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00:00.
00:09These are revolutionary times for maps.
00:15They're being transformed by 21st century technology.
00:21In the past, it could take hundreds of years to make a map.
00:26Now, photoreal digital images can be made in hours
00:29and updated every week to create a virtual world of maps.
00:35They seem to present a completely accurate, objective image of the world,
00:40the triumphant culmination of thousands of years of map-making.
00:46But from the Christian vision of the Middle Ages
00:50to the elaborate symbolism of the Aztecs,
00:54and from the Victorian obsession with statistics
00:58to Nazi propaganda,
01:02history reveals that maps are shaped by the beliefs, rituals,
01:06and prejudices of the people who make them.
01:10Maps have always done more than just accurately represent the world,
01:13and that's what really excites me about them.
01:15They are unique windows onto past ages,
01:18full of passions and anxieties of the people that made them.
01:22And if we scratch beneath their surface,
01:24we begin to understand how different cultures, different societies
01:28have used those maps to define their faith,
01:30to understand their environment,
01:32to impose order and structure on their teeming chaotic worlds.
01:52The 9th of October, 1943.
01:56Allied bombers above Hanover destroy much of the city,
01:59including the state archives.
02:02In the basement was one of the world's most precious medieval treasures,
02:06the Ebbsdorf map.
02:11The Nazis had just ordered its removal to safety,
02:14but it was too late.
02:15This rare insight into the medieval mind was lost in the rubble.
02:36The Ebbsdorf map was made at the end of the 13th century
02:39by the nuns of Ebbsdorf Abbey in northern Germany.
02:44Most medieval maps in Europe were made by religious orders.
02:47They were the intellectual elite,
02:49and they also had the resources to create these wonderful works of art.
02:57Fortunately, the nuns had photographs of the original Ebbsdorf map.
03:01So after the war,
03:02they were able to make a magnificent copy of their lost treasure.
03:08Wow.
03:11I have been looking at reproductions in books of this map for years,
03:18but to actually see it here, what, ten foot tall,
03:21is absolutely breathtaking.
03:26It's a spectacular map.
03:28It's not really a map as we understand it in modern terms.
03:34It's a kind of vast encyclopedia of everything that was known to 13th century Europeans.
03:42It's totally unrecognizable to us as we look at it now,
03:45but if you start to dig a bit deeper, it starts to make some kind of sense.
03:50This is a map of three continents.
03:53Asia sits at the top, that entire top half of the map.
03:59Africa is right over here, running right down from here.
04:03There is Africa right down the coast.
04:06And tucked in here, in the bottom left-hand corner, is Europa.
04:10There's Anglia, England, down here.
04:14But this is also a map of what is unknown to the 13th century mind.
04:20Looking again at the edges of the map,
04:23you start to see these rather monstrous figures.
04:26Gog and Magog, these two fearful creatures, cannibals, monstrous figures,
04:32eating human flesh.
04:35Also on the margins, the massagets, children who eat their parents.
04:40And if you go back over to this side, into Africa,
04:44again, the limits of the map, more monstrous races.
04:48Starts with animals, so griffin-like figures, snakes,
04:54strange half-human, half-animal creatures here.
04:59Figures with no eyes, with no heads, creatures with no arms.
05:03And it becomes more and more monstrous as you run up the African coast.
05:11But there are also more familiar local features on the map.
05:15Northern Germany is shown with its rivers and its towns.
05:18And the Ebbsdorf Abbey is clearly marked too.
05:23The map comes from and was created here in Ebbsdorf.
05:27And it belongs here.
05:29It's ours, and it's something we're very proud of.
05:33What are your favourite images on the map?
05:36I particularly love the representation of paradise,
05:39right next to the head of Jesus Christ.
05:42It is an enchanting depiction.
05:47Adam and Eve have both got an apple.
05:49That is a sign for equal rights.
05:53And a snake winds down.
05:55The snake is fantastic because it's not a feminine snake,
05:58but a masculine one with a beard.
