North is not a fact. It is a decision someone made five hundred years ago. This is a website about that decision — and what happens when you undo it.
Or: what four seconds of discomfort can teach you about five centuries of power
There is a photograph of the Earth that was published upside down. In December 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 pointed a Hasselblad camera out of a window somewhere between here and the Moon and captured the most reproduced image in human history. In the original frame, Africa tips toward the top, Antarctica crowns the composition, and the southern hemisphere fills the lens with the swagger of a place that has never been told it is at the bottom of anything. NASA rotated the photograph 180° before releasing it. They flipped the planet to make it look “right.” Nobody asked why “right” meant north on top.
Open our map. You will recognise everything and nothing. The coastlines are correct. The data is untouched. London is still London. But it is at the top now — or rather, the south is at the top now — and something inside you will quietly insist that this is wrong.
That insistence is the subject of this entire website.
We’ve timed it. The average user presses an arrow key to “fix” the map in under four seconds. They report the map is “broken” before they realise it is simply rotated. The assumption that north-up is correct is so deep it registers as a technical error, not a design choice. That gap — between “this is broken” and “oh, this is a question” — is the entire project.
We made one change. One line of code. bearing: 180. The tiles load normally. The labels render. The streets are where they’ve always been. But the meaning flips entirely. The Situationists called this détournement — taking an existing thing and subverting its meaning without changing its material. We took the most conventional, corporate-friendly mapping library available, and we turned it upside down. Your discomfort is the content.
“I have said School of the South; because in reality, our North is the South. There should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South.”Joaquín Torres García, 1935
North has only been on top for five hundred of them
The word orientation comes from the Latin oriens — “east,” where the sun rises. To orient yourself was once to face the dawn. Not north. East. The direction of God, of Paradise, of light. The Hereford Mappa Mundi, circa 1300, literally places the Garden of Eden at the apex of the known world. This is not a metaphor. It was a map.
Go further back. Ancient Egypt placed south at the top because the Nile flows northward — downhill — and the source of life was therefore above you. Chinese cartographers invented the compass and called it the “south-pointing stone.” The character 指南 (zhǐnán) predates the European compass by a thousand years. Al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana of 1154, the most sophisticated map of the medieval world, placed south at the top — and remained the reference atlas for three centuries.
North conquered the top of the map during the European Renaissance, through three forces: the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, the magnetic compass adapted for Atlantic navigation, and — most decisively — Gerardus Mercator’s 1569 projection. Mercator did not set out to make Africa look smaller than Greenland. He set out to make sailing lines straight. The political consequences were, in cartographic parlance, a “distortion.” In human parlance, they were a catastrophe that has not yet ended.
Let’s be precise about what “distortion” means. On a Mercator map, Greenland appears the same size as Africa. In reality, Africa is fourteen times larger. Scandinavia looks bigger than India. Brazil looks smaller than Alaska. This is not a neutral technical choice — it is a visual argument that the north is bigger, more important, more central. And every child who has ever sat in a classroom with a Mercator map on the wall has absorbed that argument before they had the language to resist it.
Foucault said that “space is fundamental in any exercise of power.” But he also said something quieter: “Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-political one.” Translation: territory is not a piece of land. It is a piece of law drawn over land. The map is not a picture. It is a jurisdiction. And the direction you place on top is not a compass point — it is a throne.
Why flipping a map feels like breaking a rule
There is a measurable cognitive bias called the north-south bias. In controlled experiments, people shown maps consistently associate northern positions with wealth, prestige, and desirability — and southern positions with poverty, lower status, and cheaper real estate. The effect has been replicated across cultures and contexts. And here is the finding that matters: when participants were shown south-up maps, the bias disappeared.
The prejudice is not geographic. It is positional. Up equals good. Down equals bad. And for five hundred years, the Global South has been placed “down.” This is not a historical curiosity. It is active cognitive infrastructure, reinforced every time someone opens a map on their phone.
Consider the language. “Things went south” means things went wrong. “Down Under” is a nickname for an entire continent — beneath what, exactly? “The bottom of the world.” “Top of the world.” “Heading up north.” “Going down south” — even when you’re travelling on flat ground at the same altitude. “Uptown” means affluent. “Downtown” once meant less than. The spatial metaphor is so embedded in English that we speak it without hearing it.
And Quino heard it. His character Mafalda — a six-year-old Argentine girl — asks “Why are we down?” then turns her globe upside down and dismantles five centuries of cartographic hegemony in three comic panels.
