The Honest Distortions of Maps
Most of us treat maps as neutral records of reality. We consult them to find a street, plan a journey or settle an argument about where a country lies, and we rarely stop to ask who drew them or why. Yet every map, however carefully made, is the product of a long series of decisions about what to include, what to leave out and how to represent a round, cluttered and constantly changing world on a flat and limited surface. It would be wrong to conclude that maps are therefore untrustworthy. But I would argue that they are best understood not as mirrors of the world but as arguments about it, and that, like any argument, they deserve to be read critically.
The most fundamental decision concerns projection. A sphere cannot be flattened without being stretched or torn, so every flat map of the world distorts something: area, shape, distance or direction. One projection developed in the sixteenth century for sailors preserved direction, allowing a navigator to plot a course as a straight line, but in doing so it greatly enlarged regions far from the equator. On such a map, a large northern island can appear comparable in size to an entire continent that is, in reality, more than ten times larger. The projection was entirely fit for its original purpose; the difficulty arose when it was adopted for classroom walls and atlases, where viewers absorbed its distortions as fact. Equal-area projections, which show the true relative size of land masses, have been available for well over a century, yet they are often dismissed as looking strange. That reaction, it seems to me, says more about our habits than about the maps themselves.
Projection is only the beginning. Every map must also be simplified, since a map with the same level of detail as the territory would be as large as the territory itself and therefore useless. Mapmakers call this process generalisation: coastlines are smoothed, minor roads removed and small villages reduced to dots or omitted altogether. These choices are guided by the map's purpose, and a good mapmaker makes them deliberately. The problem is that users rarely know what has been left out. A tourist map that shows only the historic centre of a city, for example, implicitly suggests that the outer districts are of no interest, a message that their residents might reasonably resent.
Omissions can also be intentional. Governments have long removed military bases and other sensitive sites from published maps, and at certain times they have even introduced deliberate errors in order to mislead foreign powers. Less dramatically, commercial mapmakers have occasionally inserted fictitious streets or tiny invented towns into their maps; if these 'trap streets' later appeared in a rival's product, they provided proof of copying. More troubling, in my view, are the omissions that are not deliberate at all. Informal settlements in many large cities, home to hundreds of thousands of people, have historically appeared on official maps as empty space, with consequences for everything from the delivery of basic services to the planning of emergency responses.
Names present a further set of choices. A single mountain, river or sea may be known by different names in different languages, and the decision about which one to print can carry considerable political weight. Some mapmakers attempt to avoid controversy by printing more than one name, though this solution is not always possible on a crowded sheet. Indigenous place names, which often contain valuable information about the landscape, such as where water can be found or which slopes are likely to flood, were frequently replaced by colonial administrators. Their gradual restoration in several countries therefore represents not merely a symbolic gesture but the recovery of practical knowledge.
Digital mapping has transformed this situation, though not in the way that was once predicted. Online maps can be updated almost instantly, and crowd-sourced projects allow volunteers anywhere to add buildings, paths and businesses. In a number of disaster zones, volunteers have mapped entire districts within days, helping rescue teams to find their way. Enthusiasts claimed that such collaboration would finally produce a complete and impartial picture of the world. In practice, coverage reflects the interests and locations of the contributors, and wealthy urban areas tend to be mapped in far greater detail than poor rural ones. At the same time, many commercial digital maps are now personalised, highlighting different shops and restaurants depending on a user's previous searches, so that two people looking at the 'same' map may in fact be shown quite different places.
None of this means that we should abandon maps or regard them with suspicion. The best response, I believe, is to teach map literacy as seriously as we teach the critical reading of texts. Students who learn to ask who made a map, for what purpose and with what omissions are not only better prepared to interpret maps; they also gain a vivid lesson in how all representations of the world, from statistics to news reports, are shaped by the choices of the people who produce them. Maps will always simplify. The danger lies not in their distortions but in our forgetting that they exist.
