With two new light rail lines opening in Toronto recently, the Toronto Transit Commission has had to update the maps of its subway, light rail and streetcar network, which appear in its stations and vehicles. CBC News has a short piece about the man responsible for updating those maps: the TTC’s mapmaker, Alex Blackwell. (Here’s a link to a PDF version of the map—the squarish version, not the extremely horizontal one on vehicles.)
Tag: cities
A Book Roundup
In a Guardian piece last month, Laura Spinney briefly touches on three books and the ways in which they subvert our understanding of what’s on the map and how we use them to see the world. They are Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes: a New Cartography of Borders and Migration by Henk van Houtum et al. (nai10, 2024); William Rankin’s Radical Cartography (Picador/
Doug Greenfield catches up with the 50 Maps series from Belt Publishing, focusing mainly on the two most recent: Cincinnati in 50 Maps by Nick Swartsell and maps by Andy Woodruff, and Columbus in 50 Maps by Brent Warren and maps by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. (Previously.)
Cincinnati in 50 Maps is one of two books—the other is Alan Wight’s Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas—that are the subject of a 23-minute segment on WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition this week, which interviews the authors.
Proposal 5
A short piece in The New Yorker from Adam Gopnik about Proposal 5, which appeared on the New York City general election ballot last November. It called for a unified single digital city map maintained by the Department of City Planning, rather than a hodgepodge of maps held at the borough level. Gopnik:
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.
From there Gopnik chases thoughtfulness by segueing to some national-level generalities, but I took the opportunity to poke at Proposal 5, which passed 73.6 percent to 26.4 percent. The main opposition came, as it seems to do with most things NYC, from the contrarian oasis of Staten Island. (See the precinct-level results map from “Fiveminutecrafts” on Wikipedia.)
Update, 18 Jan: Here’s more from Gothamist.
Londonist Asks ChatGPT to Draw Maps
“The shortcomings and possibilities of generative AI are, of course, well chronicled across a million op-eds. I could write at length about the dangers or opportunities the technology presents,” writes Matt at Londonist. “But this is a newsletter about London, and I’m still in a silly holiday-season mindset. So all I’m going to do today is ask AI to draw some historical maps of the capital, and then take the p*ss out of them. Popcorn at the ready . . . ” It goes about as well as you’d expect: “terribly,” with results “as crazy as a yacht of numbats,” with labels “so bizarre that I don’t know where to begin.”
Cincinnati and Columbus in 50 Maps
Two more books from Belt Publishing came out this week, both part of their “50 Maps” series, each focusing on an Ohio city: Cincinnati in 50 Maps, edited by Nick Swartsell and with cartography by Andy Woodruff; and Columbus in 50 Maps, edited by Brent Warren and with cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. They join Cleveland in 50 Maps (2019) and other books in the series that aren’t about Ohio cities. Columbus-based independent news outlet Matter has a feature on Columbus in 50 Maps.
- Cincinnati in 50 Maps ed. by Nick Swartsell; cartography by Andy Woodruff. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
- Columbus in 50 Maps ed. by Brent Warren; cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Related: Map Books of 2025.
The Man Who Drew Wellington
In the 1890s, Thomas Ward created maps of the city of Wellington, New Zealand that are the subject of a new book by Elizabeth Cox, Mr Ward’s Map, and this article in New Zealand Geographic about both Ward and Cox’s book:
Over two and a half years, Ward walked every street in the city. He drew the outline of every single building, including garden sheds and outhouses (but spared himself the effort of documenting henhouses). Historian Elizabeth Cox thinks that Ward may have knocked on all the doors of all Wellington’s houses, too, because he recorded the number of rooms in each dwelling, the number of storeys, and the building materials used. The resulting map is huge, spanning 88 sheets of paper, each the size of a poster. […]
After Ward stopped updating the map himself, others took on the task—much less perfectly, notes Cox—leaving behind ink spills, coffee-cup rings, drips of tea, and scribbled mathematical equations. It was the city’s primary map for more than 80 years, only superseded in the 1970s.
Today, a copy of Ward’s original, plus many of its subsequent versions, lives in a set of wide, shallow drawers in the Wellington City Archives—and online, as an overlay in mapping software for anyone to use.
Ward’s maps can be seen here and here (updated version). As you can see from the sample above, they’re at a level of detail that would give Sanborn maps a run for their money. Thanks to Ken Dowling for the tip.
Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street
by Elizabeth Cox
Massey University Press, 13 Nov 2025, NZD $90
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Boston at 1:40 Scale
The City of Boston’s planning department has a room with a 1:40 scale model of downtown Boston and surrounding neighbourhoods. The Leventhal Center’s Facebook page has a few more photos. (Update: Bluesky, Instagram.)
