A Brief Note on Gall-Peters Projections

The rarely-seen Gall-Peters projection is an equal-area map projection. Unlike more commonly encountered representations of our world, the Gall-Peters projection has the advantage of allowing true comparison of area-size from one part of the globe to the next, irrespective of latitude. One striking result of projecting our world using this true area representation is that regions that lie far from the equator, such as Europe and North America, shrink markedly relative to equatorial regions. Standard map projections condition us to overestimate the size of Europe, Canada and the United States relative to equatorial countries in Africa and South America. Furthermore, there is no reason why ‘north’ should be ‘up’, other than the fact that European cartographers originally mapped from a Eurocentric perspective.

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