Mapping Narratives: What the UN Map Reveals About Symbolic Reparations

This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field. For centuries, most of the world has looked at itself through a 16th-century instrument of spatial representation. On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly voted to change that, adopting a resolution that asks governments, schools, media organizations, and technology companies to retire the Mercator projection wherever the relative size of countries actually matters, in favor of equal-area alternatives like the 2018 Equal Earth projection. The vote passed 164 to 1. The United States was the sole vote against. The resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by the African Union, is non-binding, and it leaves Mercator's actual function untouched: the projection remains, as it was designed to be in 1569, a reliable tool for maritime and aerial navigation. What the vote targets is its afterlife: the nearly two hundred years in which a map built to solve a navigation problem became the default image of the planet in classrooms, atlases, and now browser tabs. The distortion itself is not in question. Mercator's projection is conformal: it preserves angles and shapes at the cost of area, which enlarges with distance from the equator. Greenland and Africa read as roughly equivalent on a Mercator map; Africa is actually about fourteen times larger. Alaska appears close to the size of Australia, which is four and a half times bigger. Put more legibly: the United States, China, India, Mexico, Japan, and most of Europe would fit inside Africa's outline, with room left over. France broke from Mercator days before the vote, opting for the equal-area Eckert IV. Togo's government says it hopes to revise its school geography materials by the end of the year. On the other hand, the United States, through its UN representative, called the resolution a distraction from "genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations" and accused the body of pushing an "ideological agenda." That a map — a fixture of classroom walls, atlases, and browser tabs, largely unquestioned for nearly five centuries — could produce this kind of disagreement at the United Nations is itself worth noting. Nobody at the General Assembly disputed the underlying geometry; equal-area projections are not a matter of interpretation. What was being contested was something else entirely. Not the Territory "The map is not the territory," the semanticist Alfred Korzybski wrote in 1931. Any representation, however useful, is always an abstraction, a reduction of something larger than itself. Jorge Luis Borges pushed the idea to its logical, absurd conclusion in the tale On Exactitude in Science: an empire's cartographers, striving for total accuracy, eventually produce a map the exact size of the empire itself, coinciding with it point for point. The map is useless. A perfect map, Borges suggests, is not a more truthful one — it is simply redundant. Representation only works by leaving things out. What gets left out, and what gets kept, is never a neutral choice. Italo Calvino explored this idea in an essay written after visiting the 1980 exhibition Cartes et figures de la terre at the Centre Pompidou. Calvino's argument runs against the intuition that the aerial, top-down map, the one in every atlas, is the natural or original form of a map. The earliest maps were records of journeys: Roman itinerary scrolls, medieval strip maps, a seventeenth-century Japanese scroll charting the road from Tokyo to Kyoto in unbroken, ground-level detail. These are linear, embodied, built from the perspective of someone moving through space, one step at a time, closer to a narrative than to a diagram. The god's-eye view came later, and it came from somewhere specific: Calvino notes that the representation of the globe only began once the coordinate system already used to map the heavens (poles, equator, meridians) was transposed onto the Earth. The map of the world, in other words, was never simply observed. It was inherited from the sky, and centered wherever its makers happened to stand. That inheritance carries its own history of shrinking self-importance. Roman maps, Calvino writes, folded the known world into the outline of the Empire. However, by 1459, Fra Mauro's planisphere, informed by Marco Polo's travels and the first circumnavigations of Africa, already shows Europe visibly smaller against the rest of the world, and its cardinal points inverted: the reversal of scale matched by a reversal of orientation. Cartography, read this way, is not a story of objectivity. It is a negotiation over how much of the frame a civilization gets to occupy. Gerardus Mercator entered that negotiation in 1569 to solve a problem that had nothing to do with size. His projection is conformal — it preserves angles and shapes — which meant a sailor could plot a straight compass course, a rhumb line, across an ocean and trust it. That was a genuine, difficult problem, and Mercator managed to solve it. But he understood the area distortion his method produced well enough to use, himself, a different, equal-area projection when he needed to compare landmasses rather than to navigate between them. The projection that would carry his name took nearly two more centuries to become fully usable at sea, once the marine chronometer solved the parallel problem of longitude. It took even longer, well into the nineteenth century, at the height of formal European empire, to become the default general-purpose map of the world, in atlases, classrooms, and eventually newsrooms — contexts for which it was never built and in which its distortions cost nothing to shape but a great deal to perception. The British cartographer George Kellaway, in his book Map Projections (1946), described the consequence with precision. He declined to ascribe any "imperialistic motive" to Mercator or to the mapmakers who followed him, as the projection was not designed as propaganda. But its popularity, he argued, owed something real to the fact that it made the British Empire look considerably larger than it was, and by then