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

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.

BIOMAPPING - EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES

Biomapping is a project that maps emotional responses to geographic locations. Emotions are read from an individual using a Galvanic Skin Response Sensor. This data is combined with that from a GPS Receiver and the results can be viewed with mapping software such as Google Earth to show where the emotional highs and lows of the day traveling were spent. Points of significance on the map could also be tagged with more info by the user, which could make the information even more useful for town planners, architects, etc.

From the project site: 'Bio Mapping is a research project which explores new ways that we as individuals can make use of the information we can gather about our own bodies. Instead of security technologies that are designed to control our behaviour, this project envisages new tools that allows people to selectively share and interpret their own bio data.'"

This concept appears to have the potential to be a very interesting design tool for architects and urban planners, although I am not so sure if the galvanic skin response is the most accurate way to "read" people's emotions. It might show that joggers are just as happy as sunbathers - if the map locations are missing tags.

see San Francisco biomap here.
A quite impressive map for Stockport can be found here