06:05In the 13th century, the majority of people were illiterate.
06:09They had to rely on pictures.
06:12I think our map used to be of great importance to communicate to people and to confirm ideas.
06:22The Ebbsdorf map is a magnificent display of knowledge.
06:26It was used by the nuns as a spiritual guide to present the Christian vision of the world.
06:33This is clearly not about geography in the modern sense of the term.
06:36This is a map about faith.
06:38And if you look at the centre of the map, all its locations are biblical ones.
06:44You can see Galilee here.
06:46You have Bethlehem with its little star there.
06:50You can see Noah's Ark up here, something there.
06:55You can see the Tower of Babel rising up there.
06:59It's telling a very specific story about the Christian faith and its forms of belief.
07:05And right at the centre of the map is Jerusalem.
07:10It's at the absolute heart of the map.
07:13And within its walled city, an image of the resurrected Christ.
07:18This is an image that puts Christianity right at the heart of the entire known world.
07:27But there's also a hidden message lying at the heart of this map.
07:31The viewer is being asked to think beyond earthly delights and think about heaven.
07:37Think about the next world that they're heading to.
07:40And you can see this in the whole sweep of the map.
07:43At the top, the head of Christ.
07:46To the right and the left, his hands.
07:49And at the bottom, his little feet poking out.
07:54This is a world defined by Christ.
07:57Christ is the world.
07:58And he's embracing it in a big theological bear hug.
08:11Medieval Christian maps weren't really about defining territory.
08:14They weren't really even interested in getting from A to B.
08:17Their interest was getting people to focus on a higher spiritual realm.
08:21On rising up above the earth and reaching up to heaven.
08:40200 years later, the ancient Aztecs were also using maps to convey information about their own rituals and beliefs.
08:52They give us a rare insight into one of the great empires of Central America.
08:57One of their maps is part of a book called the Codex Mendoza, which describes Aztec life and rituals.
09:04It was created by an Aztec artist in the 1540s.
09:09At first sight, it doesn't look like a map at all.
09:13To westernize, this image is almost completely alien.
09:17But that's because the Aztecs had a very different conception of space to us.
09:22This is in fact a city map.
09:25It shows the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on the current site of Mexico City.
09:32The city was built on a vast swamp.
09:35And you can see the canals which run in this big blue X right through its center.
09:40And also up here, you can see the main temple to the gods.
09:45But down here, there's also a rather chilling reminder of the Aztecs' obsession with blood sacrifice.
09:51This is a skull rack.
09:53And sure enough, there is the skull of a defeated enemy.
10:00The map is full of symbolic information about Aztec society.
10:07The eagle sitting on a cactus on the rock is a reference to the city's foundation myth.
10:12It was said that the gods had sent the eagle to mark the spot where the Aztecs were to build
10:17their capital.
10:18It remains the national symbol of Mexico.
10:25Beneath the eagle is a shield with seven feathers and a bundle of spears, which symbolize the authority of the
10:32Aztec lords.
10:34And beneath the city are triumphal images of two Aztec military victories.
10:44But by the time this map was made, the Aztec empire had been conquered and colonized by the Spanish.
10:54The map was commissioned by the Spanish governor, Antonio Mendoza, as a gift for the king of Spain.
11:00Aztec artists were employed to create the map to show off the king's new territories and subjects.
11:10So what were the native artists trying to tell him?
11:18The key to understanding this map lies in these male figures all across the city.
11:24And what they represent is its rulers, its elders.
11:27And this incredibly important figure down here is the priest ruler.
11:31You can tell it's him because he's larger than everybody else.
11:34He's also painted in black body paint.
11:37But surrounding him are these other male figures who represent the rulers of particular zones or neighborhoods of the city.
11:46Because this is a map about hierarchy.
11:48It's about a deeply structured society which wants to map its city around these kind of issues,
11:55rather than where the canals run or how the streets cut across the city.
12:00Because that's the nature of Aztec society.
12:03Top down, deeply structured, utterly hierarchical.
