The Map Room

Mark Tully writes with a link to the above video, part of the Visualizing Early Washington DC project, which I’ve seen before but (as has sometimes happened) I never seem to have gotten round to posting it. Here’s a description of the project:

UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC) is working to re-create Washington DC in its early years 1790-1820. Remarkably little visual information remains from this time period. What began as a simple effort to use 3D digital re-creation and display techniques has become full-scale research to uncover the original landscape. In 1791, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant arrived in Georgetown Maryland with orders from President George Washington to lay out the new Federal City. What did he actually see as he rode the land on horseback? This is just one question that we are trying to answer.

One of the more unique interactive city maps I have seen to date is the Reykjavík Center Map, an online map of Iceland’s capital. Yes, it’s a pushpin map, but it uses an isometric projection (which I’ve seen in some Chinese maps) and the base map is a veritable work of art — it’s not at all computer generated, and it looks like a watercolour. Snorri Þór Tryggvason, who worked on the map with some friends and sent me the link, wrote, “The mapmaking took two years and over 3,000 hours to complete,” and I believe him.

The Washington Post on the upcoming redesign of the Washington Metro system map: “More than three decades ago, Lance Wyman designed the Metro map’s iconic interlocking colored lines, which have become the symbol of the transit system for millions of Washington commuters and tourists. Now he’s been hired to give it a makeover.” Via @jpmaps.

Meanwhile, there has been an unofficial competition to design the next map of the Washington Metro. Announcement here, entries here; voting closed last month. (Thanks to DK for the tip.)

On The Atlantic’s website, a slideshow comparing modern-day satellite images of cities with city maps from the 1572 Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg. It’s not as effective as you might think: the atlas plates haven’t been georeferenced (some of them are bird’s-eye illustrations rather than top-down maps), so the images aren’t aligned. Via GIS Lounge.

The Guardian on the diorama maps of photographer Sohei Nishino, now on display at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London (until April 2).

Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London — which, come to think of it, does not seem that long a time for the task in hand. He took over 10,000 photographs, which, on his return to Tokyo, he edited down to 4,000. Then the real work began. Having hand-printed the photographs in his own darkroom, Nishino then set about cutting them up and piecing them together — slowly and meticulously — into a giant composite photographic map of the city of London. It measures 7.5ft × 4ft, and will be shown at Michael Hoppen alongside his other diorama maps.

The diorama maps can be seen on Nishino’s website: here’s the link.

Franklin Jarrier’s maps of urban rail systems are neither network diagrams nor geographically accurate maps, though they have elements of both: they’re extremely precise maps of the metro systems that include the number of tracks, platforms, closed stations and routes,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via @awoodruff, Yuri Alexander’s typographic map of Tacoma, Washington — “a personal design project of mine to hide a 48in×30in piece of bare wall in my living room” — which he’s selling as a rather large print….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of maps of the Moscow metro is so extensive that it must have all of them. (Above, one from 1935; they go as far back as 1931, and there are nine from 2010.) In Russian. Via @spatialanalysis….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A series of “map movies” from the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council provide cute animations of public transport and exercise-based travel. “The Council has produced several map movies which show bus, cycling and walking routes around the borough,” says the website….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I mentioned Stephen Walter’s detailed hand-drawn typographic maps of Liverpool (and London — which made the Magnificent Maps exhibit) all too briefly in this entry. Fortunately, the Guardian had a profile of him this week: apparently Berlin is his…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Spatial Analysis’s roundup of typographical maps — that is, maps made entirely of textual elements — includes Axis Maps’s typographic map of San Francisco (above) and Stephen Walter’s incredible hand-drawn map of Liverpool. Via @worldmapper. Previously: Typographic Maps of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

CNN has a piece on Christoph Gielen’s amazing photographs of suburban landscapes — read: sprawl — taken from a helicopter. Via @mrgeog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Etsy seller fugudesigns has a number of interesting copper cuffs, many of which have etched city maps, subway maps, or subway stops in their design. Chicago, Detroit and New York are featured. $50 apiece. Via Cartophile….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Guardian’s Bike Blog reviews CycleStreets, a free iPhone app; it’s essentially turn-by-turn navigation for cyclists. UK-only, using OpenStreetMap data. Via Steve Chilton. Avenza has announced PDF Maps, a geospatial PDF reader (i.e., PDFs with embedded spatial data). Universal app…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Brian Cook has imagined a Metro for the Hartford, Connecticut area, and designed a map redolent of Harry Beck’s London Underground and the style of the Paris Metro. He’s doing a limited print run, too. Via Mark….  •  Continue reading this entry.

