Easily missed on the back side of the November ballots that brought Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion was a proposal for a new map of New York City. Proposal 5, as it was called, was among the least noticed initiatives that New Yorkers were asked to vote on—yet, as happens with most proposals that make it to the ballot, a majority of New Yorkers voted for it, probably without really knowing what it meant, but approving it, in the New York manner, mostly for having made it there at all. It’s the same spirit with which we duly tick off our approval of judges and assemblypersons whose names we barely know and whose positions we can only guess at.

Proposal 5 was actually a bit of skilled electoral craft on the part of the city’s map functionaries. (They exist.) There has been a digitized map of New York for nearly twenty-five years. The extended map, however, will add to its already rich inventory of features some street-specific ones that, for ancient and complicated reasons, have been jealously guarded on thousands of paper maps by the five borough presidents. Though no one in the know will say, exactly, that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps, you do get the strong impression that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps. Now street names, lines, and widths across the city will all be available on one consolidated official digital map.

The crazy spaghetti of subterranean New York—the cables and the water mains and the angles at which a sewer slants downward, as it must—will be there for the asking. If an asteroid strikes a street corner in the Bronx, emergency workers will be able to find out where the power lines run nearby, how close a passing subway might be, and the address of the nearest diner where they can get a coffee. Property lines will be more distinct, which may make it easier to build new housing; the potential degradation of the city’s shores by climate change will be more trackable and treatable. We will better know who we are by knowing where we are.

In truth, the mysteries and compromises of mapping New York are evident every day. Consider the new subway map, which recently replaced the one long familiar in train cars. (It is, in fact, a retro design, returning to the graphic premises of a short-lived but snazzy map from the nineteen-seventies.) The new map broadens the ribbons marking the routes, intending to show how the lines run, instead of giving, as the previous map did, a clear sense of where they go on the city’s grid. On the old map, you could tell that the B and the F trains ran along Sixth Avenue without easily seeing which stops the F served that the B skipped.

On the new map, you can readily see where each train stops, but with less of a sense of where you are on the grid. Central Park, for instance, has been reduced to a small, deformed square. This change is not as helpful to tourists as it is meant to be, but, then, locals secretly think that, if you don’t know where the B train runs, you shouldn’t be on it. (Anyway, locals and tourists alike, seeking some new destination, will ultimately turn to their phones, on which the cooing G.P.S. lady will tell them how to get there.)

Maps become less perfect, even as they attempt to become more perfect. In Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” we learn of a map, described by an ambitious philosopher, that increases in scale bit by bit until it’s the same size as the terrain it represents. Unable to roll the map out, its creators cheerfully realize that the country itself can serve as its own map. Perhaps the most beloved map in recent decades was Saul Steinberg’s view of New York, initially a cover for this magazine. In the guise of a map, it captured a mentality: New Yorkers see anything beyond Eleventh Avenue as blank, uncharted wilderness. Steinberg’s point was not that his fellow New Yorkers were provincial but that all maps record a state of mind. (Indeed, on the Steinbergian map of today’s New York state of mind, many Brooklyn neighborhoods would loom as large as his West Side avenues did.)

Even the current redistricting battle reveals the constant paradox: we draw firm lines around a fluctuating reality. The intention in Texas, recently green-lighted by the Supreme Court, was to redraw the congressional map to make it easier for Republicans to win more districts, however absurd the boundaries. But the shifting allegiances of the people within those boundaries may thwart the designers’ aim. The Latinos grouped together who were expected to vote Republican may, after the mass mobilization of ICE and the implementation of other anti-immigrant policies, no longer do so. The map itself can’t capture the changing views of the people who populate it.

“The map is not the territory” is by now a truism, but the more important truth is that the territory is inarticulate without a map to know it by. Maps are the ideal metaphor for our models of what the world might be. A new political map of New York City awaits us—“slight left turn ahead,” as the G.P.S. lady would say, unless she pauses and issues an unsettling “recalculating” alert.

And so for the map of the country. We live in a time when the chart of the nation, its recognizable edges and worn paths, has been largely erased and replaced with one that calls to mind medieval maps, with misshapen horizons, weirdly distorted territories, and dragons lurking beyond the borders. The primary feeling that many of us currently experience is not merely distress but profound disorientation. We not only don’t like where we are; we don’t know where we are. Once reliable routes to reality have been cut off.

It helps to know where we’re going before we get there. If there is a consoling reflection in this season, it is that all good maps, like the digitized city map, turn out to be shared work, made by many hands over a long period of time. Drawing a plan of our plans is the necessary task of the approaching year, as an act of collective imagination and common hope. ♦