Frustrated that no one seemed to take the time to read his reports on such topics as crime trends and school lunches, Minnesota state legislator Myron Orfield decided he’d have to draw people a picture.
Using his personal computer, a desktop demographics program, Census Bureau population figures and state budget data, he created his own maps to illustrate public-policy issues around the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
But what set his constituents rocking was a map that showed that a small group of wealthy suburbs to the west and southwest had only 25 percent of the population but was getting 70 percent of the new jobs, 83 percent of the highway funds and 90 percent of the new sewer funding.
“The northern suburbs went nuts,” Orfield said when discussing how maps can arouse great passion. “They just went into orbit.” By creating a perspective and selecting certain information to show, Orfield had underscored the power of maps-which happens to be the title of an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The show, which ranges from Australian aboriginal bark drawings to satellite imagery, demonstrates that mapmaking is evolving from a cartographer’s craft to a tool of a broader society that demands visual information.
Maps explain and make connections no one has seen before. They crystallize thinking. And, of course, they give directions. Americans are fascinated by maps, and hundreds of millions are produced in the U.S. each year; North Carolina alone produces 950,000 state highway maps.
American Demographics magazine published a map in August that suggests how the U.S. feels, county by county, about Elvis. The New York Review of Books provided even more peculiar information with an illustration of a turn-of-the-century wharf showing where each whorehouse was located.
Maps and charts surround us from childhood. As a young immigrant from Germany in the 1940s, Tom Freudenheim, an assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, had the walls of his bedroom covered with maps. The lampshade by his bed, he remembers, showed the westward expansion of the United States, and a jagged line traced the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition. On the floor was an Armstrong-Quaker rug, which was not a rug at all but a piece of linoleum that portrayed a sphere of the world.
For some people, maps can enlighten or create a shudder of remembrance of hard times and hard places. Maps guide even as they provoke us to yearn for other lands or seethe over lost territory.
And maps have the potential to create other kinds of controversy.
At a symposium sponsored by the Smithsonian and Yale University last year, a group of professional cartographers was described as in an “uproar” over the ability of untrained people to use specialized computer software to create their own maps.
“Some called it an extremely dangerous development,” says Denis Wood, a professor of design at North Caroline State University and a man who loves maps. “They were afraid it would be misused by laypersons.”
Flexible truth
“Maps are useful but never neutral”-that quote from Lucy Fellowes, exhibit co-curator and project director at the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in New York, is displayed on a wall at the beginning of the show.
Whether presenting a 30-foot scroll map of the coast of China, a 1768 map of the Mason-Dixon Line or the original 1812 “Gerrymander” map that created political shifts in Boston, the exhibit makes it clear that the truth of the map is and always has been in the intention of the mapmaker.
“Most people think that maps are statements of fact, and that’s not true,” said Dianne Pilgrim, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, where the exhibit first appeared a year ago.
All maps are based on what the creator wants to include-and exclude. Antarctica, for example, covers about 10 percent of the Earth’s surface, but it is rarely shown. Depending on who is drawing the map in the Middle East, Israel is either prominent or invisible.
One New York borough map at the exhibit shows AIDS hospitalizations of people ages 25 to 44 by ZIP code. An 1855 map shows the homes of victims of an outbreak of cholera in London. After the map was made, it led to the discovery of infected neighborhood water pumps that had caused the outbreak.
Maps always make a statement. During last summer’s Midwest flooding, satellite maps showed the dynamic quality of rivers, how they expand and contract and change course. A current map of the Mississippi, back within its banks, looks much different.
Whether the goal is environmental in showing the destruction of the rain forest or military by suggesting how threatening forces were arrayed in the former Soviet Union, maps make a point; they advertise and propagandize a certain view, and they advance specific interests.
A Revolutionary War-era map at the exhibit favored British interests in the New World and thus showed the French in more-distant areas of the settled territories. Similarly, the route maps printed in modern airlines’ in-flight magazines show only their own route systems, not those of their competitors.
Maps for war
The military, of course, has its own interests. The U.S. government’s Defense Mapping Agency creates maps for military use, tactical charts for pilots, and ground maps to show tank commanders, for example, the type of sand they might encounter in different parts of a desert. One of its jobs is to make sure American pilots never have to use road maps, as they once did in Cambodia, to find their bombing targets.
Artist Tom Van Sant’s satellite composite view of the Earth in the exhibit shows what a fragile planet this is. But Wood notes that to show that, Van Sant had to distort the reality of the global map by leaving out the atmosphere, the clouds and all weather systems that normally obscure parts of the Earth.
Humans seem particularly geared to maps. Psychologists estimate that children as young as 3 1/2 develop a sense of space and understand the idea of maps. They can create their own not long after that.
Many early maps were used to explain and buttress religious claims. Jerusalem was centered on such maps and all else was explained in terms of biblical narrative. For a time, people believed that the three known continents were an inheritance from the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japheth. When a fourth continent was discovered, that teaching became problematic.
The record of mapmaking goes back to prehistoric times, and the University of Chicago Press is at work on a six-volume history of cartography, expected to be the most comprehensive collection of maps and research on the subject.
Not accurate for long
The creation of maps is humbling, in a way, because they change constantly. Just ask Jack Shupe, chief cartographer for the National Geographic Society in Washington.
“Any map is only as accurate as the day it’s printed,” Shupe said several months ago as he considered the border and territorial implications of the fighting in the former Yugoslav republic.
Shupe has had to make about 14,000 changes in the National Geographic Atlas over the last several years. Political change in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe required an immense redrawing or borders and renaming of nations, regions and cities.
Besides doing away with the USSR designation, the republics of that union returned to traditional names; overnight, Ukraine abandoned the Cyrillic spelling of all its place names. While Berlin became the capital and the two Germanys merged, Czechoslovakia split into two.
The land didn’t change, but our perception of it did, and so did the map.
“And this, essentially, is what maps give us, reality,” Wood writes in a book accompanying the exhibit, “a reality that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve no other way.
“We are always mapping the invisible or the unattainable or the erasable, the future or the past, the whatever-is-not-here-present-to-our-senses-now and, through the gift that the map gives us, transmuting it into everything it is not … into the real.”
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“The Power of Maps” is on display until Jan. 23 at the International Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center on the National Mall in Washington.
