No, they toilets don't spin opposite of the northern hemisphere.

October 20, 2009 7:47 PM

I was just recently in Buenos Aires. The Time Out Guide had the maps in the back oriented with north facing down. Why? I would think southern hemisphere maps would still face north up due to magnetic north and wayfinding with a compass. Was this just a case of Time Out being wrong/different/thinking logically that the south pole would be the desired direction of orientation in the southern hemisphere? And yes, we were perpetually lost until we flipped the guide upside down and west/east left/right were as they should be.
posted by Keith Talent to travel & transportation (20 comments total)

I have no idea why they'd do that, but as someone who's lived most of their life in the Southern hemisphere, let me assure you that we default to having (true) North be at the top of the map.
posted by pompomtom at 7:51 PM on October 20

I have been living in Buenos Aires for about 4 weeks now, and some of the maps I've gotten my hands on have the city oriented in a weird way, too. Sometimes, in order to fit a specific section of the city onto one page, they had to change the orientation. Perhaps that was the case for your maps, too? I have yet to see a map here that specifically oriented the south pole as "up."
posted by inatizzy at 7:59 PM on October 20

Data point: Lonely Planet Argentina maps have North facing up.
posted by smackfu at 8:12 PM on October 20

inatizzy: Maps with south-as-up and north-as-up would have the same shape.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:20 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]

not sure but the best map to use there is the Guia T!
posted by pinto at 8:20 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]

Further data point; Other maps were oriented in the traditional (read correct) direction. The Time Out guide has north facing approx. 4 o'clock.
posted by Keith Talent at 8:25 PM on October 20

I expect this is a concession to page layout. It's not all that uncommon to have large scale (read: small geographic area) maps with a compass rose indicating north, whether that's up on the page or elsewhere.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 8:32 PM on October 20

I was also in Buenos Aires recently, and had issues with maps being rotated strangely. As others have suggested, with the maps I had it was just to fit the greatest part of the city centre onto a single page. The place itself is oriented diagonally - with the main axis of the city roughly on a NW - SE orientation, parallel to the shore of the River Plate.

Melbourne has a similar problem, even though it doesn't have any geographical features behind its wonky orientation; I think they just like to try to be different there.

For whatever it's worth, when I was in New Caledonia, they had (all?) their maps rotated 90 degrees, with North to either the right or the left; I forget which. I'm not sure if this is a Gallic thing, but something deep within my memory tells me that certain cultures traditionally have North-South on the horizontal axis.
posted by UbuRoivas at 8:50 PM on October 20

I expect this is a concession to page layout.

I recently planned a conference at a resort in Virginia. I was so disoriented when I actually got on site, until I realized that the map of the property that I had been using for months had North on the bottom. There wasn't even a compass rose indicating that the orientation was switched from most maps.

I asked the property, and they told me it was for page layout. Looking at it again, it made sense. By turning the map upside down, many of the map labels (names of buildings/streets/etc.) fit better and more legibly because of their shapes. (I told them they should probably add a compass notation of some kind, though.)

So yea. Probably page layout issues, or labeling of map features issues, I would guess.
posted by gemmy at 8:54 PM on October 20

I was just in BA about a year ago and remember subway maps in particular being quite awkwardly arranged.

The Time Out website says "Maps are rarely oriented north, instead flipping the city to show the river to the south. In fact, Avenida 9 de Julio, the city's main thoroughfare, runs north-south." though I have no idea where they got that info from.

Googling "Buenos Aires map" returns mostly conventional north-south orientations, and a few with north facing the right (which is how I remember the subway map).

Also, I can't imagine how a layout would be any easier rotated 180 degrees.
posted by AtomicBee at 9:06 PM on October 20

OT:

Ubu: You've probably got a map where they're lining the Hoddle Grid up with the page.
posted by pompomtom at 9:52 PM on October 20

I would think southern hemisphere maps would still face north up due to magnetic north and wayfinding with a compass.

A compass points South, as well as North. Even North of the equator.
posted by Monday at 2:40 AM on October 21

I spent last spring in BA and frequently got confused when shifting from map to map, especially if the river wasn't visible on the page/fold. Orientation seemed to vary on almost every map I used, and then I'd use Google maps and be all "what?" Wow I miss that place.
posted by Mngo at 4:57 AM on October 21

madcaptenor: inatizzy, Maps with south-as-up and north-as-up would have the same shape.

Huh? Unless a city section is symmetrical from north to south, how could this possibly be true? Or are you just speaking of shape regardless of position, i.e. the pure shape of a map regardless of its orientation on a page? But inatizzy was talking about orientation, not shape!
posted by koeselitz at 5:04 AM on October 21

I was just in BA about a year ago and remember subway maps in particular being quite awkwardly arranged.

