...the grid is a spatial apparatus that consolidates appropriation and subdivision into a permanent system through which many sedentary societies impose their order on the land. Yet the grid also translates appropriation and subdivision into the abstraction of measurement, through which land becomes a quantifiable item. As a social force, abstraction is therefore the mechanism that transforms the grid from an order first traced on the ground to an apparatus whose ordering impact invests in and orients the totality of human relationships.