Commission on national atlases

Summary

This article reviews the establishment, activities, achievements, and future priorities of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on National Atlases. Founded in 1956 to promote the preparation, improvement, and possible standardization of national atlases, the Commission expanded its remit to comprehensive regional atlases in 1960 and became permanent in 1964. Drawing on institutional records, publications, plenary meetings, exhibitions, bibliographies, and examples of atlas production worldwide, the article focuses particularly on the Commission’s work during 1969–1972. Its principal mechanisms for international knowledge exchange included synthetic monographs, thematic working-group studies, analyses of individual atlases, biennial reports and exhibitions, and regularly updated bibliographic compilations. Major outputs addressed small-scale evaluation maps of natural conditions, methods for constructing physical-environment sections of Soviet regional atlases, synthetic population and economic mapping, and the standardization of agricultural maps. The Madrid plenary meeting of 1970 and international atlas exhibitions in Madrid and Budapest provided opportunities to assess fourteen years of work and define subsequent objectives. A survey of atlas production demonstrates rapid worldwide growth in national and regional atlases, including substantial activity in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and developing countries. A notable trend was the emergence of atlases for functional regions extending beyond administrative boundaries, especially areas targeted for initial development, accelerated growth, resource exploitation, restoration, or regional planning. The article argues that the scientific and technological revolution increased both the volume of spatial information and the practical significance of comprehensive atlases. Such atlases were no longer merely repositories of geographical knowledge; they had become instruments for resource management, environmental protection, territorial organization, economic planning, and regional development. This transformation created demand for evaluative, predictive, and other application-oriented map types. For its next term, the Commission should retain the improvement of national and regional atlases as its central mission while strengthening written documentation at biennial meetings, researching atlas purposes and users, reducing production and revision costs, developing new thematic and synthetic maps, continuing bibliographic work, and coordinating with the International Cartographic Association and relevant IGU commissions. Its recommendations should be treated not as fixed doctrine but as internationally synthesized experience and a flexible foundation for innovation.