“Metaphors are used to help people understand abstract concepts in terms of perceptual experiences. A consequence of this strategy is that metaphor can bias perception and decision making.”Meier et al., Gettysburg College, 2011
Thomas Saarinen asked 3,568 university students across 52 countries to draw the world from memory. The finding was devastating: 79% drew Eurocentric maps — even students in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Europe was always enlarged. Africa was always shrunk. Students from formerly colonised countries drew the colonial power at the centre. Saarinen called it “one of the unfortunate characteristics of colonial mentality — the idea that the centre lies elsewhere.”
The centre lies elsewhere. Read that again. The internalised conviction that you are not the centre of your own map. That somewhere else — somewhere north — is the real place. That is what a default setting can do to a mind.
Liben and Downs tested 259 children aged 5 to 12 on rotated maps. Performance degraded with 180° rotation — but this is a learned difficulty, not an innate one. Younger children struggled most with perspective; older children had internalised the convention so deeply that alternatives felt like errors. Piaget showed that spatial frameworks are built, not given. Which means they can be rebuilt.
Every map is a portrait of power disguised as geography
J.B. Harley wrote the founding text of critical cartography. In 1989, in the most cited essay in the field, he said: “Much of the power of the map, as a representation of social geography, is that it operates behind a mask of a seemingly neutral science.” Then the kicker: “To those who have strength in the world shall be added strength in the map.”
That sentence has not aged. The Mercator projection — still the default in Google Maps, Apple Maps, and virtually every web tile service — was designed in 1569 for sailors who needed straight rhumb lines. It was never meant to represent the relative size of countries. It was never meant to be on a classroom wall. And yet.
In March 2017, Boston Public Schools became the first US district to adopt the Gall-Peters projection. Six hundred classrooms. 57,000 students, 86% of them students of colour. Director Hayden Frederick-Clarke: “Maps that they are presented with generally classify the places that they’re from as small and insignificant.” He called Mercator “one of the most insidious examples of how schools perpetuate racism.” Total cost: $12,000. The cost of not doing it was centuries.
Arno Peters — the German historian whose equal-area projection sold over 80 million copies — was the son of trade union activists. His mother was secretary of the League Against Colonial Oppression. He said what polite cartographers wouldn’t: “The Mercator projection overvalues the white man and distorts the picture of the world to the advantage of the colonial masters of the time.”
The professional cartographic establishment responded with fury. In 1989, seven North American geographic organisations adopted a joint resolution urging publishers to “cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes.” They rejected Peters and Mercator. They were right about the geometry and wrong about the politics: the fact that a map provokes a debate about power is not a flaw. It is the point.
“The map is not a picture. It is an argument.”Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, 1992
Edward Said called it “imaginative geography” — the practice of designating “a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs.’” Walter Mignolo went further, showing how colonial cartography was not a tool of empire but a constitutive part of what he called the “colonial matrix of power.” The map didn’t just describe conquered land. It produced the concept of “land to be conquered.”
And Gayatri Spivak, without ever writing about maps directly, gave us the sharpest blade: every map is an act of Darstellung (portrayal) that claims transparency but always involves Vertretung (political representation — someone deciding what and whom to include). The map speaks for territory the way a politician speaks for constituents: with all the violence that “for” conceals.
Mark Monmonier put it plainly: “Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential.” Kenneth Field at Esri said it even plainer: “I could take a dataset and make a map to tell whatever story you want.” The question was never if maps lie. It was whose lie are you looking at.
A million people lived in Kibera. The map said nothing was there.
David Harvey documented it in Mumbai: slum dwellers living “without legal title — the places they live are left blank on all maps of the city.” Doreen Massey warned that maps falsely suggest “space is a surface” when space is actually “the sphere of a dynamic simultaneity.” Loose ends. Ongoing stories. Real challenges to cartography. The clean blue lines on your phone screen have no room for the mess of actual life.
But communities have been filling in the blanks.
Henri Lefebvre warned us: the planner’s map — what he called “representations of space” — exerts a “violence intrinsic to abstraction.” The reduction of three-dimensional life to two-dimensional plan confers “a redoubtable power.” Edward Soja sharpened the knife: “It is now space more than time, geography more than history, that hides consequences from us.” What is hidden? Redlined neighbourhoods. Zoned-out communities. Blank spots where a million people live. The map doesn’t just fail to show them — it actively renders them invisible, and the invisibility becomes administrative fact.
“Counter-maps significantly increase the power of people living in a mapped area to control representations of themselves and their claims to resources.”Nancy Peluso, 1995
What cartographers couldn’t say, writers did
Jorge Luis Borges wrote the ur-text in 1946. A single paragraph. An Empire whose cartographers produce a map the size of the Empire itself, coinciding with it point for point. Later generations abandon the map. “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.” Baudrillard used it as his epigraph. Then he flipped it: “Today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.” The map now precedes and generates the territory. The desert of the real itself.