12:08The native artists who drew this map were making a record of the glories of the old Aztec empire.
12:13It's a defiant celebration of its power structures, its rituals and its beliefs.
12:22The map is a record of a mighty empire conquered by the Spaniards.
12:27But it's also a really poignant image of everything that the Aztecs had lost.
12:37While the Aztecs were drawing symbolic images commemorating their own lost empire,
12:42Europeans were making ever more accurate maps to help them understand their newly conquered territories.
12:50And maps were starting to look more like the ones we used to navigate the world today.
12:59But even as they became more accurate, they were still revealing the beliefs and prejudices of the age.
13:10The British were increasingly curious about the inhabitants of Britain's far-flung dominions.
13:16And in the 19th century, maps were a popular source of information.
13:24Some of London's most fashionable maps were made by a prolific cartographer called James Wilde.
13:33Wilde specialised in world atlases.
13:36And in 1815, he made this elaborate map, which he called a chart of the world,
13:41showing the religion, population and civilisation of each country.
13:46It was an ambitious attempt to catalogue all the available statistics about the population of the world.
14:03Wilde even used a colour code to show the dominant religions in each part of the world.
14:09Protestantism was green, Catholicism was red, Jews were black, atheism was brown,
14:19and idolatry was a rather sickly yellow.
14:23In the key to Wilde's map, he describes all the different religious denominations,
14:29Christians, Muslims.
14:30And then he gets into some rather wonderful descriptions of idolatry,
14:35which he says is absence, feigned or sincere, of religion,
14:40which is apparently 153 million people.
14:43He also has atheism, which he describes as a state of absolute ignorance.
14:48And there are apparently 30 million people who subscribe to that belief.
14:52And you can see this being reproduced across the surface of the map.
14:57And down here in the South Seas, you get lovely descriptions of Fijians, cannibals.
15:05Down in New Zealand, cannibals.
15:08Cannibals.
15:09More cannibals.
15:11And yet more cannibals.
15:13In the Atlantic Ocean, a tribe called the Jagas.
15:17And their chief worship consists in frequent sacrifices of human victims,
15:22particularly children.
15:26Wilde's map was made at a time when Britain's imperial forces
15:29were spreading through India, Sri Lanka and Southern Africa.
15:34He used his map to satisfy his readers' curiosity
15:38and confirm their worst fears about these unfamiliar native peoples.
15:44There's even a scale to show how civilised each nation is,
15:48which is in Roman numerals, from one to five.
15:51One is absolutely uncivilised, and five is very civilised.
15:56No surprise, England gets top marks, gets a five.
16:00So does France.
16:01But you look across the rest of the map,
16:04and sadly the Hare Indians up in Canada only score a miserable one,
16:08as do the Copper Indians.
16:10And so sadly do the cannibals down in the South Seas,
16:14only coming in with a miserable one.
16:23Wilde's map was an attempt to reassure his readers
16:26that Britain and the British were at the pinnacle of civilisation.
16:33It's really an expression of British fears, prejudices,
16:37but also anxieties about how to govern non-Christian alien peoples
16:42that were now coming into the sway of the Empire.
16:56In 19th century Britain, the drive to gather statistics about the rapidly rising population at home
17:02was also gathering pace and efficiency.
17:05And maps were becoming powerful tools that could be used to identify social problems,
17:11and even save lives.
17:17In 1831, a mapmaker came to the rescue when thousands of people across the country
17:23suddenly started dying of a mysterious disease.
17:30Maybe you'd wake up and there would be 10% of your neighbours would be dead,
17:34and that would be horrific when you didn't have any idea what was going on.
17:38And it meant that a lot of people would just move,
17:40would just pack up their stuff and leave to try and get away from this very, very quick death.
17:52Victims writhed in agony, their muscles continuously spasming.
17:56Once infected, they could die within hours.
17:59Nobody knew what was causing the spread of the disease or how it could be stopped.
