Without question, the most popular post on The Map Room so far this week—by two orders of magnitude—was this post pointing to Chaz Hutton’s “A Map of Every City.” Hutton’s map went kind of viral, and not just here. He’s since announced that a print of the map will be available at some point; he’s also written a post on Medium explaining some of the background behind the map.
Tag: cities
INAT London Metro Map
Jug Cerović has reimagined the map of London’s transit network. It’s one of several transit maps that share a common design language. Mapping London calls it “a lovely map of the London system that manages to combine the tube and commuter rail networks into a single map that is clear and pleasant to read, unlike the official ones. The INAT London Metro Map is a lesson in simplifying and making attractive a complex topological map.” Though I think the rhetoric about moving away from Beck is a bit overdone—it’s not like we’re completely abandoning diagrammatic map design here.
Previously: A Geographically Accurate Tube Map.
More Snow Removal Maps
In addition to New York City’s PlowNYC website (previously), there are snowplow maps for Washington, D.C., the State of Pennsylvania, and various counties in the State of Maryland. Now be careful out there. [via]
A Map of Every City
Mapping Snow Removal in New York
Le Grand Paris en Cartes
Le Grand Paris en Cartes is a collection of interactive maps and infographics about the Grand Paris Express, a multi-billion-euro project to extend Paris’s Metro and rapid transit network deep into the surrounding Île-de-France region (if you can read French, the official site and French Wikipedia page provide a lot more information). These maps not only illustrate Parisians’ commuting routes and Metro usage, but also (see above) the kind of sociological data that underpins transit planning: employment centres, population density and so forth. In French. [via]
Cities and Memory
Cities and Memory is an exercise in sound mapping: a map of ambient sounds from hundreds of locations. Stuart Fowkes writes, “Every location and every faithful field recording on the sound map is accompanied by a reworking, a processing or an interpretation that imagines that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. The listener can choose to explore locations through their actual sounds, or explore interpretations of what those places could be—or to flip between the two different sound worlds at leisure.” It’s open to submissions.
Early Maps of London
Google Maps Mania has a post on the earliest maps of London. First, the Copperplate Map (ca. 1550s) of which no prints survive: only three copper printing plates, out of 15, are known to exist, two of which are held by the Museum of London. On the other hand, the Agas Map (above), which appears to be a close copy of the Copperplate, is available in an online interactive version.
Urban Scratchoff
Using an interactive interface to compare present-day and historical maps and aerial imagery is done all the time—on this website I use a slider plugin—but Chris Whong’s Urban Scratchoff uses a familiar metaphor to compare present-day aerial images of New York City with imagery from 1924. Give it a try. More on how Chris did it. [via]
New York Music Map
The New York Music Map is a typographical map made up of some 450 musical artists with some connection to the city. (Some choices are bound to be controversial.) A project of the U.K.-based Kingdom Collective, it’s available in both online and print forms. [via]
Mapping New York City’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions
By cross-referencing public data on energy consumption with georeferenced tax lot data, Jill Hubley has created an interactive map of New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions by property, colour-coded to show the biggest emitters. More on how she did it, and what the data reveal. [via]
Andy Woodruff’s Islands of Boston
Andy Woodruff imagines Boston neighbourhoods as islands, where any unpopulated areas—commercial districts, industrial areas, highways, parks—are represented as water. “Some neighborhoods of the Boston area are actual islands, or were at one point. Others, however, can feel that way even when connected to each other by land. Water isn’t the only thing that can create a gulf between neighborhoods; sometimes it’s created by features of the urban landscape and the experience of passing through them.” [via]
Thanks to a surprising number of links about city maps waiting in the queue to be posted, today’s blog posts will have cities as their theme.
The Best New York City Maps of 2015
Over on Metrocosm, Max Galka has assembled his pick of the 10 best New York City maps of 2015. The list includes maps of buildings, trees and languages, pathogens and crime, housing and “interestingness,” among others. [via]
Transit Explorer
Yonah Freemark’s Transit Explorer is an online map of existing, planned and under-construction transit projects in cities across North America—“fixed-guideway transit,” which means bus rapid transit, light rail and commuter rail. I’ve spotted a couple of omissions (Montreal’s commuter rail and Winnipeg’s busway don’t appear) but that might be a problem with the underlying OpenStreetMap data. [via]