A New Map for the Same World

Yesterday, reported The National, the United Nations voted 164-1 to start using the Equal Earth projection instead of the centuries-old Mercator map.¹ We are redrawing the map of the world. Togo led the initiative, arguing that »a fair world begins with a fair map«. The United States was the only country to vote against it. Mercator isn’t going anywhere, though: it remains useful for navigation. That last detail might be more interesting than the vote.

»The specialised map tells you more about the operation. The general map lets the operations talk to one another«

Gerardus Mercator designed his map in 1569 for that day’s navigators. It preserves angles, turning constant compass bearings into straight lines that a ship could steer by. The distortion isn’t an error. It’s the price of keeping those lines straight. The map doesn’t just tell us where things are. It’s preserving something, and we seem to have forgotten that.

The Mercator projection was a tool for doing something to the world. But its use escaped navigation and entered classrooms, atlases, newspapers, and our collective imagination, until a map built to cross oceans became a general picture of what the Earth looks like. We mistook the instrument for the ontology, and in the process, we started thinking Greenland was roughly the size of Africa, despite actually being about 14 times smaller.

There’s no perfect replacement waiting to be found. Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss showed in 1827 that a sphere can’t be flattened onto a plane without distortion.² Equal Earth preserves area better than Mercator, but pays for it elsewhere. Distortion is the price of the invariant.

We could choose something else instead, of course, like a map that preserves travel time, or the number of people reachable within an hour, or the energy required to get there. We could map shipping routes, migration, internet latency, carbon flows, commodity dependencies, climatic similarity, or solar exposure. Futurist architect Richard Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map changed the geometry of the problem entirely, unfolding the globe from an icosahedron to reveal relationships that get obscured by the rectangle we typically use to frame a world map.³

The space of possible maps is vastly larger than the space of maps we call world maps. So why is the UN rooting for Equal Earth? It’s a defensible choice if the operation we care about is comparing the areas of continents. But why should that operation now be the general one?

The UN’s own resolution quietly admits there is no single answer: Mercator remains appropriate for navigation, it says, while Equal Earth is appropriate for general representation and education. Different maps can be objectively good at different things.

But perhaps »representation« is already the wrong word.

A navigational chart isn’t simply a representation of the ocean. It’s a way of doing something with the ocean. A map of travel time isn’t trying to show you what a place looks like. It’s giving you a way to ask a particular question about it. The specialised map tells you more about the operation. The general map lets the operations talk to one another.

In architecture, everything is a drawing: a photograph, a plan, a model, a diagram, at times even a string of code. We use them because they make things possible to interrogate and manipulate. A drawing isn’t simply a picture of the building. It’s part of how the building becomes thinkable.

A map does something similar. Rather than just describing a place, it gives us a way of acting on it, thinking with it, moving through it. Representation doesn’t necessarily come before operation – maybe the representation is constructed precisely to make the operation possible.

This is where the idea of a »master map« starts to look strange. Which map is »the map of the world«? Perhaps all of them, not because Greenland actually changes size when we change projection, but because each map makes a different set of relationships in the same world available to us. Each shows the world under a particular constraint.

The politics of maps is more complicated than deciding whether Mercator is colonial and Equal Earth is fair. That a map is useful doesn’t make its constraints neutral. But abandoning the idea of a single true map doesn’t mean anyone gets to make the world whatever they want.

Donald Trump can rename Lake Ontario Lake America, as he did the other day.⁴ That changes something real about language, institutions, and eventually perhaps habit. But it doesn’t change the lake. He can alter a representation of the world, but he doesn’t change the world by altering its representation.

Similarly, the UN can’t make Mercator geometrically wrong by voting against it. What it can do is change which map it wants to privilege, and which operations it wants to make easier. We’re not really talking about which map represents the world correctly; the question is which map is useful for which operation, for what purpose, and under what constraints. We don’t need fewer maps. We need better reasons for choosing between them. The strangest thing about Mercator isn’t that it distorted the world, but that we used that distortion until we stopped seeing it.

We see the map so often that we forget what it isn’t showing us.

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