Urban Cartography

great map of Southern California's Legoland, by the always-excellent Paul Horn

good looking & communicative map of Orange County

"transforming meshed cartogramms into isolines with the help of constructing a gradient mesh and tracing the result"

What Charles Booth did for London (see previous post), the Justice Mapping Center does for various American cities, regions and states. Except with a much better methodology. And better technology. And more completely.

Over 500 rural communities in Georgia are being removed from a new map - created by that state's Department of Transportation - because lazy cartographers claim that there is not enough room to fit their placenames. Never mind that Rand McNally, AAA, Thomas Guides and other companies have kept the names intact with creative typography. Apparently the Georgia DOT only has one font size on their computer: too big.

Boingboing.com reports that such communities as Roosterville, Cloudland, Hemp, Due West (a decent-sized college town), Poetry Tulip and Po Biddy Crossroads have all been left off this new map. Sorry guys - your towns no longer exist. The Associated Press reports:

A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.

Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.

awesome image appropriated from Boing Boing

via Cartography: the Canadian Cartographic Association's weblog:

The Oil Drum: New York City has an interesting map of the United States that displays the amount of social capital per state. Social capital is a bit of an ill-defined term but simply indicates the sense of community and interconnectedness people feel. Or as Robert Putnam, author of a book on social capital Bowling Alone says, “The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all ‘social networks’ [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [‘norms of reciprocity’].”

mysociety.org has produced some very interesting travel-time maps - for Cambridge, London and the nation as a whole. Future additions include relating journey times to housing price; adding travel cost data; incorporating reliability-of-transportation-mode data; and real-time web service, which would be tremendously useful as part of a trip-planning tool. Imagine something like this tied to every airline, bus, train and highway - with real-time construction, weather, and other data piped directly to it!  via oblomovka

I can verify that this site is wonderful and good after easily creating my own google map hack. Just in case you are curious where to find feral cats in Sacramento, well, try here. I know you've been curious.  Anyway, I'll let them tell you (via their 'about' section) why they're so cool:

Wayfaring hopes to be a great resource for people who want to build personalized maps, and share them publically or privately. When we first started talking about building this site, we just wanted to make it easier to find activities around the globe through this map and destination sharing. What bar should you go to while waiting for a table at your favorite restaurant, for example? Just simple things like that so traveling can be a little easier.

Much like Wikipedia, the value or goodness that will come from this site will come from those who use it. Almost everything can be edited and changed, so be good to each other. The trip you save might be your own.

To see an example of how this site is best used, try checking out the Best of Wayfaring!

New Google Maps hacks seem to be springing up every day, thanks to their API. Here's one that plots the past course of Hurricane Rita and plots its possible future path over the next few days.

An excerpt from MIT's SENSEable City Lab project about the Mobile Landscape:

Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. The profusion of handheld electronic devices with increasingly powerful networking capabilities offers its users new modes of interaction within the urban environment. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!

Because it is possible to simultaneously 'ping' the cell phones of thousands of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens.

[via] [link]