By Liz DiLuzio

I'll never forget the day I learned I had been walking over the remains of fifteen thousand people for years without knowing it.

I was five years into living in New York City, walking through Lower Manhattan on my way to teach a class at DCAS. I had made the walk many times. Office towers, government buildings, the federal complex, more office towers. The kind of walk you stop noticing.

The pattern of red and green lights that morning sent me down a different block than I had traveled before. Suddenly the monotony of a Lower Manhattan block shifted. The scenery opened into green space. Trees. A wide stone wall, a low circular structure, room to breathe in a part of the city that does not usually offer it. I paused, because the scene somehow demanded it.

It was the African Burial Ground. Beneath my feet were the remains of free and enslaved Black Americans, denied burial in the city's churchyards and laid to rest here, outside the colonial settlement's boundary. The site held their graves for more than a century before it was paved over and built upon. It was rediscovered in 1991 during construction of the federal building next door. The monument I was standing in front of is the city's acknowledgment of what is underneath, and of how it got there.

I stood there for a long while. I had seen a lot of maps of New York by then. I'd used dozens of street maps for navigating and subway maps for getting in and out. I'd created asset maps to help communities find collaborators, and maps showing concentrations of need so city workers would know where to direct their services. None of them laid this bare.

The truth is, a map shows you what its maker chose to show you. Every map is a frame around a place and an argument about what matters.

The city builders who chose to mark the burial ground rather than bury it again did something a responsible mapmaker does: acknowledged the context around what their work is leaving out.

A responsible map reader, in turn, has the wisdom to know what each map is and is not telling them, and what it would take to see the rest.

Whether you make maps yourself or read them in the work of others, this brief is about the choices we make, and the choices we have to notice.

3 Ideas from Me

1. Place describes need. It does not explain it.
A map that shows concentrated disadvantage tells you the where. It does not tell you the why. When the why is left unspoken, the map reads like a description of the community rather than a description of what was done to it. Redlining, school funding tied to property taxes, environmental siting, decades of disinvestment — these are the forces that produced the pattern on the page. When you create or share a map in your work, pair it with language that names them.

2. The boundary you choose is the story you tell.
The same dataset can produce different findings depending on whether you map it by census tract, zip code, council district, or service area. None of these boundaries are neutral. Census tracts are statistical conveniences. Zip codes are postal artifacts. Service areas reflect the choices an organization or agency has already made about who counts as inside. The conclusion the reader draws is often set before the data are even read. Be discriminating about the unit, whether you are choosing it yourself or using a map someone else made. If the available framings do not carry the story your work requires, commission a different one or make it yourself. Then, be sure to name the boundary used and why it was chosen. Treat that choice as part of the analysis rather than a footnote to it.

3. The annotation is part of the map.
A map usually comes with a title, a legend, and a source line. Together, these features tell the reader what they are looking at. What they don't tell the reader is what to make of it. That is where three additional sentences can do real work: one sentence to name the boundary you chose and why, a second to name the forces that produced the pattern on the page, and a third to name the limits of what the map is able to show. This small addition makes the difference between a visual that describes and one that informs.

2 Quotes from Others

“Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things."

{Waldo Tobler}

"Places are processes, not things."

{Doreen Massey}

1 Question for You

What place-based story isn't yet told in your work that a map could help to convey?

Interested in going deeper? 

The hardest part of mapping is making the first one. If you've always wanted to learn but haven't yet had the opportunity, June is your month. Put It on a Map: Creating a Simple Choropleth from Program Data walks you through joining your program data to a geographic layer and producing a clean map you can put in front of a funder, a board, or a community partner. The practice centers on the data prep step, since matching geographic identifiers correctly is where most first attempts break. Early registration is open for exclusively for newsletter readers. You can learn more and reserve your spot here.