Spotlight the beautiful and the boring will be ignored. A warning for new mapping libraries.
In this post I’m going to tell you a story about the future of mapping. It starts with a casual coffee and ends with a realisation that, if we don’t heed the mistakes of the past, the latest trend in mapping might end up undermining all our hard work. The use of new mapping libraries, such as Cesium and Leaflet, which allow us to show off all the beauty of the world around us, might mean we only see the beautiful places, leaving behind all those essential but unaesthetic ecosystems we need to see (and protect) as well.
A casual coffee.
The other day I was making coffee for my architect housemate. She’s currently investigating livable urban spaces and the principles for planning open spaces that people want to be in. As I let the pot stew on the hob, I was looking over her shoulder at google maps: she was looking around a city in the Netherlands.
“Eurgh, that place is so ugly, I’d never live there” she remarked. As a fan of brutalism — all straight lines of concrete, exposed metal and plenty of glass — I replied “nah come on, that place looks really nice!”. While the pot whistled away in the background we traded stories about the architectural styles we like.
When I got into the office a few hours later I was still thinking about those beautiful brutalist buildings. And then I thought “I’ve just visited a town and passed judgement on the beauty of its buildings from a map”. And that’s pretty profound. Maps have moved on from being navigation devices to holding all kinds of information about the properties of the space we’re looking at. I could not have had that discussion based on a map 10 years ago; I would have needed pictures and sketches to get an better idea of the beauty of the buildings. Thanks to advances in mapping technology we can visualise so much more than ever before.
Technology helps us scale new heights.
I spend a lot of my holidays walking around the countryside with a trusty map strung around my neck. I’ve learned to read every 1D contour as the 3D mountain it really is, and to see every real mountain as just a set of contours on a map.
That all changes when the maps you encounter every day are in 3D.
For example, have you dropped in on the city of London and flown around all the skyscrapers? The whole city is laid out before you ready to be examined at any angle. And did you know there is a garden halfway up the side of The Shard?
We have a similar feature on the Half-Earth project map, where you can transcend from an on-high global view into a close-up of a place in the world. Thanks to recent advances in the technology that we’re using, we can do these kinds of animations and show you all the intricacies of the terrain like never before!
When you see a map on a website, it’s made up of loads of little bits of code that tell your internet browser what to show and how to behave. Over the last few years we’ve slowly been adding in new blocks that have laid the foundations for letting you drop into the Andes and see all the contours close up. If you’re a developer and you want to look at this further, why not look our code on Github?
We’ve found that being able to spin around and zoom into a globe is a really powerful tool for captivating your audience as you tell them a story about what’s happening in the world around them. I guess it evokes that same joy and wonder you must have felt as a child spinning a big 3D globe around in your tiny hands, pointing at all those countries you wanted to explore one day. But now you can find out so much more than just their capital city!
With all this put together, online maps are representing many more aspects of how the world is, in much more detail. As I wrote in a previous post, that can have huge power for the way we construct the world in our heads. Instead of having to translate a 2D depiction of the world (on a map) into your imagination, you can literally see the world as it is.
Beauty or biodiversity?
If the way we are showing the world is changing, and has consequences for how people think about the world, then our choices about what parts of the world to show off are also important. Let me give you an example, again from the Half-Earth project.
One of the new datasets we added shows how the richness of Hummingbird populations is related to height above sea level. You can zoom in really close and see how they stay away from the tops of mountains and flood into certain valleys where the conditions are just right. That’s a story we’re going to tell again and again, especially because the first reactions we’ve been hearing are “Wow” and “amazing” and “cooollllll”.
But I live in Cambridge, UK. If you’ve ever been, you’ll know that (apart from that one hill, which isn’t really a hill) it’s extremely flat: it’s about 12 metres above sea level. If you go straight North, the next highest point is the Arctic glacial island of Svalbard. You wouldn’t get that same “wow” effect if you were to tell a story about the cool birds of Cambridge using a 3D map. I’m friends with enough birders to know that the surrounding area is vital to birds, especially as they migrate up and down the country in spring and autumn. It’s a really important and, in its own way, beautiful part of the world, that might get ignored because it doesn’t look quite as nice as other places. We’ll choose to tell stories about the Alps and the Himalayas and the Marianas Trench instead, because it looks really cool on these new maps we’ve made.
Now think about that at a global scale. You’ve got thousands of ecological niches supporting millions of species, all around the world. Swamps, deserts, wetlands, valleys, flood plains… But we may not hear about them if the trend continues, and if we only tell stories about the beautiful places.
We see this already with the global coverage of data about biodiversity: we know more about the most interesting and exciting species than we do about the boring old blobfish. It was for this reason that the team at London Zoo decided to create the “EDGE” list, to raise awareness of those species that are really important for life on Earth — totally unique and completely irreplaceable — but often forgotten. They’re trying to direct more attention to these species, so that we know more about them and take more action to protect them. They’ve had some successes but there’s still plenty of work left to do.
I think we need to do the same for places too. In our rush towards beauty and awe, we musn’t forget the foundational flat places. For every Kilamanjaro, Everest and Machu Pichu, we need to remember the Ugly places (like this one).
Let’s make the boring beautiful.