several generations had grown up seeing that inflated scale as simply how the world looked. "For them", he wrote, "any other map is a distorted and meaningless hieroglyphic." A map built to solve a sailor's problem had become, for people who would never plot a course by it, the only image of the world that felt true. Counter-Cartographies If cartography has always been a negotiation over whose frame the world gets read through, it also holds the possibility to negotiate back — or to transgress its frame. In The Mapping Journey Project, the French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili filmed eight people who had made clandestine migrations across the Mediterranean, each recounting their journey while tracing it, in real time, on a geopolitical map. The camera never leaves the map and the moving hand; there are no faces, no interviews, no casting. Khalili gave the participants the map itself and let them author their own account of crossing it. What results is not a documentary illustration of migration but a redrawing of the map's authority: the same paper that states where borders fall becomes, in a stranger's hand, the register of a route no border was built to permit. Memory here does not recount a closed past; it produces space, in the present, on the same surface the state uses to deny it. Working from the opposite premise, Scottish-Nigerian architect and artist Dele Adeyemo doesn't overwrite the official map, but refuses its logic altogether. In The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism, he juxtaposes the Cantino planisphere — an early-sixteenth-century Portuguese map that renders territory as something to be claimed and extracted — against spatial diagrams drawn from West African material culture, building what he calls a "trans-cosmological cosmogram." The contrast turns on a single shared symbol. In European cartography, a cross marks a point: a coordinate, a claim, a site of conquest. In the Yoruba cosmology Adeyemo draws on, a cross inside a circle marks something else entirely: the intersection of the material and immaterial worlds, reached not by measurement but through dance, divination, ritual movement. It is not a more accurate map of the same territory. It is a different account of what territory is, one in which land was never reducible to a plotted coordinate in the first place — which is precisely what colonialism and capitalism needed it to become. These artistic practices suggest that the corrective to a distorted map is not always a more accurate one. Sometimes it is a map that insists on being authored from below; sometimes it is the recognition that the grid itself was never the only way to hold space. Both are forms of the same refusal: to let territory remain something drawn from above, by others, on someone else's behalf. That refusal, however, doesn't only land in galleries. On September 4, it reached the UN General Assembly. Size, Symbolically What a map enlarges, it also elevates. Mercator's math was never in dispute, but its centuries-long run as the default image of the planet was never only mathematical: it consistently inflated the imperialist nations and compressed the colonized countries. Equal Earth projection performs a similar operation in reverse. Correct the distortion, and Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia grow, on the page, into something closer to their actual weight in the world. The countries that Mercator shrank are, with almost no exceptions, the countries the resolution enlarges. Togo's foreign minister, Robert Dussey, was careful to frame the campaign as scientific rather than political. He is right: equal-area projections are settled cartography, not opinion. But the framing is also strategic: anchoring the correction in irrefutable math is precisely what makes its symbolic weight impossible to wave away as ideology. Jean-Noël Barrot, announcing France's own break from Mercator, said directly: "Changing the map obviously doesn't change the world. But correcting a representation that distorts it is already an act of truth." Moky Makura, of the advocacy group Africa No Filter, went further, framing the stakes as narrative rather than geometric: "If we got something as basic as Africa's size wrong for this long, what else about Africa have we simply accepted without questioning? Africa doesn't need to be made bigger. It needs to be seen accurately." The United States' objection, read against this, is more revealing than it first appears. Yaryna Ferencevych accused the General Assembly of relitigating "map projects from the 16th Century" in the name of "reparations and 'cognitive justice.'" The remark was meant to dismiss the resolution as trivial. Instead, it names what's actually at stake: scale is being treated here as a question of justice, and nobody — not even the US — is disputing the math behind it. But why does depicting the exploited countries and continents — the periphery of capitalism — in their actual size bother so much? There is a longer theoretical thread underneath this. Geography is never produced from a neutral vantage point; it is always read from somewhere, and that somewhere sits in a structural relation, of center and periphery, to everywhere else. In that framework, the periphery's condition is not simply a matter of scarcity or underdevelopment; it is a deprivation of the capacity to narrate one's own place in the world on equal terms. A map is one of the most literal instruments through which that narration happens or fails to happen. For nearly five hundred years, and more strongly in the last two centuries, that instrument told one story. Equal Earth tells a different one on purpose — not because the periphery has grown, but because, for the first time at this scale, an institution has agreed to draw it at the size it actually is. This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: The Lure of Escapism in Architecture and Alternative Worlds. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and architecture projects. We invite you to learn more about our ArchDaily Topics. And, as always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.