18:03Once the outbreak had ended, over 32,000 people had lost their lives,
18:08and they called it the Blue Death.
18:13It was Britain's first cholera epidemic.
18:17As it swept across the country, an apprentice surgeon called John Snow
18:22was struggling to save the lives of infected patients.
18:27Snow felt helpless as he watched victim after victim die.
18:31But he was already beginning to develop an idea about what was causing the deadly disease.
18:39The scientists at the time were baffled.
18:41Most of them thought that the disease was spread by a miasma of infected air.
18:46But John Snow believed that it was caused by tiny microorganisms invisible to the eye.
18:51And he suspected that the sewers were contaminating the drinking water and spreading the disease.
18:59When another cholera epidemic hit Britain, Snow examined water samples from the drinking supply
19:04of a cluster of victims in South London.
19:06He found they were all contaminated by raw sewage.
19:13This was the breakthrough.
19:15In 1849, he published an outline of his theory to explain the transmission of the disease.
19:21But nobody took him seriously.
19:25Why didn't Snow manage to persuade people of his theory?
19:28Everyone believed that diseases were spread through bad air.
19:31And it was just so strongly believed, it was a bit like, I guess you can compare it to Darwin's
19:35theory of evolution.
19:36It was so radical, so ahead of its time, that people just struggled to see and believe that this was
19:42true.
19:46To prove his theory and convince people to take him seriously, the doctor turned into a mapmaker.
19:59When cholera broke out again here in Soho, Snow seized the opportunity to prove his theories once and for all.
20:06He walked around marking the deaths on a street map, house by house, and sure enough, a pattern quickly emerged.
20:14He realised that people who were drinking from the water pump on Broad Street were dying.
20:21Snow's map plotted the deadly progress of the epidemic, and the cluster of deaths around the water pump seemed to
20:27confirm his theory.
20:29He was so excited by this extraordinary breakthrough that he rushed into a meeting of the parish guardians and demanded
20:36that they immediately take the handle off the water pump to stop the local residents from killing themselves.
20:46The parish guardians weren't convinced by the vital connection revealed by Snow's map.
20:53But after the deaths of 600 people in the parish, they were prepared to try anything.
21:01The handle of the pump was removed.
21:06How do you think that Snow exploits the power of the map?
21:09It was definitely almost a PR technique of getting information, of getting a theory across.
21:16And we still use that very much today in terms of talking to policy makers, talking to people about what's
21:22going on.
21:23And showing them it visually on a map is a very nice way, a very friendly, perhaps unthreatening way of
21:29getting something that's quite scientific across.
21:33Thanks to John Snow's pioneering work, maps are now a powerful weapon in the battle against disease.
21:41So what kind of things are epidemiologists looking at today?
21:45It's very similar to the entire history of public health mapping.
21:50It's whatever is the biggest public concern at the time.
21:53So in Snow's time, cholera was the big issue.
21:56And now we're working on the things which are in the news of public interest.
22:00And there's lots of public health studies looking around climate change.
22:04One of them would be looking at malaria and how malaria may spread if the climate change is, as some
22:09predictions suggest.
22:10Would it come back into Europe, for instance?
22:25As the industrial cities of Britain expanded, wealthy Victorians felt threatened by the ever-growing ranks of the poor.
22:35Maps became tools for understanding poverty as well as disease.
22:44How did the Victorians view poverty in this period?
22:48They viewed it, I suppose, as one of the most major problems of the time.
22:53The poverty question, what do we do with the masses of urban poor that had arrived and settled in the
23:00city during the previous decades of the century?
23:02That was seen as a major concern for people.
23:10The poverty question inspired a wealthy industrialist to create one of the most sophisticated mapping projects of the Victorian age.
23:18His name was Charles Booth.
23:22Booth was inspired to act when he heard the claim that 25% of Londoners were living in poverty.
23:31Booth was sceptical, but he was also curious.
23:34He decided to fund a team of researchers to do a thorough assessment of levels of poverty throughout the city.
23:40All the information would be carefully charted in a series of street maps.
