I believe **TDN **meant that the Southern hemisphere has relatively more land mass than is shown in a standard Mercator projection, not that it has more land absolutely than the Northern Hemisphere.
I’m trying to understand the OP. I could see a perspective where one could argue that a East-up or West-up map could portray a level of favoritism because any place where one would draw the line as the top would be purely arbitrary. With a North-up or South-up map, the top has a very simple non-arbitrary point to describe as the top. But what I’m failing to understand is why, even if we assume that up is good, North-up is somehow evil and South-up is not.
It seems to me that, when choosing between those two, North-up makes the most sense simply because, as others have pointed out, the majority of the land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere and the vast majority of the population as well. As such, I’d think that a North-up map would make it more useful than South-up simply because ~90% of the population that lives in the Northern Hemisphere. I use maps in a way that’s most convenient for me, and as I live in the Northern Hemisphere and North-up is the established standard, it’s what I use. Just as I know people here in the US who insist on using Metric for everything and spending energy converting units to figure out what to buy, if people want to use South-up maps, they exist, they can buy them; no one is stopping them.
And sure, you can draw associations to slavery and oppression, but I think doing so is tenuous at best. And, really, when I look at a map, I don’t think “Africa is under Euro, therefore white people are better than black people”. I think the reason the Northern Hemisphere is more developed has absolutely zero connection with how maps are drawn and everything to do with the fact that the Northern Hemisphere has such a huge population and land mass margin. It’s the very same reason that, typically, larger countries will perform better in international sports; they have a larger pool of talent and resources.
And even if we grant that somehow North-up is wronging the Southern Hemisphere, how does reorienting our map fix that? Doesn’t that just reciprocate that evil onto the Northern Hemisphere instead? If we have to pick one hemisphere to be on the bottom, doesn’t it make the most sense to put the hemisphere that has so many fewer people living in it on the bottom to favor the overwhelming majority? And even if you can justify that, do you really believe that the impact is significant enough that it warrants the costs associated with changing something so ubiquitous, not only in replacing countless maps, but in relearning for the majority of people how to use it?
So, even if your premises are right, they don’t support your conclusion. And, your premises are utterly lacking support. North-up just makes the most sense.
In short, it seems to me that this sort of proposal is akin to saying that designs favoring right-handed people is perpetuating ancient cultural norms of looking down on left-handed people and forcing them to use their right-hands rather than being ostracized. And so, to correct this, we should redesign everything to benefit left-handed people. Nevermind that the whole reason it came up in the first place is that the overwhelming majority of people are right-handed, and so it makes the most sense to the most people to design everything where one hand must be favored to favor the hand that the overwhelming majority favors. Making everything left-handed doesn’t correct any past wrongs and more than reorienting the map South-up would, it just inconveniences the vast majority of the population with no meaningful benefit to anyone.
I agree also. The Mercator over-emphasizes the size of land further north, and would in the south as well, if there was any there. This leads to Russia and Canada covering half the world’s area. And Greenland taking up most of the remainder.
Actually, I meant the latter, but I was wrong. I swore it said that on the New World Map, but I misremembered. But it is true that the Mercator map is seriously out of proportion. Greenland is not as big as South America, dammit.
*He had brought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
What's the good of Mercator's, North Poles, and Equators, Tropics, Zones and Meridian lines?' So the Bellman would cry; and the crew would reply, They are merely conventional signs!’
Other maps are such shapes with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave captain to thank.' (So the crew would protest) that he’s brought us the best,
A perfect and absolute blank!’ *
Someone should post a Youtube link of that scene from West Wing where some society for geographic equality does a presentation to the White House staff explaining that north-hemisphere centric maps are unjust. It’s a funny clip but I can’t do youtube from here.
What did maps look like when Europeans began colonizing?
This wikipedia page has a bunch of maps covering from B.C. into the 1600s.
I have not suggested using only south-up maps. We should north- and south-up maps equally.
Why only those two?
Well, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to use the poles as the two focal directions. Especially if you wanna use compasses and stuff to navigate. Poles aren’t arbitrarily chosen; they’re a natural feature.
How does “equal” get determined? How are you going to enforce this? Do I have to go buy another Atlas with all the maps turned upside down? If AAA wants me to try driving across the United States using a map with Florida at the top, am I allowed to find a north-up one that does doesn’t bewilder me?
There is no good reason for your suggestion, and there are plenty of good reasons why it’s a bad idea. You should have offered your comments back in the days when mapmaking conventions were being developed.
Certainly students should be taught that it is just a convention, shown other methods of mapping (such as the Fuller example above), and learn the history of maps, but for the everday purposes that most people use maps and globes for, your solution offers confusion and error for a problem that doesn’t exist.
Besides, everyone knows that any map worth its salt has me at the center.
Could someone explain to me how an east-up or west-up map works? I’ve been looking for the east pole on my globe, but it just keeps spinning around 
Why? There is a large natural utility to using North-up maps, being that the majority of the land mass and population live in the Northern Hemisphere. On top of that, we’re dealing with thousands of years of momentum in an established international standard. Considering that the entire purpose of maps is for navigation, it seems to me that using multiple standards will necessarily result in greater ambiguity. As such, I don’t see any reason to use multiple standards, and I think the reasons for using North-up signficantly outweigh those of a South-up.
