urban cartography

Victorian demographics: "poverty maps"

Our friend Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

Charles Booth's groundbreaking "Poverty Maps" of London from 1886 to 1903 used survey data to visually represent the quality of life for Londoners across a city that was characterized by enormous economic disparity. The LSE maintains an archive of the maps, zoomable and overlaid with the contemporary London map. The maps are colored from black ("Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.") to yellow ("Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.")

Brick Lane is a bit different today - on the map it's black to represent the highest rates of crime, poverty and mortality. A commenter on the BoingBoing thread notes that essays on that area of East London are available online, and also that the maps themselves are on display at Bishopsgate Library.

Manufactured Landscapes

Via mongrelmedia.com:

"MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful,” and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.         

The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it."             

The CommonCensus Map Project

Do you ever wish that political boundaries were drawn not by politicians with political interests, but rather by citizens incorporating their sense of community? Well, the CommonCensus Map Project finally gives you the opportunity to voice your opinion. At least to Michael Baldwin, the creator of the site.

 The CommonCensus Map Project is redrawing the map of the United States based on your voting, to show how the country is organized culturally, as opposed to traditional political boundaries. It shows how the country is divided into 'spheres of influence' between different cities at the national, regional, and local levels.

The survey is quick and painless - it only takes 12 clicks to complete. The project also gives participants the option of identifying their favorite professional and college sports teams, and has corresponding maps. Hopefully, this project will have some real effects on our thought processes and how political boundaries are defined. If not, at least the maps are cool to look at!

Biggest Commuter Cities - Where Does Yours Rank?

Les Christie, CNN/Money staff writer, reports on the latest Census 2000 data release:

Ever notice that on weekends you have a lot more elbow room? Maybe you live in one of those cities where the daytime population is a lot higher than at night and on weekends. 

The U.S. Census Bureau has released its first ever report highlighting the differences between the residential populations of various towns and the numbers of people present during the work day. "The concept of the daytime population," says the report, "refers to the number of people, including workers, who are present in an area during normal business hours, in contrast to the resident population present during the evening and nighttime hours."

According to these data, the wee City of Sacramento CA, grows by over 100,000 people during day (about 25%), due to commuting workers. Where does your city rank? [via]

The Climax of Humanity

A recent article - The Climax of Humanity in Scientific American - looks at demographic, economic and environmental transitions occuring in this century and how these characteristics are transforming individually, each other, and the world around us.

World Processor

One globe of many, this represents countries that were peaceful in the 1980s:

via boingboing:

Worldprocessing is Ingo Günther's sculpture/data-visualization business. Günther makes hundreds of globes of the world, with the graphics and labels tweaked to overlay social, technical and political relationships to geography.

Sex in the City

A charity in London, Eaves Housing, has now published the Poppy Report, which examines and tries to understand the patterns of the sex industry in London by mapping locations where commercial sex takes place. The project also aims to help emancipate those who are trafficked into the city for this purpose.

Worse than Creepy Neighbors

Use the handy Environmental Justice Geographic Assessment Tool that your favorite feds have made to identify, via EnviroMapper EJ, the polluters in your zip code.

Mapping Urban Poverty

Mapping Urban Poverty is an illuminating use of census and GIS data to show the changes in our cities from 1970 to 2000 by race and income groupings. It shows the concentration of poverty and the overlapping concentration of race, supporting Sampson and Wilson's thesis (PDF) that there is a vicious cycle where macro social forces (poverty and unemployment, racism, segregation, migration) interact with community-level factors (turnover rate, family disruption, crime) to contribute to social disorganization, causing more crime and further family disruption and reasons for increased policing.  it turns out that prison is not a solution for this, as it contributes to further social disorganization, causing more crime (PDF).

Vote Vectors

The Rise and Fall of the Black Voter is a collection of maps documenting change in voting patterns throughout the 20th century (context). "It is an excellent companion to the purple maps of the most recent election, and a nice antidote to simplistic comparisons of pre-Civil War and recent electoral college maps. Republicans can bask in the glow of their successful 'Southern Strategy,' while Democrats can take heart that change, while often slow, is still possible." via Metafilter