23:46The project would continue for 17 years.
23:53Charles Booth was an unlikely man to try and map London's poverty.
23:56He'd made a vast fortune in animal skins on the docks of Liverpool.
24:01But the tanneries were terrified by his visits as he probed and catalogued every inch of his thriving empire.
24:08And it was a habit that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
24:15Booth's hunger for statistics was fed by a team of investigators.
24:19From hundreds of interviews and observations, his team created a series of colour-coded maps that showed the income levels
24:26and social classes of every street in London.
24:33This is one of Booth's maps and it shows Limehouse, one of the poorest districts in London at the time.
24:40Yellow on Booth's maps denoted wealthy areas, pink and red were the middle classes, blue and black were the poorest.
24:48And there's absolutely no yellow on this map whatsoever.
25:02Booth often joined his researchers as they spread out through the streets of London, gathering information on wages, working conditions
25:10and what Booth called social and moral influences.
25:15This wouldn't be just a map, it would be an intimate social profile of the city.
25:21Booth even lived with some of the families himself and he recorded his feelings in his notebooks.
25:27He wrote about those living just above the poverty line that the children have when young less chance of surviving
25:34than those of the rich, but I certainly think their lives are happier.
25:38They are more like to suffer from spoiling than harshness, for they are made much of being commonly the pride
25:44of their mother and the delight of their father's heart.
25:50One interesting aspect of Booth's work is that prior to Booth poverty was seen very much as a morality problem.
25:59And one of the things that he showed was that poverty was not so much a problem of drunkenness or
26:06unwillingness to work.
26:08That was a very, very small part.
26:10That was a very, very small part.
26:10He saw poverty as being a complex problem and needed to be therefore addressed through a whole variety of sources
26:17of information.
26:20Booth's researchers scoured these streets, making decisions about how they colour coded the streets.
26:26The kind of information that they were feeding back into the maps were contained in these extraordinary notebooks where they
26:33wrote down every encounter in every single street.
26:37And they make for fascinating reading to discover not only who they were encountering and what they were seeing, but
26:44how that fed back into the maps.
26:46Here's one entry. It says,
26:47Reach Street, Jamaica Place and Gill Street are a nest of brothels frequented by common seamen of every nationality.
26:56Another, this is a noted thieves resort at Nightingale Lane.
27:00I knocked at the door of number 13 Jamaica Street.
27:04They were a man and a wife, and they kept an opium den.
27:09So what is it that Booth's maps reveal?
27:11Well, for me, what's really interesting is that it reveals that poverty is spread out throughout the city.
27:19So you have pockets of poverty very, very close to areas of great prosperity.
27:25It's showing that even if you were living in the west end of London, for example, you weren't that far
27:32away from situations of severe poverty.
27:34Poverty is just specks of black and dark blue within a sea of much warmer colours, of relative prosperity.
27:45This is something that we can manage, that we can get to grips with, that we can handle.
27:54Booth's extraordinary project provided graphic evidence that helped prompt housing legislation to improve living conditions in Victorian Britain.
28:01It also fuelled a campaign to introduce an old age pension to alleviate poverty.
28:09Booth's maps revealed that more than a third of all Londoners were living in poverty. An awful statistic.
28:16But somehow by putting the problem on a map, Booth made it more manageable.
28:20It seemed less terrifying.
28:22And his maps also convinced Victorian society that something had to be done to help the poor.
28:41In the 20th century, statistical mapping was firmly established as a powerful tool of government.
28:50In 1940, these ordinary American citizens had no idea they were being watched.
29:00Over 4,000 miles away, someone was counting them and plotting them on a statistical map.
29:07And this was the result. A map of America, seemingly rather innocuous, with neat little pie charts showing the percentage
29:16of European immigrants in each state.
29:18And the countries down here that they came from.
29:21This is also a classified map. It says up here in the corner, for official eyes only.
29:26This was a map that was made by the Nazis.
29:32The map was part of a secret mission to flood America with Nazi propaganda.