Furthermore, using North-up and South-up maps equally directly contradicts your original point. If North-up acts in some way to oppress the Southern Hemisphere, then, following that logic, I can conclude that using South-up will oppress the Northern Hemisphere. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the population lives in the Northern Hemisphere, a South-up map necessarily oppresses more people. As such, using each standard equally will result in oppressing more people than are currently being oppressed. If you want to balance out the oppression, fine, but that would mean you’d not be using them equally but, in fact, be using North-up maps ~90% of the time and South-up Maps
~10% of the time, so that the total average oppression is slightly lower than it is now. But now, you have a system such that, usually, you know up is North, but sometimes it won’t be, and you’ll almost certainly get lost.
So, if we did decide to switch to a system where we use North-up maps and South-up maps in some ratio, how do we decide which standards are used in which circumstances? For instance, will my car GPS be in one standard, but the maps when I’m watching the news be in the other?
I would argue that while the oppression of peoples from various regions around the world is certainly a regrettable stain upon human history, but that the worst of that stage is behind us, and we’re continuing to move forward. Yes, it’s not gone, but any continuation of it by maps is tenuous to, in all likelihood, non-existent. As such, modifying one of the most useful tools to modern life to account for it, especially without any guarantee it will have an effect, in such a way that that tool becomes potentially much less useful is the greater evil than any perceived notions about the current international standard.
To me, arguing this connection doesn’t seem a whole lot different from saying slavery in the US and the resulting racial turmoil was horrible, many slaves picked cotton, so the fact that we still use cotton to make clothes and other goods acts as a reminder of that oppression.
This. Picking East or West kind of makes sense too, but only for the very same reason, in that, as a result of the poles and the Earth’s rotation. I can even understand why, in the old days, putting East at the top might have made sense, because the sun rises in the East. But if the idea is to counter-act the oppression created by maps, East or West, then you actually do run into the problem posed by the OP because any line drawn at that point has no natural reason why. I could just as easily have an East-up map with a line through the Pacific or the Atlantic, and either one could potentially be seen as a form of favoritism. As such, not only are you faced with justifying why that particular direction was chosen, but also why, of any countless number of countless potentially top-most points were chosen.
Any non-cardinal direction is even worse because it would necessarily be arbitrary since there’s no compelling natural reason to choose them. Hell, the whole reason the cardinal directions are the cardinal directions is precisely because they have a compelling reason to be chosen over any other ones.
So, North and South are really the only two logical standards based on our current geographical knowledge because it is defined by two easily recognizable natural features that are essential to navigation. Even before the compass, the North Star and the Southern Cross were used for navigation.
Quite.
I’m fairly bemused by this thread. Northism… I thought this kind of useless bloody tripe died out in the 1990s after the American universities got wrapped up in other bits of useless leftist Academic wankery.
Regardless, I recall from my now ancient Geography studies that none of the flat projections are particularly favoured as general maps - not Peters any more than Mercator - but rather mixed projections. Looking at Wikipedia I see that things like Winkel Tripel projections are favoured. I recall the Goode… In any case, the ridiculous confusion of superficial wooley headed left-third worldism with a technical issue doesn’t do anyone any favours.
And in the real South, one has a lot better bloody things to worry about than some student wankers in the North worrying about fictitous tripe…
Yet I don’t see a thread about a real problem, like where the incumbent Big Man dictator is exploiting this third worldist rhetoric in a classic fashion to justify stealing an election. The well-being and self respect of Africans has a lot more to do with addressing these corrupt exploitive bastards than the imagined sins of maps or other divorced-from-reality esoterica.
Ah, you’re one of those “uppists” who think that things on top are more important than things below.
I guess some of this thread is serious … so I’ll bite.
But that might be one of the weakest reasons for maintaining the North-South orientation.
Today, who travels by compass?* There’s GPS. Car, boats, planes having “moving maps” that orient themselves to the direction of travel. And who here has never rotated a road map to get a better sense of the direction of travel? And even if you’re using a compass, why use North as the main direction?
My car’s GPS has the option to view the map with North at the top. I never use that option. I want to know where I am traveling, not what the cardinal directions are.**
Main reason to stick with the current orientation is: That’s what people are used to. But, standards have changed in the past. For example, the change from Julian to Gregorian calendar, from various local measurements to Metric, and the history of and proposed use of Decimal Time.
I posted it upthread, but I’ll do it again, because it’s so cool: Fuller’s Dymaxion Map. Almost as cool as Geodesic domes and Bucky balls.
- I remember a stand-up comic wondering why some people have a compass in their car. It’s not as if when you ask for directions, you’re told: “Go SW for about a mile, then NNW for a couple of blocks, and then due North until you get to the store.”
** A friend of mine has a compass in her car (it was standard equipment) and she couldn’t figure out why the compass said she was traveling SW when, “obviously”, she was going South. I couldn’t convince her that the “North-South” streets in her town were not actually laid out from Due North to Due South. 
The 90% of humanity that doesn’t have access to GPS. Jaysus, GPS is bloody new even in Developed markets, it’s some gobsmacking myopia…
It’s convenient.
When I was young, my father instilled in me a reverence for our family name. It wasn’t just MY name, it was also his, and his father’s and his grandfather’s. This was part of the reason we were encouraged to be honest, polite, industrious and of good humor.
I have tried to live up to my name.
Apparently, the OP is trying to live up to his.