Dein’s Transit Maps: London in the Style of Paris, and Vice Versa
Abraham Dein makes transit maps in the style of other transit maps—notably, a London Tube map in the style of a Paris metro map, emphasizing express lines and anchored by orbital routes. But he’s also got other cities, like Barcelona, Glasgow and Paris, drawn in the London or Paris style, on his Instagram and TikTok pages, and for sale on his Etsy page. Via Mark Ovenden, who interviewed Dein on his CATCH-cast program.
Two Mapmakers Awarded MacArthur Fellowship
Tonika Lewis Johnson, whose Folded Map Project explores decades of segregation in Chicago neighbourhoods, and Margaret Wickens Pearce, whom Map Room readers might remember for Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada, are among the 22 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships. News coverage: AP, NPR. [Alan McConchie]
Two Books Map London
Two books out this year, both from Batsford, explore London through maps. Vincent Westbrook’s Modern London Maps focuses on more than 60 maps from the 20th century. Like many books of this kind, Modern London Maps draws primarily from a single source: the London Archives. Mapping London reviewed it last month: “probably quite close to the book that we would have published.” And out next month, The Boroughs of London collects Mike Hall’s “boldly coloured, highly detailed maps of every London borough, inspired by classic 1960s graphic design,” pairing it with commentary by Matt Brown.
- Modern London Maps by Vincent Westbrook. Batsford, 8 May 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. - The Boroughs of London by Mike Hall and Matt Brown. Batsford, 9 Oct 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Related: Map Books of 2025.
The Big Map of Kent’s South End
Jennifer Mapes created a large corkboard map to illustrate the history of Kent, Ohio’s South End, a neighbourhood inhabited by railroad workers, immigrants, and African Americans moving north during the Great Migration.
I purposefully created this project as something that could be done cheaply, as a form of “analog” GIS, where students are asked to think spatially and consider how regional and national history played out in their own community. I am particularly interested in showing South End kids how the people who lived in their current homes contributed to Kent’s past.
The map is 60″×60″ and includes 350 3D printed transparent houses representing 25 different house styles in Kent’s South End. I’ve wired the map to light up based on answers to questions about the history [of] each house’s resident based on census records.
The map is currently on display at the Kent Free Library.
Fuller Goes to Washington
Gareth Fuller’s latest creation is “The DMV,” a pictorial map of Washington, D.C., and the neighbouring bits of Maryland and Virginia (hence “DMV”).
Created over twelve months, including three months of on-the-ground exploration in 2023 and creation in 2024, this artwork becomes the fourth capital city within the ongoing series, Purposeful Wanderings. The third time capturing an entire region on canvas. And the very first artwork depicting the United States of America.
From its very beginning, Washington, D.C. has sat at the centre of American national identity, politics, conflict, compromise, and power. But it doesn’t work alone: it’s the wider region that sustains the Capital. The DMV—D.C., Maryland, and Virginia—isn’t just a geographic label; it’s a cultural badge, a collective effort shaped by the reach of the Metro, the sprawl of the Beltway, and the unique, fluid neighbourhoods that define its borders. These observations have guided my exploration; the drawings seek to uncover what binds The DMV together and creates its unshakable sense of place.
As with Fuller’s previous works, prints are available at several price points.
I missed the previous installment of Fuller’s Purposeful Wanderings series, “Shanghai,” which came out in 2022.
Mapping the University of Chicago’s Expansion into Its Surrounding Neighbourhoods
The Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, has posted a story map showing the university’s relationship with, and expansion into, the surrounding neighbourhoods. “As the University of Chicago has expanded its property footprint on the South Side, conflicting priorities, land use disputes, and racial tension have characterized a historically fraught ‘town and gown’ relationship with the surrounding neighborhoods. Setting the stage for others to follow, the University was the first higher education institution to embark on an urban renewal campaign of its kind, a topic University scholars and students have written on extensively.”
Daylighting Rivers
Last April, CBC News ran an interactive, map-rich story about buried waterways in Canada’s large cities—buried largely for sanitary reasons—and initiatives to restore old and forgotten creeks and rivers to the surface. Focuses on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but there are links to other cities at the end.
Online Exhibition Introduces Cincinnati Library’s Map Holdings
How many libraries host map collections that you might be unaware of? The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library’s online exhibition, Landscape and Layers, is an introduction to that library’s map holdings, which per the blog post include 19th- and early 20th-century maps of the city, Sanborn fire insurance maps, and early maps of Ohio.