A thoughtful New York Times article by Alison Arieff describes a University of California, Berkeley project lead by Nicholas de Monchaux, an assistant professor of architecture and urban design. The project, Local Code, uses GIS to measure unused public land in major cities, such as abandoned lots and remnants of parcels on the edge of transportation networks, and proposes economically viable solutions for converting these spaces to green and environmentally sustainable public areas.
WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates from Nicholas de Monchaux on Vimeo.
Just found this fantastic route-planning website for bikers and hikers. I found a nice map of Maastricht which will give me some ammunition for touring around with visiting friends. Judging by the content, it has been around for a while (since 2005), but appears to be gaining momentum. It seems like a very nice interface, and the company also re-sells the web-components so people can customize routing on their own websites. They also do hard-core GIS processing, creating route-networks for GPS systems. RouteYou is a Belgian company, and they seem to be just expanding into global markets. So far they show over 80,000 public routes in Europe, but only a few hundred in the States, and a handful in Australia. This business may be fun to watch.
Planning a trip to New York? The Museum of the City of New York has three exhibitions of special interest to Nederlanders. This one is for map-people, too. Written-about in an Arts section review in the New York Times, the exhibition sounds a delight, and there is a book by the exhibition designer, Eric W. Sanderson and a clever Google maps mashup website about the Mannahatta Project sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Fund. Time to travel.
The exhibition, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center at the Queens Museum of Art (through Sept 23) is a large scale installation by Damon Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. The New York times reported on the exhibition’s extraordinary centerpiece, an intricate conversion of the museum’s most famous work, the Panorama of the City of New York , to depict the location of foreclosures in the five-borough area. The Panorama is a 9335 sq. foot scale model (1 inch = 100 ft) of Manhattan and all five boroughs made in 1964 for the World’s Fair, and updated in 1992. On top of this 3-D “map”, Damon and his young helpers placed bright pink plastic triangles representing blocks where 3 or more foreclosures have taken place. The result shows the concentration of foreclosures in areas where the non-white population is highest.
According to the Times: ”Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.”
The neighborhoods with high foreclosures, according to the Times, are the same areas where the disastrous practice of “redlining” denied credit to African-American and Latino families until it was made illegal in the 1970’s. The data used in creating the exhibition was also used by NY Times staff to create a great interactive map which allows you to see the growth of foreclosures across the area, and at the block level, since 2005. Frightening!
The Henry Hudson 400 website has a dazzling new map mash-up. Using a “layering system” thirty-two historical maps and Henry’s four routes can be displayed on top of Google Maps, with variable transparency. Places and events related to this year’s celebration can be “turned in” revealing a wealth of historical information. There is even an opportunity for the public to add information to the map. The clever and rich map application was created by Cartosoft , a Portland-based neo-geo company with some great applications for new age mapmakers. The Hudson 400-year celebration is picking up steam (has wind in its sails). In September a fleet of traditional Dutch flat bottom boats (botters) will sail up the Hudson from New York to Albany. I’m going to try to hitch a ride.
Sixth Sense is a multi-component wearable multi-function device invented by Pranav Mistry, a researcher at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group. It was demonstrated at the TED conference in February this year by Belgian Patty Maes, leader of the MIT lab, and this fabulous video describes the various features, and potential applications. Since one of the demonstrated applications is a map interface, I’m including it here, but the coolest thing (to me), is a watch created by drawing a circle on your wrist. As I perpetually lose watches, this would be the perfect solution.
Mapchannels Twittermap of the Elections in Iran.
Twitter maps of elections in Iran from 20 Minutes France.
When will it appear in Amsterdam? The Google Street View Trike was revealed in late May, and after a test-run in Rome (pictured), the trike will be put to use in the UK. Google-UK asked googleites for suggestions on where to ride the trike first, places such as monuments and castles. The final vote takes place on this web page. In the States, U Penn seems to be the first campus to snag the trike.
The USGS which calls itself “the nation’s largest water, earth, and biological science and civilian mapping agency” yesterday announced the availability of free vectorized topographic maps for the US in GeoPDF format. Details are on their Digital Map-Beta home page. Raster images of topographic maps have been available in GeoPDF form for some time, but the new series will include vector “layers” which can be switched on and off - contours, water, transportation, labels, etc. … just like a real GIS, but much easier to share. So far, only Arizona is available from the USGS, but much more will be released this year.
The GeoPDF reading software (TerraGo Desktop) can be download free from the developer, TerraGo Technologies. It is essentially a toolbar which is added to Adobe Reader which makes it possible to see the layers, to do a few spatial calculations (distance and area), and with a single click, hop into Google Maps. This is a fascinating development for the GIS world. Late last year ESRI announced an extension for ArcGIS 9.3 for exporting to GeoPDF. The US government is embracing GeoPDF in a big way, so little TerraGo will probably go a long way. After three venture-capital financing rounds will they go public, or be gulped by Google? Could we be looking at the ultimate Google/GIS Mashup? More later.
This Recovery Map is a really slick interactive map mixing Google Maps with USDA (US Dept. of Agriculture) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) data, showing ARRA(American Recovery Act of 2009) funding by state. Click on a state and county levels to zoom in and projects appear at the local level. The map looks like a great resource for people who want to hook into funding. As for map-makers, I am still trying to reverse-engineer it! Shouldn’t there be freedom of information on how to do this?
Another such map about DOE (Dept. of Energy) projects was made by ace cartographers at Axis Maps in Madison Wisconsin. This illustrates various techniques for communicating data on a static map. Axis Maps also posted a super video (with a beautiful musical accompaniment composed by one of the map-makers) showing 106 10-minute steps used to create a meticulously-crafted custom printed map. Nice!
Recent Comments