Cities

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Belgrade Is the World
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… »
Posted on Friday, August 8, 2008 at 6:23 PM
Categories: Art, Cities
Ottawa Construction Map
The City of Ottawa has announced a map (PDF) of its upcoming road, bridge and sewer construction projects (around here, we call construction “infrastructure” for whatever reason). The map’s a bit unwieldy: several years’ worth of construction, indicated by year… »
Posted on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 12:50 PM
Categories: Cities
Urban Rail Maps
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… »
Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 7:50 AM
Categories: Cities, Mass Transit
Cities at Night
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… »
Posted on Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 6:52 PM
Categories: Cities, Satellite & Aerial, Tokyo
Scale Models of Moscow
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… »
Posted on Friday, April 25, 2008 at 5:29 PM
Categories: Cities
The Singles Map
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… »
Posted on Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 9:33 AM
Categories: Cities, Demography
Shanghai in 3D
It doesn’t work in Safari and the text is only in Chinese, but this eerily cartoon-like, three-dimensional map of Shanghai is still worth a look. (I think I just had a Sim City flashback.) Via MetaFilter, where one commenter… »
Posted on Tuesday, April 1, 2008 at 8:34 PM
Categories: Cities
Review: Transit Maps of the World
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… »
Posted on Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 12:39 PM
Categories: Book Reviews, Cities, Mass Transit
Swiss Trains in Real Time
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… »
Posted on Monday, February 18, 2008 at 5:40 PM
Categories: Cities, Hacks & Mashups, Railroads
Transit Maps of the World (Again)
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… »
Posted on Sunday, February 17, 2008 at 10:18 PM
Categories: Books, Cities, Mass Transit
Maps of Vienna
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… »
Posted on Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 7:54 AM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities
Transit Maps of the World
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… »
Posted on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 6:23 PM
Categories: Books, Cities, Mass Transit
A View of Prague for the Blind
I’ve been encountering items on maps for the blind for some time now, and I’m fascinated by the fact that each map I encounter is done differently — there are quite a few approaches to the problem of providing visual,… »
Posted on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at 9:35 PM
Categories: Cities
Street View: City Updates and Its 1907 Equivalent
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…. »
Posted on Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 5:31 PM
Categories: Cities, Houston, Los Angeles, Online Maps, Roads
Global Cities: Tate Modern Exhibition
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… »
Posted on Sunday, July 8, 2007 at 8:08 PM
Categories: Cities, Exhibitions
Mapping Urban Growth
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… »
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 at 8:42 AM
Categories: Cities, Demography
Google Maps Street View
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… »
Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 4:28 PM
Categories: Cities, New York, Online Maps, Roads, San Francisco, Video
Fly Swatter Map of Milan
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…. »
Posted on Thursday, May 3, 2007 at 7:18 PM
Categories: Cities, Miscellany
Detroit Through the Years
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… »
Posted on Sunday, February 25, 2007 at 5:57 PM
Categories: Cities, Hacks & Mashups, Satellite & Aerial
Edinburgh Time-Gun Map
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… »
Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 at 12:10 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities
Google Transit Adds Five Cities
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… »
Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 at 10:13 PM
Categories: Cities, Mass Transit, Online Maps, Pittsburgh, Seattle
Another Texas Bird’s-Eye-View Maps Exhibition
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… »
Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 at 12:05 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities
Scale Models of Cities
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… »
Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 8:11 AM
Categories: Cities
Map of Dubai
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… »
Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 7:45 AM
Categories: Cities
City Income Donuts
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… »
Posted on Thursday, July 27, 2006 at 1:56 PM
Categories: Cities
GIS Portal for McAllen, Texas
The city of McAllen, Texas has launched a GIS portal, The Monitor reports…. »
Posted on Sunday, May 21, 2006 at 9:35 AM
Categories: Cities, GIS
Travel Matters Emissions Maps
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… »
Posted on Sunday, May 7, 2006 at 1:18 PM
Categories: Cities, Environment
Mapmaker Fined for Infringing Sherlock’s Copyright
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… »
Posted on Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 9:33 AM
Categories: Cities, Copyright, Publishers, Roads
Exhibition Roundup: Fort Worth, Texas; Hannibal, Missouri
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… »
Posted on Monday, March 6, 2006 at 3:26 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Art, Cities, Exhibitions
Mapping the Winter Olympics
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… »
Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 9:48 PM
Categories: Cities, Current Events, Hacks & Mashups
LA Times: Maps Outpaced by Suburban Growth
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…. »
Posted on Sunday, August 21, 2005 at 11:05 AM
Categories: Cities, Online Maps, Roads, Surveying
Interactive Nolli Map
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… »
Posted on Saturday, August 6, 2005 at 3:17 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities, Rome
Texas Bird’s-Eye Views
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:… »
Posted on Saturday, July 30, 2005 at 7:56 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities
MapSouthampton Adds Old Maps
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… »
Posted on Friday, July 8, 2005 at 5:49 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities, Online Maps
Seoul and Beijing: The Best and the Worst
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… »
Posted on Wednesday, June 1, 2005 at 11:41 AM
Categories: Beijing, Cities
Bike Routes of Major Cities
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… »
Posted on Monday, February 21, 2005 at 10:12 AM
Categories: Cities
Historic Cities
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… »
Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2004 at 9:51 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Cities

Note: Entries from 2003 were not categorized and will not appear in the category archives. Please consult the monthly archives.