CARTOGRAPHY AT IT'S BEST

stamen design is a San Francisco based design and technology studio which designed for example archinects cover page. Very interesting are their amazing mapping projects, including crime mapping or mapping photos on flickr.com. For seeing Invisible Dynamics take a look on Cabspotting. Using GPS technology for tracking cabs creates a living and always-changing map of city life in San Francisco.


For constructing your own map of Manhattan go for Transparent New York. Do Manhattan's historic districts correlate at all to the island's original farm plots? How many office buildings are constructed in the last 10 years compared to post-war period? All that you can see there.



Fake is the New Real (what a name!) offers a broad range of new cartography and taxonomy ideas. For example Chicago Mile by Mile (image above) maps every intersection of the city's mile streets through photography. And finally the best: How long have I been waiting for that? A comparison of more than 30 city's subways at scale. Could somebody please compare the track length of those networks, now that we know that San Francisco's BART is covering a huge area, and Tokyo's network expands not so much as expected, and Bejing's looks like a piece of minimal art. Bravo! subways at scale

thanks to where for this incredible mapping links

EARTH WITHOUT PEOPLE

The movie I Am Legend recently satisfied the curiosity of what would happen if mankind vanished from our planet. With incredibly appealing images the movie creates a New York absent of people proliferated by nature. This takes us to Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us published last summer.

The following timeline of post-human New York below is taken out of the same author's article from discover magazine which was the initiator for his book

If humans were to vanish from New York, how soon would nature take over? Scientists predict that within . .

• 10 years Sidewalks crack and weeds invade. Hawks and falcons flourish, as do feral cats and dogs. The rat population, deprived of human garbage, crashes. Cockroaches, which thrive in warm buildings, disappear. Cultivated carrots, cabbages, broccoli, and brussels sprouts revert to their wild ancestors.

• 20 years Water-soaked steel columns supporting subway tunnels corrode and buckle. Bears and wolves invade Central Park.

• 50 years Concrete chunks tumble from buildings, whose steel foundations begin to crumble. Indian Point nuclear reactors leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

• 100 years Oaks and maples re-cover the land.

• 300 years Most bridges collapse.

• 1,000 years Hell Gate Bridge, built to bring the railroad across the East River, finally falls.

• 10,000 years Indian Point nuclear reactors continue to leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

• 20,000 years Glaciers move relentlessly across the island of Manhattan and its environs, scraping the landscape clean.

Speculations about the future in the movie seem to be partly realistic. Certain aspects will happen also from a scientific point of view. Nevertheless the situation in the movie, which should draw an image after 3 years is drastically overdone. understandable, due to the fascinating effects we wouldn`t have liked to have missed.

URBAN DEMOLITION

please click the image to activate

Even though we all know it already: Berlin is one of the most interesting and unique sites in terms of history and city development. But still - this animation makes even the most hard-boiled berlin expert realize the bandwidth of berlins urban tragedy (and great opportunity!).

check this out!

URBAN GROWTH

Urban Planet is a collection of features on urbanisation from the BBC News. It includes an interactive map that tracks the growth of the world’s largest cities , ...
as well as comparisons of the environmental effects of urban and rural life. Unfortunately the last update was half a year ago.

GARBAGE

And still Naples is suffocating in garbage. Since by the end of last year the last landfill of campania was shut down by the Camorra it got even worse. In the streets of Naples 4000 tons of garbage are waiting to be picked up, in the whole region since Christmas 100000 tons where left in the streets. While official Italy is concerned about their image, the inhabitants of the region start to burn their problem. Politicians are negotiating with Switzerland and Germany to transport the garbage up north. How many trucks of garbage would that be!?

Take a tour through current Naples: