The hidden theory in Google Maps
A Georgian idea behind modern digital mapping
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Georgian theorist-cartographer Alexander Aslanikashvili came up with the concept of metacartography, shifting mapmaking from a technical craft to a theoretical science. It exposed contradictions between “just making maps” and the deeper scientific principles behind how space is represented. If Cassini taught us how to measure the world, metacartography teaches us how maps decide what the world is.
The fact that it came about at the same time as French theorists like Foucault were shifting attention from brute facts to how knowledge is structured may not be a coincidence. Aslanikashvili was asking who defines space, by what rules, and for what purpose. If maps are ideas and not just tools, then they shape perception, power, identity, and knowledge, and they also become products of their time rather than some atemporal representation of reality.
Even if the phrase is overused currently, metacartography basically formalizes the “the map is not the territory” concept, but in a meta way that applies it to cartography itself, and theorizes upon it, treating maps as models of real space rather than mathematically perfect representations. Cartography was ignoring deeper philosophical questions about what space is and how humans understand it.
Aslanikashvili splits cartography into three levels, or strata: the Intervention stratum reflects real-world space and phenomena; the Object stratum looks at actual maps (as communication, models, or critiques of reality); and Metastratum represents the language of maps itself, which Aslanikashvili treats as the true theoretical subject of cartography, expressed through the idea of an ideal map.
What the Georgian theorist anticipated is the world of digital mapping, where maps are no longer static images but relational systems that decide what matters (what’s searchable, what’s visible and what’s ignored). Technology like GPS, GIS, and algorithmic maps reflect reality while actively structuring it. Metacartography explains why this happens at a conceptual level, decades before the technology existed.
Sources
1 - Semiotics from Maps to the Digital Earth: Problems and Challenges
2 - Metacartography of A. Aslanikashvili and Relational Cartography