Maps Are Never Neutral: UN Vote, Trump Renaming Orders Put Cartography's Politics in Focus

Maps anchor people to places, guide them from one point to another and depict global political realities through contested borders. They are widely treated as objective records — X marks the spot, the spot has a size and a name, and it compares in a certain way with other spots.

Yet the physical geography of the world may be fixed while its maps are not. Choices run through every map: which countries sit at the centre, how large they appear relative to one another, and what the objects on them are called. Those choices create a perspective and shape assumptions about how the world looks. Where there are choices, there can be contention.

That contention was visible this month at the United Nations, where a General Assembly vote endorsed a map offering a different way of looking at the world. The map showed Africa more accurately and larger. The vote was 164 countries in favour, six abstaining and one — the United States — against.

In August, President Donald Trump signed an order directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America" as a trade war with Canada continues. In January 2025, he signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America." Some technology companies, including Google and Apple, followed the changes for US users. MapQuest did not, nor did Canada.

"To the extent that maps come to shape the way that we think about different places and people who inhabit them, maps structure our politics in ways that then have consequences," said Alex Moulton, assistant professor in the geography and environmental science department at Hunter College.

No flat map can be fully accurate to the physical geography it depicts. Converting a three-dimensional Earth into a two-dimensional drawing always produces distortions — akin to flattening an orange's peel. Mapmakers decide which distortions to allow depending on a map's purpose, decisions that can be invisible to a public that treats the map as absolute reality.

The Mercator map, familiar for centuries, was created in Europe as a navigational tool, with longitudes and latitudes structured so ships could travel from one place to another. To achieve that, the size of land masses had to be altered: places nearer the poles, such as Greenland, appear larger, while those nearer the equator, including African countries, were made smaller. In reality, Africa is massively larger than Greenland. That distortion drove efforts leading to the UN vote in support of the Equal Earth projection map, which supporters say is more accurate in size.

Why does this matter? Because how people see things can affect how they relate to them, with political and economic implications, said Nerve Macaspac, a political geographer and assistant professor at Queens College. "If you see Africa as a smaller land mass, there's a political implication to that. If we see it larger or it's in true size, then there is economic and political implications to it," Macaspac said. "What's being foregrounded and what's been hidden or obscured or neglected or ignored or reduced?"

What is included on maps can also make them snapshots of a particular period. What was considered the "United States" would look different depending on which point in its 250-year history was put to paper. Maps "really are a time capsule of how that cartographer saw the world," said Tony Rodono, owner of The Map Shop in Charlotte, North Carolina. "That was their understanding of world at the particular time with everything that surrounding that person's human experience."

Trump's orders to change the names of bodies of water are examples of this as well, as is his order renaming the Alaskan mountain called Denali during the Obama administration back to its previous moniker of Mount McKinley, the tallest peak in North America.

"Map-making is world-making," Moulton said. "It is apprehending our world as we observe it and then putting that down as the truth of those things and that is an inherently political practice."