Collective Atlas

Collective Atlas invites New Yorkers to map places in the city that matter to them, entirely from memory. These maps range from meticulous street grids to abstract gestures. Even when participants map the same place, the drawings reveal how differently we hold space in memory: what stands out, what fades, what stretches, or distorts.

Each hand-drawn map reflects a personal geography that disrupts the fixity of conventional maps, challenging assumptions about orientation, accuracy, and authority. Together, they form an atlas of the city as lived rather than prescribed, demonstrating that mapping is not only technical, but personal, cultural, and emotional. Visitors are invited to contribute their own maps to add to the archive, and see, side by side, how diverse our visualizations of place can be.

Collective Atlas is an inversion of power: maps become bottom-up acts of storytelling instead of top-down tools of surveillance and control. In the context of public interest technology, it reframes mapping as a tool of justice and imagination, challenging extractive, data-driven models with intimate, human-scale knowledge.

Previously presented at BetaNYC’s Open Data Week, the work has since traveled across the city through pop-ups, public schools, and artist-led community events.

Collective Atlas is presented by Queenie Wu.