Essay by Akash Wadhwani: “On the morning of February 6, 2023, an earthquake killed more than fifty thousand people in Türkiye and Syria. I spent a week inside the edit history of the world’s free map, reading what the internet did that morning. I haven’t stopped thinking about it…
Why would a city of half a million people be missing from the map? That sounded impossible to me in 2023, so I went and looked it up, and the answer turns out to be money, twice.
Commercial maps are built where the money is. Google and Apple map roads because cars navigate them, and they map shops because businesses pay to be found. That works beautifully in London or Los Angeles. In a working-class Turkish city, and in the Syrian towns across the border, there is no ad revenue in knowing where each house stands, so no company ever paid to find out. The satellites photograph everything, but a photograph is not a map. Someone still has to look at the pixels and say: this shape is a building, this line is the road that reaches it.
The second reason surprised me more. Even where a commercial map looks complete, rescue teams mostly cannot use it. They can’t download it onto a GPS unit and carry it into a zone where the internet is down. They can’t count its buildings to estimate how many people might be trapped in a district. The data belongs to the company, and the license says no. OpenStreetMap is the exception, and it is the exception on purpose: it is the Wikipedia of maps, free for anyone to copy, carry, and analyse. When things go wrong, it is the map that gets used. It just has to be drawn first, by someone.
That morning, rescue teams were already in the air. They were flying toward a city the free map could not yet describe.
You cannot search rubble you don’t know exists…(More)”.