Not a fair comparison. In graphic design (and map design) terms, a subway "map" isn't a street map at all, it's a much more representative diagram. The actual station arrangements in London, New York or other subways are very, very different than what the diagram shows. It doesn't matter, either, when you think about how you use a subway. Making it "accurate" would also make it more confusing.

As for the Time Out map in the question: just a bad/lazy design choice. I've seen a few maps like this, in travel books especially, and not just southern hemisphere ones. Usually, it's a hacky thing to do to fit your titles and labels. Spending more time and care could make an attractive and useful map without wacky orientation and the usability confusions that ensue.

The one time it's acceptable, IMHO, is when it's a change to accommodate a city that has a strong and rational grid that isn't quite true. For example, Manhattan's avenues don't run perfectly north-south (they're almost 30 degrees off that), but almost every printed map shows them as running directly N-S, and every person in the city maps it that way mentally. Uptown is north, in a common sense way, not north-northeast, and we don't call it the West-Sorta-Northwest Side, right?

This does not excuse huge, 180ish degree rotations like your BA map, though. It's possible they're just being cute to remind northern travelers where they really are. But that's still bad.

Bad map.
posted by rokusan at 5:18 AM on October 21

Can you see the Southern Cross constellation from there? In the northern hemisphere, we use the Big Dipper/Little Dipper/Pole Star to find north, which is much better than a compass when traveling, because there's no magnetic deviation, which skews the compass different ways in different places.
posted by Ery at 6:56 AM on October 21

could it be a printing/binding error? do you know if all of the TimeOut books are like that?

i bought a copy of Ginsberg's "Howl" for a course i was taking on banned books and 'dangerous' art and when i sat down to read it and make notes, i noticed that all of the pages were upside down. i wrote down some thoughts about how interesting that was, and made a note to ask how subversive that would have seemed at the time of publication. basically, i thought, "oh, Ginsberg! good one!"

when i asked in the seminar what everyone thought of the printing job, i got a few blank stares and some raised eyebrows. turns out it was just my copy that was faulty. so much for subversive printing strategies.
posted by gursky at 8:13 AM on October 21

North as up is just a convention. It's no more "correct" than any other orientation. When you hold a compass, it doesn't point "up", it points forward and backward, both north and south. North being up is a standard, traditional convention, but it's a bit much to call it "correct" and to call other orientations "wrong".
posted by secretseasons at 10:41 AM on October 21

This seems to be a specific convention that developed in Buenos Aires.

I pondered for a few minutes before I thought to look at the orientation axis on the map, and there I found that, in this map of Buenos Aires, the North was at the bottom right of the map and the South was at the top left. This map, the standard one of the city, does not follow cartographic conventions of North South. That convention naturalizes the North South orientation and renders the position of the viewer irrelevant. But in a city, the map works only in relation to where you are . Thus, many maps of cities position physical markers (mountains, water) along the top or bottom of the map in order to allow their readers an obvious point of reference in their movement through the city. In the Buenos Aires map, the river, as the only topographical marker in this flat city, is run alongside the bottom, so that the city is represented as one would approach it by land. This choice already provides an itinerary, informing the ways in which the city will be travelled. -- Jorge Macchi's Fracture Narratives of Buenos Aires

When examining a landscape, scale can be intuited from trees, houses and cars. Not so with a map. Even such a simple thing as a north arrow is crucial. It may seem obvious that the top of a map should point north but this might not be the case. The supposition that “up” or “top” is automatically north is a cultural bias.1 It is at least as reasonable to orient a map east with the rising sun; in fact this is the origin of the words orient and orientation (Harper, 2001). Furthermore, an oddly shaped or elongated region may be rotated to better fit onto a piece of paper, reducing coverage outside the region of interest. A map may be rotated for other reasons as well, perhaps to correspond with the intended audience’s mental map of the world. The Buenos Aires map is oriented such that it is nearly “upside-down”. -- Improving the Cartographic Quality and Design of Greenmaps

Maps are generally oriented with the river at the top, rather than the north to south pattern you might be used to, so keep that in mind. Many tourists get lost thinking the top of their map is north and walking in the wrong direction. -- Frommers

The convention of having north at the top of maps dates back to Ptolemy, although there have been notable exceptions.
posted by dhartung at 12:50 PM on October 21 [2 favorites]

Many maps of Hilo, Hawaii, feature south kinda at the bottom, and I've confirmed that at least one local visualizes the town this way. It may have to do with south being more-or-less uphill, so map-up corresponds with real-world-up.
posted by secretseasons at 1:16 PM on October 21