Prior to reading William Rankin’s Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World, I thought I loved maps. Turns out, they can be problematic and misleading in ways I hadn’t imagined, to say nothing of what I did imagine.
In 2010, a suburban Chicago school teacher reached out to Rankin, an associate professor of history at Yale University. The teacher had assigned his eighth-grade students to read Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, the 1992 nonfiction classic that tells the story of two boys growing up in the projects on Chicago’s West Side. The teacher wanted to help his students understand racialized poverty and asked them to create maps, which he shared with Rankin. He wrote to Rankin because he hoped the cartographer would redraw the students’ maps to be more polished. Rankin agreed to help. In reviewing the students’ work, he saw they relied on the city’s ward map to shade in racial and ethnic concentrations. For Rankin, the problem was that the ward map, created in the 1920s, did not capture what he saw in the recent census data. Filling in the 50 wards with patterns and colors to indicate racial and ethnic difference failed to capture nuances in the “city of neighborhoods”—a catchy moniker some critique for rationalizing segregation in Chicago. Rankin’s solution was to use block-by-block census data to create a map that included the city’s wards while being overlaid with dense fields of dots in different colors to denote self-reported racial and ethnic identity. Unlike the color-blocked ward map, which naturalizes human-made boundaries, the dots show subtle transitions in the distribution of people. Rankin shared his map with the teacher—“That one really makes the segregation pop, doesn’t it?”—and posted it to his website. Rankin’s graphic put him on the map, so to speak, as a “genius of cartography.”
The 2010 Chicago map powerfully demonstrates the impact that seemingly simple alterations in graphics can have on representing and interpreting information. When the data is restricted to wards, the map shows segregation as a jigsaw puzzle with neighborhood borders for enforcing segregation. Consider a notorious discriminatory result of this partitioning: “redlining,” a practice lasting from about the 1930s to the early 1970s where Black and non-white residents were prohibited from buying, leasing, or inhabiting property in restricted “whites-only” areas.
Radical Cartography is organized into seven chapters, each dedicated to addressing basic features of modern maps: boundaries, layers, people, projections, color, scale, and time. Each feature, says Rankin, is unavoidably political. For example, in the “People” chapter, Rankin examines the map of slavery Abraham Lincoln relied on for military strategy during the Civil War. The map indicated enslaved people as percent of total population by county, which did not reflect where the greatest number of people were being held. Had the same data been used instead to plot a map showing the population density of enslaved people across the country, the resulting map would have more accurately reflected where most enslaved people lived. Lincoln’s focus on percentage of population by county meant that more sparsely populated areas such as Texas and Florida received greater attention for Emancipation over border states Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maryland where more than 20 percent of the total enslaved population lived. So, what is a budding cartographer to do?
First, Rankin recognizes “all data is flawed data” and second, that no one map can offer a copy of reality. He suggests maps as a means for translating, filtering, and providing a partial view of the world to address a specific purpose. For the author, the best maps are neither too precise nor too imprecise. Radical Cartography is Rankin’s Goldilocks solution.
Radical Cartography addresses general audiences yet for readers such as this one—well-read folks who enjoy maps while knowing little about cartography—the text and quantity of information can be overwhelming. Coming in at 304 pages with more than 150 full-color maps, nearly every sentence and image is loaded with important information. For this novice, some sentences required multiple re-readings:
“This also means that I’m again confounding Jacques Bertin’s ideal of monosemic clarity, since I’ve prioritized the visual denominator by introducing (or perhaps acknowledging) uncertainty in the visual numerator, with basic acts of data reading—how many people live in Baltimore, what percent are enslaved in Chatham County—giving only approximate results.”
Lines like this had me flipping back to refresh my memory on unfamiliar terms and historical figures. The well-reasoned arguments are important, though a commitment to comprehension is not for the faint of heart. By Chapter Six, I began to understand Rankin’s unwillingness to simplify for readers. In discussing Richard Wurman’s contributions to modern mapping, Rankin informs readers Wurman launched the TED talk conference series in 1984:
“The standard critique of TED is that the eighteen-minute lectures—with their dramatic delivery, professional production, and somewhat cloying narratives of obstacles overcome—inherently simplify complex topics and leave the audience with an inflated sense of their own comprehension. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
Radical Cartography readers are unlikely to be in danger of completing the book with an inflated sense of their own comprehension. For my part, I took away some key points, though I mostly felt more ignorant than when I began. The illustrations and side-by-side comparative maps are this book’s greatest assets, as they beautifully capture Rankin’s points about the power of maps.
NONFICTION
by William Rankin
Viking
Published on November 11, 2025