Wisława Szymborska was working on a poem called “Map” when she died in 2012. It became the title poem of her collected works. The final lines:
“I like maps, because they lie.Wisława Szymborska, “Map,” 2012 (posthumous)
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.”
The mercy of the map’s imperfection. Mass graves and sudden ruins are out of the picture. From a writer who survived Nazi occupation and Stalinism, this is not whimsy. It is a meditation on what the clean lines of any representation must leave out — and whether that leaving-out is violence or compassion. Or both.
Elizabeth Bishop opened her entire career with “The Map” in 1934: land “leans down to lift the sea from under,” peninsulas “take the water between thumb and finger.” Her closing line: “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colours.” The map as aesthetic object — tender, autonomous, more honest than history because it admits its own beauty.
Eavan Boland wrote the inverse. “That the Science of Cartography is Limited” traces a famine road in Ireland — built by starving people in 1847, where “they died, there the road ended.” The line which says woodland and cries hunger and finds no horizon — “will not be there.” The map as absence. The clean line as erasure.
Deleuze and Guattari gave us the counter-instruction: “Make a map, not a tracing.” The tracing is reproductive, closed, hierarchical. The map is “open, connectable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.” To map is not to represent — it is to experiment. “The map is entirely oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real.” They wanted maps that could be torn, reversed, reworked. They wanted, essentially, what open-source cartography has become.
Derek Walcott remapped Caribbean space through poetry. “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea.” The devastating image: “the ocean kept turning blank pages / looking for History.” Édouard Glissant demanded “the right to opacity for everyone” — a direct challenge to cartography’s imperative to make everything knowable, mappable, controllable. Not everything wants to be on your map. Some things have a right to remain unmapped.
And Lewis Carroll, seventy years before Borges, gave us the Bellman’s perfectly blank Ocean Chart: “What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, / Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?” The crew’s reply: “They are merely conventional signs!” In 1876, a Victorian nonsense poet understood what most GIS professionals still resist: the grid is a convention. The convention is a choice. The choice is a politics.
“Every map shows this… but not that.”Denis Wood
From 99 smartphones in a handcart to the borders that change depending on who’s looking
In February 2020, Berlin artist Simon Weckert loaded 99 secondhand smartphones into a small red handcart, walked slowly past Google’s headquarters, and turned every street from green to red on Google Maps. Real drivers were rerouted around phantom traffic. His point: “There’s a blindness that arises from thinking of data as objective, unambiguous and interpretation free.” Google’s response was cheerful: “We love seeing creative uses of Google Maps.” They did not address the critique. They never do.
But the deeper problem is structural, not performative. Google Maps operates a “disputed region team” that displays different borders depending on the viewer’s country. From India, Kashmir appears fully Indian. From Pakistan, the border is disputed. Crimea shows a solid Russian border from Russian IP addresses and a dotted one elsewhere. In 2010, Nicaraguan troops invaded Costa Rica’s Calero Island after a commander relied on Google Maps, which had drawn 2.7 km of Costa Rican territory as Nicaraguan. The map didn’t describe the border. It moved it.
Laura Kurgan showed that Google Earth is not “a smooth zoom” but “a patchwork of archived aerial and satellite images of varying origins, sources, motivations, and resolutions.” Trevor Paglen photographed classified military sites that were physically erased from USGS aerial images — “edited out of the original negative.” His insight: “Blank spots on the map begat dark spaces in the law.” And Ingrid Burrington spent three years walking Manhattan decoding spray-painted sidewalk markings — the physical infrastructure of the internet following copper lines from the 1880s, which followed railroad tracks. Infrastructure as sedimented cartography. The past is always underneath the map.
OpenStreetMap — the open-source alternative, the community’s map — carries its own shadows. Only 3% of OSM contributors are female. Coverage overwhelmingly favours the Global North. A former CEO of a major OSM company noted: “There’s more info on OpenStreetMap on strip clubs than day care centers.” Open does not automatically mean equitable. Democratic tools can reproduce the biases of the people who show up to use them.
And then there are the maps you’re not supposed to see. Palantir’s predictive policing system, deployed secretly by the LAPD and New Orleans police, targeted people who were 53% Latino and 31% Black — far exceeding their population share. Sociologist Sarah Brayne embedded with the LAPD and documented how the system “techwashes bias.” One sergeant told her the data infrastructure “looks bitching, but it’s worthless.” Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths does the opposite: repurposing mapping technology for human rights, reconstructing Syria’s secret Saydnaya prison from blindfolded survivors’ ear-witness testimony. Eyal Weizman’s principle is simple: “Mapping is power.” The question is who holds it.
