A map of a city appears to offer a view from nowhere. Streets become lines, parks become green patches, and neighbourhoods acquire clean edges. This abstraction is useful: a visitor can find a station without knowing the arguments that preceded its construction. Yet every map begins with a decision about what deserves to be visible. A transport map records routes and connections; it rarely records the cost of a fare or the unease a passenger might feel at an empty stop. The map is accurate within the terms it has chosen.
It is tempting, then, to demand a more complete map. Add rents, walking times, public toilets and the places where people gather, and the city seems to return to the page. But completeness is not simply a matter of accumulating detail. A place that offers welcome to one resident may suggest exclusion to another. Their accounts need not cancel each other out, yet they cannot always be reduced to a single symbol. Some differences are differences of experience, rather than gaps in a survey.
Community mapping projects respond by inviting residents to record what official maps omit. Their value is not that they finally produce a map without a point of view. The participants must still choose categories, resolve disagreements and decide which contributions to display. A meeting held on a weekday afternoon may exclude precisely the workers whose routes are least understood. Participation changes who can influence the map; it does not remove the need to ask who remains unheard.
A useful map, therefore, need not pretend to be the last word on a place. It can make its purpose visible, explain its limits and remain open to revision. This is more demanding than declaring all maps equally partial and therefore equally untrustworthy. A map that helps a wheelchair user identify an accessible route can be judged by whether that route is usable. Its incompleteness does not excuse a broken promise. The question is not whether a map leaves something out, but whether its omissions conceal a limitation that matters to the person relying on it.