In May, as part of his campaign to annex Canada, President Donald Trump called the border with his neighbour an artificial line that had been drawn with a ruler “right across the top of the country”. He suggested that the map of North America would look more beautiful without it.
Historians pointed out that the border reflected a complex history and an everyday reality for millions, but they also admitted that Trump wasn’t entirely wrong. Much of the border does follow a straight line – the 49th parallel – and the Americans and Britons who drew it up knew almost nothing about local geography.
Trump’s gambit drew attention to the fact that the maps most of us grew up with convey a deceptively tidy view of the world – one parcelled into homogeneous blocks that admits no challenge to its objectivity, omniscience or truth.
Historian William Rankin of Yale University traces this view back to 18th-century British cartographers who produced “jigsaw-puzzle maps” as teaching aids for children of the aristocracy. These maps, which represented countries with clear-cut frontiers and doubled as the first jigsaw puzzles, remained a fixture of education for more than a century. They still shape our thinking today: what started out as a geography lesson evolved into a way of depicting variability in indicators such as life expectancy or GDP per capita, with each country-block represented by a single number. “I think that does real damage, not just to how we understand those countries, but to how we understand inequality,” says Rankin.
Some are now calling for a mapping revolution. Last year, political geographer Henk van Houtum of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, issued a call to “Free the Map”. He wants to replace the state-centric mindset with one that emphasises mobility and human connections. Or as he puts it, to swap Atlas, buckling under the weighty globe, for his grandson Hermes – he of the winged sandals, messenger between worlds.
Van Houtum is an expert on European border policy and migration, which is routinely depicted on maps by swooping arrows that suggest invasion (for those old enough, think the Dad’s Army’s opening sequence). “The faceless, massive arrow is primarily the perspective of the state,” he writes. “It emphasises the imagined homogeneity of the nation and the exceptionality of the border crossing of non-natives.” In response to his and others’ critiques, Frontex, Europe’s border and coastguard agency, has replaced the menacing arrows on its migratory maps with less alarmist – though still non-neutral – circles of varying sizes, and legions of schoolteachers have promised to change the visual narrative in their classrooms.
For his part, Rankin wants cartography to embrace a new set of values. Both the collection and visualisation of data are flawed human enterprises that require interpretation, he says. Rather than aspire to neutrality, objectivity and sharp distinctions, map‑makers should embrace uncertainty, subjectivity and multiplicity. His book, Radical Cartography, is filled with maps that challenge the dominant narrative. One depicts European and American exploration over 500 years from the early 1400s, not in terms of where the explorers planted their flags, but the places they reached that had never previously been inhabited. These amounted to “several dozen islands and a huge amount of ice”.
That’s informative both about how much of the globe humans had already settled by the middle ages, and about the genuine discovery that happened after that. It contrasts with an 18th-century map of North America currently on display in the British Library’s Secret Maps exhibition, which shows indigenous lands as blank spaces, “to provide an impression that they were unoccupied and available for acquisition”, says Tom Harper, the library’s lead curator of antiquarian maps.
In the 1980s, the pavement dwellers of Mumbai, India, staved off eviction by mapping themselves. Civil rights activists in the US had been doing the same for a while, to highlight inequality, and this kind of “countermapping” became a favoured tool of indigenous or marginalised peoples for making themselves seen by those in power. It is a huge and ongoing task. By the 1990s, when Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, had been a significant slum for well over half a century, it still showed up on official maps as forest.
New knowledge makes new cartographic demands. When The Lancet published a map of global hotspots for emerging infectious diseases in 2012, some criticised it for pointing the finger at poorer regions while shielding the conglomerates whose investments were driving new patterns of land use in those regions, and reshaping disease ecologies in the process. Follow the money, the critics said, and you’ll locate the real disease hotspots – in London, New York and Hong Kong.
Technical wizardry is constantly expanding the possibilities for visualising patterns in data, but Rankin and Van Houtum’s point is that the perfect map will never exist. An animation that shows how slavery evolved over time in the southern US may tell a more nuanced story than a static map, but it focuses attention on one possible end of the story – abolition – rather than on slavery’s historical scars.
Accepting that perfection is unattainable allows us to be more forgiving of imperfection, as illustrated by the case of the Mercator projection, a map of the world created by the 16th-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator as a navigational aid. Since it’s impossible to depict a sphere in two dimensions without introducing distortion, every flattened world map makes trade-offs. In Mercator’s case, it’s accurate at small scale, but at large scale the size of landmasses near the poles is exaggerated relative to those nearer the equator.
Cartographers retired Mercator a century or more ago for that reason, while others objected to its imperialist associations. But starting around 2005 it made a comeback as the standard world map used in web applications. These capitalise on its strengths, either by preventing viewers from zooming out, or by switching to a spherical view at large scale. Its flaws minimised, complemented by other visual stories, Mercator is enjoying a new lease of life.
Further reading
Free the Map by Henk van Houtum (NAI, £38.25)
Radical Cartography by William Rankin (Picador, £30)
Secret Maps by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes and Magdalena Peszko (British Library, £40)