This thermal map of Antwerp and the surrounding region measures heat loss from rooftops. In Flemish. Via Ogle Earth….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Eric Fischer won’t stop. Following up on his Geotaggers’ World Atlas (previously), he’s separated out the geodata generated by locals from that generated by tourists — locals being defined as people taking pictures of the same city over a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Geotaggers’ World Atlas is Eric Fischer at work again: this time he’s taken geographical data from Flickr photos, determined the speed at which the photographers were travelling based on their photos’ timestamps and geotags, and plotted them on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Earth Observatory’s Cities at Night features photography of the night side of the Earth taken by orbiting astronauts. “Astronauts circling the Earth have the wonderful vantage point of observing the nighttime Earth from 350-400 kilometers above the surface, taking…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Emanuele Pizzolorusso’s Crumpled City Maps are made of Tyvek and are meant to be scrunched up and stuffed rather than folded. (Personally, I would have thought silk, or some other fabric, was more scrunchable than Tyvek — I’m reminded…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Spacing Atlantic, an urban blog covering cities in Atlantic Canada, has a series called [Re]Presenting Halifax, which looks at historical and contemporary maps and diagrams of the Halifax region. Four posts so far, including this one on Atlantic Neptune cartographer…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Times maps zones in Istanbul where poor construction could lead to a large number of deaths in the event of an earthquake; it also has a world map showing which cities in the world have large populations,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I grew up in Winnipeg, so I was thrilled to discover the thousand-plus maps of Winnipeg, Brandon and the rest of Manitoba posted on the Manitoba Historical Maps Flickr account. The maps include old city maps, transit maps, insurance…  •  Continue reading this entry.

BBC News reports on an OpenStreetMap “mapathon” taking place this weekend, during which 200 or so volunteers will spread out and map the city. Via Maps-L….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google’s Street View has launched in 11 Canadian cities: Calgary, Kitchener and Waterloo, Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Québec, Toronto, Vancouver, and Squamish and Whistler (these last two almost certainly for the upcoming Olympics). Equally large cities like Edmonton, London (Ontario),…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Treehugger has a gallery of what they consider to be the world’s most impressive subway maps. (These are the official maps, rather than some third-party iteration.) Via Teresa. Previously: Review: Transit Maps of the World. Buy Transit Maps of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Randy Plemel, who we last saw working on accessible transit maps, writes to let us know about the latest episode of his Smogr Alert podcast, in which he interviews Charles Graves, the author of The Genealogy of Cities (see…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Charles Graves writes to tell us about his upcoming book, The Genealogy of Cities, “a compilation of ancient and modern city plans, from 350 BCE to the present, depicting both built and proposed plans. … [I]t is illustrated with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I can’t believe I didn’t notice Radical Cartography’s Urban Mass Transit Systems of North America before. This map plots the mass transit systems — subways, light rail, busways, whatever — of U.S., Canadian and Mexican cities circa 2005 on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Richard Akerman sends along a link to this article on model cities in the March issue of Wired. Model cities aren’t just for show; they can have real utility. In 1957 the US Army Corps of Engineers created the Bay…  •  Continue reading this entry.

OnionMap’s isometric maps of various world cities are somewhat disappointing: they’re essentially tourist maps that depict major landmarks, subway routes and the like. Nice enough — we don’t see very many examples of isometric mapping — but not very…  •  Continue reading this entry.