29:39By 1940, Hitler had already invaded much of Europe. Britain was next on the list.
29:46The British were desperately trying to persuade the Americans to join the war against Nazi Germany.
29:52But President Roosevelt was reluctant to act.
29:56There is no demand for sending an American expeditionary force outside our own border.
30:04There is no intention by any member of your government to send such a force.
30:12You can therefore nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.
30:26The Nazis were determined to bolster Roosevelt's resolve to remain neutral.
30:31And they were leaving nothing to chance.
30:35Using statistics from the latest American census, they were drawing up a map that pinpointed the biggest communities of German
30:42immigrants living in the United States.
30:45The large red segments in these little pie charts identified the best targets for propaganda.
30:53The map revealed that the Nazis should focus their efforts in the rural communities of Missouri, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Texas.
31:04This was where public opinion could be most easily manipulated to oppose American intervention in Europe.
31:11In 1940, this dry statistical map was actually a weapon of war.
31:16Maps were incredibly powerful objects.
31:18They touch the mind, but they also touch the soul.
31:21They magically conjure up places that we've never even seen.
31:24And it's that power which leads them to being exploited or even perverted.
31:41The Nazis were masters of mass manipulation.
31:43But they weren't just using statistical maps as weapons of propaganda.
31:49In occupied Europe, they were also using them as tools of terror.
31:58This is a map of Slovakia from the Second World War, showing the population figures for the local towns and
32:05villages.
32:07But this is also a really sinister map, because the Z's marked here show Roman-Egyptian communities.
32:15And the black dots, here, here, here, and here, show the local Jewish population.
32:28The maps were drawn up in 1941 by a Nazi expert in ethnography.
32:35The Nazis passed them on to the president of the Slovakian puppet government, Jozef Tiso.
32:43Under the Nazis, Tiso had already introduced anti-Semitic legislation to prevent Jews from holding public jobs, attending schools, or
32:52owning property.
32:54Now he was under pressure to go further.
32:59For the Nazis, these maps were blueprints for subsequent policy.
33:03They allowed them, at a glance, to look at the dots and see where the Jewish communities lived in this
33:09area.
33:10And just a year later, in March 1942, they started rounding them up from the towns and villages here.
33:16The Slovakian Jews were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps.
33:30Within six months, 58,000 men, women and children had been taken.
33:45This neat statistical map of Slovakia was being used to drive the so-called final solution.
33:56In the hands of the Nazis, maps had become tools for genocide.
34:27After the Second World War, revelations about Nazi atrocities and the ideological tensions of the Cold War
34:34created a generation suspicious of government.
34:38The authority of maps also came under scrutiny.
34:43In May 1973, a German historian called Arno Peters confronted the map-making establishment.
34:51He denounced the most famous map of the world and said it was distorted by political and cultural prejudice.
35:00This is the map that generations of school kids have grown up with.
35:04It's the famous Mercator projection.
35:06But Peter shocked the world when he announced that this map was quite simply wrong.
35:10He pointed out that Mercator was distorting the size of countries in an attempt to retain their shape.
35:16As a result, Europe looks far more prominent, whereas the developing countries are being downplayed.
35:22If we look at Africa and Greenland, they look about the same size.
35:25But Africa is actually 14 times bigger.
35:29Peters condemned this map as being imperialist and racist.
35:35Peters was no cartographer, but he thought he had the solution.
35:44Taking account of the relative size of each country, he came up with a new formula for representing the globe
35:50on a map.
35:51And he called it the Peters projection.
35:57Peters claimed his map showed the true size of countries for the first time ever.
36:01He dramatically reduced the size of Europe, whilst expanding the size of Africa, elongating South America.
36:10And it's still something of a shock to look at this map and see how large these two continents loom
36:17on the Peters projection.
36:19Peters regarded himself as a champion of what he called the non-white peoples.
36:24And he saw this map as part of a wider project to right the wrongs that he saw as being
36:30perpetrated against those people living in the developing world.
