Lecture & MapLab
Redrawing Borders, Reimagining Cities
What if everything we think we know about borders and cities on the map is misleading?
Join us for a provoking 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.
This seminar explores the following questions
- How are borders and cities typically mapped—and why does that matter?
- What does dominant visual storytelling of countries and cities do to policy, identity, and imagination?
- How are the Dutch border and cities entangled in cross-border networks and flows?
- How do people actually experience borders and cities through movement, connection, memory, and everyday life?
- Where are the Dutch borderscapes really located—economically, socially, and demographically—through its everyday connections, dependencies, and flows?
- And if not as dots on a map, where are Dutch urbanscapes really located—deeply entangled as they are in international networks of trade, migration, and culture?
- What new maps do we need for a more open, connected, and inclusive future ?
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.
| Ticket Type | Price | Cart |
|---|---|---|
| MapLab with Henk van Houtum (Member Discount) | ||
| MapLab with Henk van Houtum | Reguliere prijs €15.00 incl.VAT | |
| MapLab with Henk van Houtum (Student price) |
Henk van Houtum
Prof. Dr. Henk van Houtum is a leading expert in border studies, serving as Professor of Political Geography and Geopolitics at Radboud University Nijmegen. He co-founded and directs the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, where his interdisciplinary work explores the ethics and philosophy of borders, European geopolitics, and the cartography of borders and migration. His most recent book, Free the Map, advocates for a new visual language in representing borders and migration. Van Houtum is a frequent contributor to national and international media, offering critical insights on contemporary border issues.
Free The Map
A map is more than a tool—it is a proposition, a visual story we tell about the world and our place in it. Yet most maps still echo a single, outdated narrative: the world divided neatly into bordered nation-states. From school atlases to news graphics, this state-centric design—rooted in Mercator’s 16th-century projection for colonial navigation—continues to shape how we imagine space, identity, and power today. The world remains largely represented as state-appropriated territories, surrounded by static linear boundaries that envision homogeneous nation-states. Tellingly, the migration of ‘Others’ is predominantly represented as unidirectional arrows invading these state-containers. Read more here.
The consequence of this hegemonic representation is that, despite critical border and migration studies convincingly establishing that borders and migration are dynamic, relational processes, standard cartography systematically normalizes nationalism and nativism, and suppresses demographic diversity, international interdependencies, human experiences, and the complex socio-economic, technological and legal entanglements that shape geographical reality. In this book Van Houtum examines the profound impact of this visual regime and gives an overview of innovative artistic and cartographic counter-mapping practices that seek to humanize and mobilize the map. Free the map ends with a call to action. Various artists and cartographers offer exciting ready-to-use mapping challenges for education and public Maplabs. Order Here
Session overview
13:00: Welcome and Introduction to School of the city
13:00: Welcome from the Delta metropolis association
13:10: Lecture ‘Free the Map’ by Henk van Houtum
14:00: Maplab: the remapping of borderscapes and urbanscapes
15:00: Closing reflections
15:30: Drinks
