Rediscovering the World: Map Transformations of Human and Physical Space

Abstract

Dr. Hennig’s work builds on the work of Arno Peter’s, the cartographer whose equal-land area projection has been adopted by various United Nation bodies and is put forward as the main alternative to the Mercator projection that so distorts area to allow it to preserve compass directions as straight lines. On Hennig’s pro- jections all the compass lines curve as you travel. The rose line winds its way between populations rather than cutting the world in half. He also relies on the earlier work of Dr. Mark Newman and the recent availability of high quality global population and other data to construct the new images shown in this thesis. This work could not have been carried out a few years ago. It produces images which could be used to challenge the new conventional depictions of the globe. Here, for the first time in detail, are shown the countries of the world reprojected by their populations, where everybody’s location is used to stretch the map, producing the projection in which all people are represented as equal. Hennig’s new projections allow us to find the centre of humanity, to see how we live in relation to everyone else. It allows us to plot everything else upon that projection, to see how water falls onto people (rather than land), to see how roads run through towns, not fields. To see the normal maps as an antiquated anomaly that you might use if you were to undertake some unusual activity such as walking in the wilderness or flying in a hot air balloon, but not something for general use.