Shannon Mattern put it cleanly: “Some aspects of our cities and our lives within them will never be machine-readable.” Not everything is data. Not everything should be. The dream of the total map — the Borges fantasy made literal by Google — is also a dream of total surveillance. Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design: “We expect maps to be a direct reflection of the world, and they clearly are not. I wanted to call attention to the fact that these maps were being made by people.” People with budgets, employers, deadlines, and politics. The basemap is not the world. It is a product.
Or: the map as a tool you can pick up
The founding story is William Bunge and Gwendolyn Warren in Detroit, 1967. Bunge was a geographer. Warren was a resident of the Ferguson neighbourhood. Together, they mapped rat bites by block, children’s walking routes to school, abandoned buildings. The data came from the community. The maps went back to the community. The university was furious. Bunge was fired. The maps survived. They are now recognised as the founding moment of radical cartography.
What made Detroit different was not the technique. It was the question: who holds the data? In conventional cartography, data flows upward — from the surveyed to the surveyor, from the mapped to the mapper. In counter-cartography, data flows back. The map becomes a mirror held up by the community to itself.
Jan Gehl spent his career trying to turn “the view of his architect colleagues upside down, asking them to change their perspective, from the usual bird’s-eye view to the view of the human being on the ground.” His question cuts: “All cities have traffic departments and statistics for traffic and parking. Do you know of any city with a department for pedestrians and public life?” The planner’s map sees roads. The lived map sees crossings. The counter-map sees the child trying not to get hit.
In Australia, Songlines — oral maps encoding navigational information in song, story, dance, and art — represent the world’s oldest living cartographic tradition, spanning 65,000+ years. Margo Neale calls them “a master archive” in which “humans are documents.” In Canada, Native Land Digital maps territories, treaties, and languages worldwide. Jordan Engel’s Decolonial Atlas argues: “Mapmaking is an art, not a science.” Ushahidi, born in Kenya’s 2007 election crisis, has been deployed in 160+ countries with over 50 million reports. The New York Times called it “an innovation that comes from a world where entrepreneurship is born from hardship and survival.”
These are not alternative maps. They are additional maps. Peluso’s definition still holds: counter-maps “significantly increase the power of people living in a mapped area to control representations of themselves.” Danny Dorling’s cartograms — where area is proportional to human data rather than territory — offer “a more socially just form of mapping by giving people more equitable representation in an image of the world.” Bill Rankin at Yale names three values for cartography’s future: uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity. His radical cartography shows “a geography that’s messier, lumpier, with more overlaps and internal diversity.”
Messier. Lumpier. More overlaps. That’s not a bug. That’s the world.
“Make a map, not a tracing. The map is open, connectable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.”Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980
Not rules. Provocations.
North is not up. There is no up on a sphere. The convention is 500 years old, colonial in origin, and reinforced by every app on your phone. Rotate the map. See what loosens.
Defaults are ideology. The default zoom level. The default centre point. The default basemap. Every default was chosen by someone with a worldview. Change the defaults and you change the world the map describes.
If your map looks like Google Maps, it has failed. Style is not decoration — it is the argument. Rekacewicz draws maps by hand because the tremor of the line communicates uncertainty. A vector line communicates authority. Choose your line.
Performance is a political act. A web map that takes 8 seconds to load on 3G in Lagos has excluded most of the planet. Ship less JavaScript. Use fewer tiles. If your radical map only works on a MacBook in Shoreditch, it isn’t radical.
Disorientation is a feature, not a bug. But it requires consent. Three to five seconds of productive confusion, followed by an insight. Time it like a punchline.
Ask who is absent. Whose data was not collected? Whose neighbourhood was not surveyed? Whose language is not on the labels? Radical cartography begins with radical data governance.
Every projection is a lie. Say which one. Every classification is a choice. Every colour ramp is a persuasion. If you can’t explain the trade-offs you made — in plain language, to a non-specialist — you haven’t finished the map.
Open source is a start, not a solution. OpenStreetMap is 3% female. Open tools can reproduce closed biases. The architecture of participation matters as much as the licence. Who mapathons? Who decides the schema? Who sets the defaults? (See #2.)
Not everything wants to be mapped. Glissant demanded “the right to opacity for everyone.” Some knowledge — Songlines, sacred sites, migration routes — belongs to communities, not databases. The radical cartographer knows when to stop drawing.
The map is not a picture. It is an argument. Make yours.
A reading list for map-breakers. Organised by urgency.
The first photograph of Earth had south on top. NASA flipped it. We’re flipping it back.