Cities

This category includes the following subcategories, whose entries are not included below: Baghdad (2 entries), Beijing (3 entries), Berlin (2 entries), Boston (4 entries), Chicago (12 entries), Hong Kong (3 entries), Houston (3 entries), Las Vegas (3 entries), London (38 entries), Los Angeles (7 entries), New Orleans (13 entries), New York (41 entries), Ottawa (2 entries), Paris (8 entries), Pittsburgh (4 entries), Portland (4 entries), Rome (4 entries), San Francisco (11 entries), Seattle (4 entries), Shanghai (2 entries), Tokyo (5 entries), Toronto (7 entries), Vancouver (2 entries).

Randy Plemel Interviews Charles Graves
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 previous entry). This is the first of two parts, but…   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 9:32 AM
Categories: Books, Cities, Historical Maps, Podcasts & Audio
The Genealogy of Cities
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 more than 500 plans drawn at the same scale, a…   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 10:31 PM
Categories: Books, Cities, Historical Maps
Urban Mass Transit Systems of North America
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 the same scale. Direct link to the PDF. Via The…   Read more →
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Posted on Monday, March 9, 2009 at 11:13 AM
Categories: Cities, Mass Transit
Wired on Model Cities
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 Model, a replica of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento/San…   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 9:59 PM
Categories: Cities
Montréal Gets Google Transit
Montréal now has transit trip planning in Google Maps. A good thing: Montréal is an awful place to drive, but its Metro is wonderful; it’s one of the few North American cities where it’s relatively easy to go car-free. Ottawa seems to have had it for a while as well;…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 8:32 AM
Categories: Cities, Mass Transit, Online Maps
OnionMap
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 interactive. The maps are zoomable static images that do not…   Read more →
Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 8:03 AM
Categories: Cities
David Adjaye’s Europolis
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 city but the idea of the city as phenomenon. Its…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, September 1, 2008 at 3:18 PM
Categories: Art, Cities
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 populated areas. Just as the Atlantic Ocean separates the Old…   Read more →
Posted on Friday, August 8, 2008 at 6:23 PM
Categories: Art, 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 expected) not in the same league as the official network…   Read more →
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 in whole regions at once. Onboard cameras and a bit…   Read more →
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 and off depending on the time of day; the cost…   Read more →
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 looks familiar, it’s because it’s inspired by a similar map…   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 9:33 AM
Categories: Cities, Demography
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 this book, which first came out in 2003 as Metro…   Read more →
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 of the trains. But, as Swiss trains are almost always…   Read more →
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 copy shortly, not just because I want to review it…   Read more →
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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 map is a front-end to a massive cadastral database. The…   Read more →
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 love. … This is the kind of book that would…   Read more →
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, geographic information to the visually impaired. The most recent iteration…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 Geens visited the exhibition earlier today; he writes that it’s…   Read more →
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 they use the Gall-Peters projection, and that they point out…   Read more →
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 calling Street View: Google Earth Blog, Google Lat Long, O’Reilly…   Read more →
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Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 4:28 PM
Categories: Cities, Las Vegas, 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….   Read more →
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 how it looks, would you? Via Live Maps/Virtual Earth….   Read more →
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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 that your neighbourhood is eight seconds away, say, from the…   Read more →
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 Eugene, Oregon. See also Google Maps Mania….   Read more →
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 on display in Fort Worth earlier this year, so if…   Read more →
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 Currie. Via MetaFilter. See previous entries: The Living Map; There’s…   Read more →
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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 palm-, crescent- and world map-shaped artificial islands are on display…   Read more →
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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 was to test the “donut” hypothesis — the idea that…   Read more →
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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….   Read more →
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 available (e.g. public transit). Via WorldChanging….   Read more →
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 between the two were “purely cosmetic.” Via Cartography. I’ve been…   Read more →
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 exhibition will offer a chronicle of one of the greatest…   Read more →
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 of my other projects: DFL, the blog that celebrates last-place…   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 9:48 PM
Categories: Cities, Hacks & Mashups, Olympics
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. That’s right, thousands. You can imagine that traditional paper-based maps…   Read more →
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 with background and research papers. Most notable, though, is its…   Read more →
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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: Panoramic Maps….   Read more →
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 Google Maps came along. But I digress. The news is…   Read more →
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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 and mapping technology ever put on line anywhere in the…   Read more →
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 map questions. (Another place for your questions, if this here…   Read more →
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 16th century, are available. There aren’t necessarily many maps per…   Read more →
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.