Is it time to redraw our maps?

"In May, as part of his campaign to annex Canada, President Donald Trump called the border with his neighbour an artificial line that had been drawn with a ruler right across the top of the country. He suggested that the map of North America would look more beautiful without it. Historians pointed out that the border reflected a complex history and an everyday reality for millions, but they also admitted that Trump wasn't entirely wrong."

"Trump's gambit drew attention to the fact that the maps most of us grew up with convey a deceptively tidy view of the world one parcelled into homogeneous blocks that admits no challenge to its objectivity, omniscience or truth. Historian William Rankin of Yale University traces this view back to 18th-century British cartographers who produced jigsaw-puzzle maps as teaching aids for children of the aristocracy."

"These maps, which represented countries with clear-cut frontiers and doubled as the first jigsaw puzzles, remained a fixture of education for more than a century. They still shape our thinking today: what started out as a geography lesson evolved into a way of depicting variability in indicators such as life expectancy or GDP per capita, with each country-block represented by a single number. I think that does real damage, not just to how we understand those countries, but to how we understand inequality, says Rankin."

President Donald Trump described the Canada–US border as an artificial line drawn with a ruler and suggested North America would look more beautiful without it. Much of the border follows the straight 49th parallel, and the Americans and Britons who drew it knew little about local geography. Maps commonly portray countries as tidy, homogeneous blocks with clear-cut frontiers and single statistical values, a legacy tracing to 18th-century British jigsaw-puzzle teaching maps. Representing nations by single numbers for indicators such as GDP or life expectancy flattens internal variation and obscures inequality. Political geographers call for replacing state-centric mapping with approaches emphasizing mobility and human connections.

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