The Politically and Culturally Sensitive Practice of Mapping the World: The Quest for a More Accurately Proportional Projection

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The UN General Assembly recently endorsed the Equal Earth Projection to replace the traditional Mercator map of the world. This new world map more accurately depicts the size of Africa, which on traditional maps appears to be the same size or actually smaller than Greenland – when in reality it is fourteen times larger! Critics of the historic 16th century map say that it makes northern countries appear larger, reinforcing the Western stereotype of a colonial worldview (aka “cartographic colonialism”)ⓐ (‘U.N. Endorses Map That Accurately Shows the Size of Africa’, David Cheung, New York Times, 4 September 2026, www.nytimes.com). 

Rejigging the spatial dimensions of north and south    
Until the 20th century the Mercator Projection of the world in map form was still the basic yardstick for cartographers – designed by Flemish geographer and mapmaker Gerardus Mercator in the 1560s. Mercator’s projection was a breakthrough for oceanic navigation, representing sailing courses of constant bearing (rhumb lines) as straight lines on a map. The problem with Mercator is its cylindrical projection, rather like forcing the globe into a cylinder. When applied to a world map is this inflates the size of lands furtherest away from the equator, ie, it distorts Europe and the polar landmasses Greenland and Antarctica which appear far larger than they actually are relative to landmasses closer to the equator or south of it. The Herculean task facing cartographers—trying to stretch a sphere to fit a rectangle—has flummoxed practitioners for centuries as they struggle to get the balance right, maintaining straight latitudinal lines with the preservation of perspective. Debunking any notions of 100% correctness, maps are compromises between distorting the angles of latitude and longitude lines and the relative areas of the continents and oceans (‘Finally, a World Map That Doesn't Lie – The AuthaGraph Is the Most Accurate Map of Earth’, Nathaniel Scharping and Erin Berge, Discover, Upd. 30 October 2025, www.discovermagazine.com).

Despite the seeming nigh-on impossibility of it, cartographers have not been reluctant to tackle the task of trying to create a more accurate map of the world. Perhaps the first serious attempt to move away from the Mercator standard was Scottish clergyman/cartographer James Gall's cylindrical equal–area projection in 1855. In the 1960s and 70s, a German scholar with a focus on the study of synchronoptic world historyⓑ, Arno Peters, reinvented Gall’s Projection, styling it the “Peters World Map” with the stated aim of redressing a perceived Eurocentric bias (enlarging of the North–latitude countries) inherent in the default Mercator Projection. Peters’ map removes the distortion around the equator and reassigns it to more populated areas along 45° lines of latitude by portraying the true surface areas. Peters asserts that this gives a fairer scientific representation of country sizes than Mercator. While the Peters Projection has sold over 80 million copies and has been adopted by many UN agencies (such as UNESCO) and by schools and progressive church institutions, it has been very polarising,  For some critics, Peters plagiarised Gall’s map (Peters’ reworked model is also known as the “Gall–Peters Projection”), other professionals in the discipline of cartography make the point that Peters was not a cartographer (and presumably not qualified to make maps). Many in the field have taken umbrage with Dr Peters’ over-exaggerated vertical stretching of Africa and South America, eg, Prof Arthur Robinson criticised Peters’ elongated distortion of country shapes which made them look like “wet, ragged, long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle”. Peters followed up his 1973 equal–area map with a world atlas which aroused similar controversy and labelled “Marxist cartography” in some quarters (King, Russell, and Peter Vujakovic. “Peters Atlas: A New Era of Cartography or Publisher’s Con-Trick?” Geography 74, no. 3 (1989): 245–51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40571673).

Alternative maps, folding globes, down-under projections, etc      
The kerfuffle generated by the Peters Projection has provoked a spate of other innovations in new global map creativity which have sought to avoid both the Eurocentric layout and the rectangular form of map…these include the AuthaGraph Projection, a Japanese model which divides the spherical globe into 96 triangles, creating a folding effect to produce a proportionally accurate 2D map; the Waterman Butterfly Projection – to reduce distortion it projects the globe onto a truncated octahedron, which is then unfolded into its iconic butterfly shape; the Azimuthal Equidistant Projection, which represents true distance and direction from a chosen central point, but results in severe distortion away from the centre of the map; the South-up Projection – this presents a simple 180° inversion of the traditional direction of the world map to place the South (Antartica, Australia, Africa, etc) at the top…it’s political effect being to attribute a greater significance to the generally poorer southern hemisphere countries ('Five maps that will change how you see the world',  Donald Houston, The Conversation, 23 March 2017, http://theconversation.com).

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ⓐ notably, Trumpian America was the only country to vote against the resolution

ⓑ apportioning equal weight and importance to the study of all areas of history and culture