Tag: cities

You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

You Are Here NYC: Mapping the Soul of the CityAn exhibition taking place now at the New York City Library, Picturing the City: Illustrated Maps of NYC, features 16 pictorial maps from the Library’s collection of illustrations. Running until 9 April 2018, it’s curated by Katharine Harmon, whose book, You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City, came out last November from Princeton Architectural Press. Here’s an interview with Harmon about the exhibition in Print magazine.

This seems as good an excuse as any to take a closer look at You Are Here: NYC. Past time, actually, since I’ve had a review copy in my hands for a year now.

You Are Here: NYC is the third of Katharine Harmon’s map books. The first, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, came out in 2003, the second, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, in 2010. Harmon’s distinctive style in editing and curating these books, carries over to the present volume.

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TransitFlow

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Will Geary’s TransitFlow project is an experimental set of tools to build animated transit flow visualizations, built from Transitland’s open-source transit schedule data. More than a dozen visualizations are available in video form here; each shows the flow of trains, buses and other forms of transport over the course of a day. Very high visual appeal. More at the Guardian. [Metrocosm]

London National Park City Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Urban Good’s London National Park City Map is a 125 × 95 cm paper map of Greater London’s green spaces that “includes all of the capital’s 3,000 parks plus woodlands, playing fields, nature reserves, city farms, rivers, canals and all the spaces that contribute to London’s parkland. Some of the most iconic walks through and around London are drawn, such as the London Loop and Capital Ring, along with symbols marking places to swim outdoors, climb hills, pitch a tent or go kayaking. It even shows front and back gardens, but not any buildings!” Shipping next month; the first 1,000 copies are free plus £4.75 in shipping (U.K. addresses only): see the order page. [Ordnance Survey]

Between Stations

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In Nicholas Rougeux’s latest project, Between Stations, subway maps “were broken down into the segments between each station and rearranged to fill a common simple shape: a circle. Each diagram shows every segment in a subway system while maintaining geographic orientation (no segments were rotated).” The project page is full of hypnotic animations in which the maps undergo their transformations. Nicholas’s blog post explains the data, code and design behind the project. [Transit Maps]

We last saw Nicholas in August 2016, when I told you about his Interchange Choreography project.

Bridges of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Lis Watkins, “Bridges of London.”

Illustrator Lis Watkins created this hand-drawn map of London’s bridges for the AA and Londonist. At Mapping London, Ollie O’Brien notes that the bridges are shown “in their approximately correct geographical position, and correct distances apart, although the width of the Thames itself is greatly exaggerated, as a fish jumping out of the river announces in a little speech bubble!”

Boston Immigration Map Exhibition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Along with Regions and Seasons (previously), the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center is hosting another exhibition, Who We Are: Boston Immigration Then and Now, which runs until 26 August. “This exhibition compares the landscape of today’s ‘new’ Boston with that of over 100 years ago. The maps and graphics on display here show where Boston’s foreign-born residents originate from, and where newer immigrant groups have settled, while celebrating who we are, and the vibrant diversity that is Boston.” Text is in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Chinese and Vietnamese.

Baltimore’s Radi(c)al New Transit Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Maryland Transit Administration

Baltimore gets a radical new transit map (direct PDF link) to go along with its redesigned bus network, which goes into service on Sunday. The map, which Greater Greater Washington reports was designed by Marc Szarkowski, adopts a diagrammatic radial style—essentially, a diagrammatic map based on concentric circles rather than a grid.

For those who find such a map just a little too out there, the Maryland Transit Administration also has a system map with a more familiar design (PDF).

Maryland Transit Administration

They call it a geographic system map, only it isn’t: it’s still a schematic, just less radical—or, if you like, less radial. [Planetizen]

Mapping Bristol

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A wide-ranging article at Bristol 24/7 explores at the different ways that Bristol has been mapped throughout history. It begins with a look at Jeff Bishop’s 2016 book, Bristol Through Maps (Redcliffe), which includes 24 maps of the city from 1480 to today. Then it goes on to Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place, which layers historic maps on top of a web mapping interface, and finishes with a roundup of the work of local artists and graphic designers. Quite the microcosm: so many kinds of mapping activity, all focused on one British city. [Tony Campbell]

Tube Maps of the Thames

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Transport for London also operates river buses along the Thames; their maps of the London River Services are very much in the Tube map vein, in both tourist and non-tourist versions:

Of the tourist version Ollie O’Brien of Mapping London says this: “We like the pseudo-tube-map styling, although it could of course be simplified even further, with the Thames just being shown as a straight line. The inclusion of isometric squares showing the major landmarks near each pier is a nice touch. TfL has never really decided whether its river services are for tourists or commuters, but this map should satisfy both.”

Travel Times in Helsinki

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Lauri Vanhala wanted to figure out the best place to buy an apartment in Helsinki, so he built an interactive sort-of-isochrone map of the city. He explains: “I calculated the travel time from every address to every other address in Helsinki around 7:30-8:00am (about 30 billion searches total!). Then I calculated the (weighted) average travel time to anywhere in the city, using amount of jobs in the target area as weight.” [OSM]

Maps of Delhi

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Pilar Maria Guerrieri’s Maps of Delhi, a collection of 66 maps from the 19th century to the present day, comes out from Niyogi Books in August. Nevertheless, the wire service IANS has an article about it now: it reveals how the book came about because the author wished it had been available when she began working on her doctorate.

“While I was searching specifically for the pre and post independence maps in several Indian archives and institutions, I slowly found and collected all the other documents. At the end of my PhD I realised that if I had the complete collection of maps at the beginning of my studies, my research would have been much more easier and smoother. I decided to publish the whole collection with the aim that it will turn to be useful for scholars interested in understanding the capital of India,” Guerrieri told IANS in an interview.

[Tony Campbell/WMS]

A Typographic Literary Map of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Dex, “Literary London Map (Graphite Plike, 2017).” White ink on Plike Graphite paper, 50 × 70 cm.

You might have seen this typographic literary map of London: it was featured in a recent article in the Telegraph and went a bit viral from there. The work of London-based artist Dex, who runs a creative studio with interior designer Anna Burles, the map places the names of fictional characters in the areas of London they’re associated with. It’s one of several typographic maps and illustrations available for sale on the artist’s website. [Cartophilia/Goodreads]