Since humans live on only a small percentage of the land in the world, maps that just show that physical space don’t really tell us much about how we live. These maps--from a cutting-edge cartographer--do.
Ever since Gerardus Mercator created his iconic map of the world in 1569--the one that first enabled ships to navigate at sea without getting lost--people have been drawing maps using the same fundamental concept of conveying physical space.
Cartographers have gotten more sophisticated over time. They’ve figured out how to distort that space, how to portray that Massachusetts has more electoral votes than Wyoming, or that countries closer to the equator are larger than we think. But for hundreds of years, we’ve been tethered to the idea of looking at the world through the shape of its land. Now that there’s virtually none of that left to explore and discover, it may be time to start thinking about our world in new visual ways: not according to physical space, but to how people are distributed across it, and what their presence can tell us about global poverty, health inequality, environmental impacts, and geopolitics.
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