36:48Anno Peters invited nearly 300 members of the international press to the unveiling of his new world map.
36:53The media embraced it with enthusiasm, but professional cartographers were furious at what they saw as the cheek of this
37:00outsider.
37:00Peter. They called the map deceptive, absurd, illogical.
37:04They were clearly really annoyed at what they saw as an untrained cartographer trying to map the world.
37:10And they accused Peters of making a map that was full of errors.
37:16The reaction was very disappointing for Anno Peters.
37:22It was in sharp contrast to the great enthusiasm of the international press.
37:29The map-making establishment saw it as a fundamental criticism of their profession.
37:37Peters was disappointed, even shocked.
37:43But he stayed optimistic and said, this map will prevail because it will succeed internationally.
37:55And the Peters projection did become an international mapping phenomenon.
38:00Anyone who wanted to display their liberal credentials pulled down their mercators and proudly replaced them with the Peters projection.
38:08It was championed by Oxfam, the United Nations and the Catholic Church, and it sold more than 80 million copies
38:15across the world.
38:18But the Peters projection did have distortions of its own.
38:23Despite all the success and adulation, the critics did have a point.
38:27The Peters projection was flawed, and it wasn't even accurate on its own terms.
38:32Peters had made some basic miscalculations, which meant that countries like Chad and Nigeria were twice their actual length.
38:39Did Peters ever accept that there were inaccuracies on the map?
38:44He was certainly prepared to accept mistakes.
38:52But no argument convinced him, because everything had been calculated.
38:59Every point had even been recalculated to a specific formula developed by experts.
39:07He kept on checking, and no mistakes were found.
39:14Arno Peters was attacking other maps for being biased.
39:17Yet he was blind to the fact that the Peters projection was just as distorted by his own political assumptions.
39:26But the Peters projection did do something quite extraordinary.
39:30It finally exploded the myth that maps can ever be 100% accurate, scientific, objective representations of the world.
39:37It showed that maps always have social and political agendas.
39:51Arno Peters not only transformed the way we look at the world, he also changed the way we look at
39:56maps.
39:58There is no such thing as a neutral map, and you're kidding yourself if you think you're a neutral cartographer.
40:04Since the 1970s, radical map makers have been building on Arno Peters' legacy, deliberately using maps to promote alternative views
40:13of the world.
40:16If you think the Peters projection was strange, what about these maps?
40:21These images are so distorted that you can hardly tell that they represent the outlines of countries.
40:28They look more like peculiar pieces of abstract art.
40:32But they represent a very special kind of map, and it's a map with an urgent and very powerful political
40:39agenda.
40:42These images are part of the World Mapper Project, launched in 2005.
40:47They use statistics compiled by the United Nations to redraw the map of the world.
40:53These images draw attention to some of the greatest problems facing humanity in developing countries.
41:00This map shows HIV infection across the globe.
41:04Tragically, Africa dominates the entire map.
41:09India and Southeast Asia are also large.
41:12Europe reduced very small up there.
41:16This one shows refugee destinations, and the shape changes again.
41:21This time, places like Sri Lanka become massively distorted, as does South America, and rather interestingly, so does the Middle
41:29East.
41:32Here, teenage pregnancies.
41:35India now is the most dominant figure, with the highest number of teenage pregnancies, in contrast to Japan, which is
41:44only a speck with the lowest rates.
41:47And finally, this map, infant mortality rates.
41:51Again, India and Southeast Asia loom large.
41:55But the map is once again dominated by Africa, with the largest number of babies dying under the age of
42:02one in the entire world.
42:08What was your aim in making these maps? What were you trying to do?
42:11I thought that now we had all this information about almost everybody in the world, it should be made much
42:17more widely available.
42:18And by available, I mean not just the numbers being available, but the actual picture of what it was showing
42:23being made available, so that people around the world could see what was being counted about them, what was known
42:28about their lives, and then you could decide for yourselves what you felt about it and what you wanted to
42:32do about it.
