What’s “up” with our maps?
The politics of cartography
Because the Earth is spherical(ish), it’s almost impossible for any of our 2D maps to accurately represent the geography of our 3D planet. There exist several 2D projections of the world, each with their own set of pros and cons. The Mercator Projection, created by Gerardus Mercator in 1594, has become the most popular solution to this problem — these are the maps we display in our classrooms (1), print in our atlases, the ones we have come to know and recognize even in its abstract forms. It’s a useful representation of our world, and helps us navigate through it. The biggest advantage of the mercator projection is that its really good at telling us the relative position of things. If it shows that point A is to the left of point B, you can be certain that going from A to B you’re heading east. It’s wildly misleading, however, because it distorts geography. While it doesn’t claim, obviously, that geographies are depicted at the correct (or even the same) scale, the average viewer would never notice the spacing out of the latitudes that indicates the distortion. The world as we imagine it looks really different from the world we actually live in.
Some common misconceptions propagated through the mercator projection (2):
- Greenland and Africa are roughly the same size. (They’re not. Africa is about 14 times larger.)
- Indonesia is a tiny country. (It actually has the same area as the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy combined.)
- Antarctica dwarfs the other continents. (It’s roughly the same size as continental US.)
- Germany is near the middle of the world. (It’s in the northernmost quarter.)
Mercator’s map, while useful for navigation, is problematic, because it assumes a north-biased view of the world. Countries in the northern hemisphere occupy much more real-estate on the map than those on the south, despite having the same relative area. For example, Africa is the second most populated continent in the world, with 15% of the people (about 1 billion) living in it. This is hard for many to image, because we think of Africa as not being very large, and often as one single place instead of as a collection of countries with a great diversity of people, cultures, ecosystems, climates (3).
As human beings, we are subconsciously prone to assigning importance and power based on perceived size and position. By portraying Africa through the distorted geographies of the Mercator projection, we are not only literally, but also socially and politically diminishing the space it occupies in our world. This is true for most of the southern hemisphere. Not only relative size, our maps are also misleading in terms of relative position. As mentioned above, Germany actually falls in the northern most quarter of the world. The equator often falls lower than the middle-point of the map. The upper half of the map — mostly Europe and North America — is spread out to take up more space than belongs to it.
The other thing we never question is orientation. North is up, south is down, west and east are left and right respectively. On the map, and as a consequence, in our perception of the world, the northern hemisphere far is given more importance because it is the “top” hemisphere, while the southern half is relegated to the bottom. It’s also interesting to note that the western Europe is placed in the horizontal centre of the map. The reason for both of these is that the map was made by Europeans and they wanted to be on top. Really, there’s no other real reason for orienting our maps the way they are (4).
The world map is “inherently political”. It is the embodiment of the interests of the European community, their perceptions of themselves vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and serves to assert their superiority. It has been “designed in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.” By flipping the map on its head, we can subvert this Euro-centric paradigm, and shift the power to the “third world” countries. Why should north be up?
One proposed alternative to the Mercator projection is the Gall-Peters projection, which shows landmasses at the accurate relative size. However they appear stretched, horizontally closer to the poles, and vertically near the equator. Ultimately, this is the cartographer’s dilemma. Both shape and relative size of landmasses on a sphere cannot be accurately represented on a 2D surface, and a compromise must be made. The solution we chose to adopt is very revealing picture about the political dynamics of our world.
(1) Ellie Zolfagharifard, “Why every world map you’re looking at is WRONG”, Daily Mail, 2014
(2) Christina Sterbenz, “The Most Popular Map Of The World Is Highly Misleading”, Business Insider, 2013
(3) David Walbert, “Projections and Propaganda” Map Skills and Higher-Order Thinking, 2010, LEARN North Carolina, available on the web at http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/mapping/6434, accessed October 6, 2015
(4) Nick Danforth, “How the north ended up on top of the map”, Al Jazeera America, 2014
(5) Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109:1 (Winter, 1980): (125)
Somewhat related: Hank Green’s entertaining (and thought-provoking) rant about the why the concept of continents is stupid.
