Free the Map: Redrawing Borders & Reimagining Cities with Henk van Houtum

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.

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.