42:33And that's the power of the map, isn't it? I mean, I'm fascinated by how you see that importance, that
42:40the map does something that text can't do. What is it that the map can give us?
42:44What does the map give us?
42:46The map taps into a whole part of our brain and our imaginations, which text doesn't do. It's like looking
42:53at a face, looking at a picture. You first of all see the kind of eye line of the map,
42:57and it taps into different emotions. I mean, you can't take your ratio of numbers and become that concerned about
43:05it. But when you see a picture, it appears to be real. It's very different.
43:18These maps with their swollen and shrunken countries are a dramatic call to action. They take a mountain of statistics,
43:25which are usually so easy to ignore, and provide shocking clarity, a profound understanding of the most pressing problems that
43:34face our world today.
43:55The world mapper project captures the spirit of the digital age, globally aware, visually sophisticated, and technically innovative.
44:04And when it comes to navigating our way around the planet, today's photoreal online maps from companies like Microsoft and
44:12Google can take us anywhere in the world at the click of a mouse.
44:21From their corporate playground here in Zurich, Google Earth routinely sends out cars with mounted cameras to map our roads,
44:28cameras on tricycles to get into heritage sites, and aerial teams to capture the big picture.
44:36These images are combined with satellite photographs and then wrapped around a 3D model of the Earth to create an
44:43instantly accessible virtual world.
44:46It's the technology that only a few years ago would have been impossible outside of defense departments or the CIA.
44:55And now you have access to that information. And you can fly around the world with very high rates of
45:02frame update, i.e. it looks very smooth.
45:04And there's a massive amount of very clever technology going on behind the scenes.
45:09You can explore as if you were flying over the Alps in a jet fighter from your home, and that's
45:16amazing.
45:19Google Earth has been downloaded by over half a billion people worldwide, and it's no surprise because there's something incredibly
45:26exhilarating about seeing our planet suspended there in space,
45:29hurtling down through the layers and coming to rest in your own street, which is what most people do when
45:36they usually log on to Google Earth.
45:38And this is Oxford. This is where I live. That's my own street, and that's where I get my coffee
45:45in the morning.
45:47This is a miniature version of the Earth at our fingertips. The world now seems open and accessible to all.
45:54Digital maps produced by online companies all over the world are helping to redefine the relationships between global corporations, national
46:02governments, and individual citizens.
46:06One of the things that surprised us was how quickly Google Earth became a tool for people, individuals, organizations to
46:13communicate their idea, whatever they had a concern over.
46:18In the Amazon, there was a tribe that we got to know who had, for many years, avoided civilization.
46:26So they didn't have a culture of writing reports or creating maps, but nevertheless, they were in an area that
46:31was under environmental pressure from logging and so on.
46:35But because they could recognize their local area from images, they were able to use Google Earth as a tool
46:41to delineate their tribal areas and then use that information then to fight their case.
46:52Maps have also been used to mobilize international public opinion.
46:57In places like Darfur, I mean, the mapping has taken on even more political resonance, hasn't it?
47:02Yeah, so a few years ago when the atrocities were happening in Darfur, we worked with an organization in the
47:10United States to actually show people pictures of villages that had been burned.
47:15You could actually see the circles that were the people's huts that had been burned.
47:19And that had a huge human impact.
47:26For hundreds of years, maps have been used to do so much more than help us navigate around the globe.
47:33From the spiritual meditations of the medieval Catholic Church to Victorian anxieties about civilization, poverty and disease.
47:44Maps have been used to help us carve up, manipulate and make sense of the world.
47:50Digital maps are now being used in the same way.
47:54They feed our hunger for instant information and define our fears for the future of the world in the 21st
48:01century.
48:02Human beings have been making maps of one sort or another ever since we first walked the Earth.
48:07And what I've always loved about them is the fact that they define our world rather than simply reflecting it.
48:13And they'll continue to shape who we are and what we do as humans, whatever our future.
48:18So thank you for your work.
48:48Oh, my God.
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