Redrawing Borders, Reimagining Cities
Workshop
What if everything we think we know about borders and cities on the map is misleading?
Join us for a provocative lecture and hands-on MapLab that invites you to see the map—and the world—differently. Based on his new book Free the Map, Prof. Henk van Houtum challenges conventional cartographies that reduce countries to linearly enclosed, static containers and cities to anonymous dots. Such maps do not reflect reality—they shape it.
Borders are not fixed lines. Cities are not isolated points. They are part of dense networks—of people, goods, data, finance, and ideas. And yet, standard maps often conceal these connections, reinforcing rigid territorial thinking that does not match the world we live in. What is more, these representations – with its emphasis only on territory – overlook how people actually experience space.
Together, we will question the map’s default settings and experiment with alternatives—collaborative, imaginative, and grounded in lived geographies. You will be invited to draw, rethink, and engage in a speculative cartography that reflects how we actually live, move, and connect across space.
This is not just a lecture—it is a space to reflect, imagine, and design more inclusive ways of seeing the world. And a call to redraw the frame. Let’s free the map.