Take Out Your Map and Look

Albert Einstein once said, “You can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” It’s a quote that Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah use to start their treatise on how to make sense of the state of the world and its future through mapping.

Maps present information concisely, but they also project our biases and unwittingly lay bare what we don’t know. The earliest examples, going back three millenniums, show the known world in stylized form and the unknown world inhabited by various monstrosities. One of them, etched on clay tablets some 2,600 years ago, uses rectangles to depict the ancient city of Babylon and the Euphrates River at the centre (centrality says a lot about a map-maker’s thinking), with neighbouring settlements as circles. That which is beyond reflects the mythology of the time. Particularly in the sixteenth century, maps became more accessible to ever widening groups of...