David Adjaye’s Europolis is being exhibited in Bolzano for Manifesta 7. “In conceiving Europolis David Adjaye has extracted information from the capital cities of the European Union and condensed it into a single entity. Europolis is not a traditional…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Belgrade Is the World. Webmapper explains: “The artist Slaviša Savić discovered an unusual and an unexpected coincidence between the town plan of Serbian Belgrade and the map of the world. … The world’s continents seem to match the cities…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Urbanrail.net is a fan site about the world’s urban rail networks; it features an extensive collection of rail network maps that are produced by the site’s author and are original to the site, though (and this is to be…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a page of photos of cities at night taken from space; at right, Tokyo. “Astronauts circling the Earth have the wonderful vantage point of observing the nighttime Earth from 350-400 kilometers above the surface, taking…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Richard sends along links to two separate models of the city of Moscow. First, this one, an exhibition that opened in 1977. It’s more than 400 square feet in size, and has lighting inside the buildings that turn on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Richard Florida’s singles map of the United States, which charts which metropolitan areas have a surplus of single men and women, first appeared in the Boston Globe; it’s been getting a bit of buzz around the blogosphere. If it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden Penguin, 2007. Paperback, 144 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-14-311265-5 Billed on its cover as “the world’s first collection of every urban train map on Earth,” this is, in fact, the second revised edition of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Centred on Zürich, this site provides real-time positions of Swiss trains — the icons freaking move — based on their schedules. “The current view is based on the Swiss train timetable, and does not yet show the actual GPS-positions…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartophilia has a review of Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World — well, it’s not so much a review as an excuse to share images of transit maps, but I certainly don’t mind. I’ll be ordering my own…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Maps of Vienna from the city’s government. The city’s architectural, archeological, artistic and cultural history is presented through a map-based interface (which unfortunately does not work in Safari). Clicking on points of interest brings up incredibly detailed information: the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovendon’s Transit Maps of the World sounds delightful: it’s a compendium of maps of urban rail systems of more than 200 cities around the world. Cory Doctorow is smitten: “This is sheer public transit/map porn, and I’m in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Four more cities in Google Maps Street View: Houston, Orlando, Los Angeles and San Diego. Cute: Google Maps Street View Circa 1907 — or, rather, a sample of Rand McNally’s photo auto-maps, which apparently predated road maps….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Global Cities, an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London until August 27, “looks at the changing faces of ten dynamic international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.” Ogle Earth’s Stefan…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From an in-depth report on the global urban population explosion, the BBC has an interactive map showing the growth in urban population from 1955 to 2015; cities with more than five million inhabitants are also shown. Quite interesting that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The big news so far from Where 2.0 is the announcement of Google’s street-level imagery for five U.S. cities — Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and (of course) San Francisco — which, in a fit of originality, they’re…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Okay, I have now officially seen everything: this fly swatter’s webbing is patterned after a street map of Milan, Italy. Via Boing Boing and Gadling….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I can’t see it because I’m on a Mac and this is a Virtual Earth mashup, but Detroit Through the Years, which displays aerial views of Detroit from 1949 to the present, sounds like a fascinating project. Let me know…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Time-Gun Map of Edinburgh, published in 1861, overlays concentric circles to show “the time taken for the sound of the one o’clock gun to travel from Edinburgh Castle to different parts of Edinburgh and Leith.” Being able to calculate…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Transit, the trip planner that includes public transportation data, started last December (see previous entry) with Portland, Oregon as its single city, presumably as a proof of concept. Today they’ve added five more cities: Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tampa, and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of late-19th-century bird’s-eye-view maps of Texas cities will be on display at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas (near Amarillo), from March 17 to June 10 next year. This is presumably the same exhibition that was…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tinselman, aka Myst co-creator Robyn Miller, has compiled an archive of photos of scale models of cities on his blog. Most of the photos are from Flickr, such as this one, at right, of the Shanghai model by Andrew…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Dubai tourism department has launched an online map of the emirate, AME Info reports. The map is available in a not-very-interactive Java-based interactive map and a copy-protected PDF. Nevertheless an interesting map of an, um, interesting place — the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bill Rankin’s latest project on Radical Cartography is called City Income Donuts: These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The city of McAllen, Texas has launched a GIS portal, The Monitor reports….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Travel Matters has put together maps of Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco that show overall and per-capita CO2 emissions. The point is that overall emissions are higher in cities, but lower per capita, because of more efficient transportation options…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Calgary mapmaker has been fined C$8,000 for making a cheap knock-off of a competitor’s city atlas. The judge ruled that Commodore Allen’s AMI Calgary Street Atlas infringed the copyright of Sherlock Publishing’s atlas of Calgary, saying that the differences…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Patterns of Progress, an exhibition of Texas bird’s-eye-view maps — previously covered here — is now running at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas until May 28. More than sixty highly detailed and oversized prints in this special…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m not the most consistent of bloggers even at the best of times, but, depending on how things go, over the next two weeks posts to The Map Room might be a bit sporadic due to the demands of one…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From today’s edition of the LA Times, a story about how maps can’t keep up with the pace of suburban growth in fast-growing areas like California, Nevada and Arizona. Some of those areas add thousands of new streets a year….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome was a masterpiece: it was detailed, accurate and eschewed the prevailing “bird’s-eye” perspective for an overhead view. Researchers at the University of Oregon has put together a major web site on Nolli’s map, complete…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Texas Bird’s-Eye Views presents 59 bird’s-eye views of 44 Texas cities in the late 1800s, and provides some background on the genre and the itinerant artists who moved from city to city offering their services. (Thanks, peacay.) See previous entry:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapSouthampton is Southampton City Council’s interacctive mapping service; it’s a Java-based map tool that allows you to view, pan and zoom several layers of data — the sort of slow, clunky web-based interface to GIS data that looks embarrassing since…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Eadie eviscerates Beijing Public Transport’s web maps: Nowhere, on this sorry excuse for an information system, do you get the smallest piece of information about bus routes or times. This has to be the most useless example of GPS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It seems to be MetaFilter Monday here on The Map Room. MetaFilter’s hidden jewel is Ask MetaFilter, where the MeFi hive mind answers questions posed by its members. Tag support just got added here, and there are already a few…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Historic Cities is an ambitious Israeli project that presents scans of old maps of cities from across Europe, North Africa and the Near East. High-resolution scans of some of the maps, which date back at least as far as the…  •  Continue reading this entry.