This past the month of May, within the context of a controversial electoral strategy regarding the nation to the north, President Donald Trump called the frontier separating the two nations a constructed boundary that had been drawn without consideration “directly across the upper portion of the country”. He suggested that the geographical depiction of North America might appear more coherent without it.
Scholars observed that this boundary embodied a complicated past and a daily existence for countless people, yet they conceded that his point had merit. A significant stretch of the 49th parallel indeed follows a straight line – and the diplomats and negotiators who established it were largely ignorant regarding the terrain.
This gambit spotlighted the fact that the atlases we are familiar with project a misleadingly orderly global perspective – one divided into uniform nations that allows for scant opposition to its supposed accuracy, infallibility or veracity.
Academic a cartography historian links this perspective to eighteenth-century UK geographers who designed “educational puzzle maps” as teaching aids for students from privileged backgrounds. These charts, showing territories with distinct edges and doubled as the original puzzles, endured as a constant in schooling for more than a century. They still mold our thinking today: what started out as a teaching tool morphed into a technique for illustrating differences in data points such as average lifespan or GDP per capita, with each territorial unit depicted by one data point. “I believe that does actual detriment, not merely to our comprehension of these nations, but also to how we understand economic imbalance,” remarks the expert.
The Push for Cartographic Change
A number of scholars are pushing for a transformation in how we map. In the recent past, academic Henk van Houtum proposed a movement to “Free the Map”. His aim is to exchange the territorial paradigm with one that highlights migration and cultural ties. As he describes it, to exchange the mythological titan, bending under the burdensome planet, for his grandson Hermes – the fleet-footed god, link between different spheres.
This geographer has deep knowledge of EU migration policy and immigration, which is routinely depicted on maps via imposing vectors evoking a hostile advance (for many people, recall a famous title sequence). “The anonymous, large arrow is chiefly the institutional lens,” he notes. “It emphasises the supposed sameness of the state and the special status of migration by foreigners.” Addressing such criticism, a major European border agency has substituted the menacing arrows on its migration charts with less alarmist – though still non-neutral – scaled dots, and countless schoolteachers have pledged to revise the graphical representation for their students.
Welcoming Different Map-Making Ethics
For his part, the cartography expert calls for cartography to welcome a new set of values. Data acquisition and illustration of facts are imperfect human endeavors that require interpretation, he says. In place of pursuing neutrality, unbiasedness and sharp distinctions, cartographers ought to welcome doubt, subjectivity diversity. His work, entitled a critical work on geography, showcases geographic illustrations that question the accepted view.
One presents overseas voyages for hundreds of years from the early 1400s, not by highlighting where the explorers planted their flags, but the places they discovered that were previously uninhabited. These totaled “a handful of islands and extensive ice fields”.
This is enlightening regarding both the extent of the planet people had already inhabited by that era, and concerning the genuine discovery that took place later. It contrasts with an antique map of North America presently shown at a prestigious institution, which shows native territories as blank spaces, “to create an impression that they were uninhabited and ready for taking,” comments a senior archivist of historical maps.
The Impact of Community Mapping
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