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It is not mandatory to have a map in order to use the Navigation Stack (move_base).
If your configuration files in YAML format use pre-Hydro parameters (as many examples do) make sure you have set the following:

   global_costmap:
       # Static map vs. rolling window is basically whether to feed the costmap with a map 
       # (and have a fixed origin) or a small rolling window centered on the robot

       # determines whether or not to load an existent map provided by the map_server
       static_map: false

       # set to true to effectively remove the need for an a priori map
       rolling_window: true

If your configuration files define Hydro+ features such as layered costmaps you should define empty plugins to not load any map from the map server:

global_costmap:
     plugins: []

In this case you can remove the static_map parameter as it has been deprecated.