 

However, this is never true on a city or natural environment scale, wherein every nameable thing relies heavily on its surrounding context. The establishing and transformation of roads, squares, parks, and all infrastructure are all evolving in regards to one another. Neither of them can make sense without others and be independent of the surrounding topography as a whole. A city cannot be conceived as a system. The "element" in it is always a figure that depends on the ground—it is REPRESENTED by the agency of human beings. 

In this sense, the use of GIS contains a supreme danger. While using it as a practical tool, one should always be mindful that GIS can not grasp nature's entirety, and nature is never EQUAL to the ensemble of layered data. 

Merleau-Ponty, in his course notes prepared on the subject of nature, blamed this as the Enlightenment idea of nature, which takes "Nature as the Idea of an Entirely Exterior Being, Made of Exterior Parts, Exterior to Man, and to Itself, as a Pure Object."