"The cities of the future will contain no useless garbage of trees and flowers or loathsome promiscuity of animals, but geometrical buildings in glass and armed cement."
So says Signor Azari, a particularly pessimistic futurist, in this wonderful 1927 editorial from the New York Times. To see how another age debated modernism and feared the mechanization and dehumanization of the city-to-come, take a look at the article (PDF).
Sometimes maligned, often misunderstood, the City of Angels occupies a healthy chunk of Southern California real estate which has been the subject of thousands of thematic maps, dating back to the time of the first European explorers who began to wander around the area some five centuries ago. Recently, the Library of Congress and the Ira Gershwin Gallery collaborated to present a collection of historical maps of the region culled from the collections of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. For those who were unable to visit the in situ exhibit, those maps are presented here for the pleasure of the web-browsing public. There are a number of gems among their number, including a composite map plate of the Baja Peninsula from the 17th and 18th centuries, along with a 1906 map of oil fields located right in the city. Visitors can zoom in and out on each map, a feature that will come in handy when examining the 1937 Starland map which features the locations of various Hollywood stars.
Mapping Medieval Townscapes: A Digital Atlas of the New Towns of Edward I
In the waning decades of the 13th century, King Edward I was concerned with several things in his kingdom. While England was growing more prosperous, he was also concerned about the rising trend towards urbanization and about the Welsh. In an effort to deal with both situations, Edward proposed the creation of a group of ‘new towns” in both Wales and other parts of the kingdom. Out of this
desire to maintain social and political order arose such places as Conwy, Newborough, Rhuddlan, and Aberystwyth. Seven hundred years later, a group of researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, working with funds from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, created this digital atlas of those towns. Drawing on the work of archaeologists, GIS experts, and other specialists, this atlas contains copious information on each locale. Visitors can look through each interactive map, and toggle various data layers, such as town walls, trenches, streets, and so on. Along with these maps, visitors can also read about how each map was created, and download the data sets used to generate each map.
tFrom Traditional to Reformed: A Review of the Land Use Regulations in the Nation’s 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas [pdf]
In the ancient world, the king or a clutch of religious leaders had the final say of what was built in cities, and where it was built. Several millennia later, the situation is governed by a wide range of regulatory bodies and elected councils, and in some parts of the country, it is easier to start work on one’s tax returns than taking on the valiant task of understanding local land use regulations. Stepping into that mucky situation boldly are Rolf Pendall, Robert Puentes, and Jonathan Martin who have recently completed this 40-page paper on behalf of The Brookings Institution. In the survey they offer here, they find a wide variety of “regulatory regimes” in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. The report relies primarily on factor analysis, which might make it a bit on the technical side for some audiences, but overall it presents a fine survey and some good insights into the world of land use regulation.
Photographs show old and new skylines, buildings and city artwork from New York City, through the photographs and rephotographs of Douglas Levere. This link comes from an ancient metafilter post, but since the exhibition is about to end at Museum of the City of New York in less than two weeks, I thought it a great time to put in one last plug. An excerpt from the New York Changing website:
New York Changing, The current body of work by New York City photographer Douglas Levere, is a photographic record of the ever-changing landscape of New York City. Guided by Berenice Abbott’s 1930’s project, Changing New York, Levere revisited neighborhoods and former storefronts, documenting the evolution of the metropolis known for constantly reinventing itself.
Sean Dockray, Steve Rowell and Fiona Whitton dissect our ambivalence toward – and the taxonomic evolution of – traffic in issue 17 of Cabinet magazine.
The word traffic is always a little slippery, one of those words that escapes us when we try to pin it down. When engineers say traffic, they mean the movement of vehicles along a roadway, or what you'd find if you asked a dictionary. For the rest of us civilians, however, traffic has come to mean the exact opposite: that phenomenon of vehicles crowding a roadway until everything slows down to a frustrating crawl.
Roughly ten years and 400,000 automobiles into the twentieth century, the phenomenon was given its own name by the Saturday Evening Post: the traffic jam. While this seems quaint to a driver accustomed to four-hour-long rush hours, engineers continue to categorize it as "traffic congestion" even if there's no consensus on what that means. Is it slowness at a point over time—or over an area at a point in time? If so, how slow? Or maybe it's just a feeling? In cities all over the world, congestion is becoming the rule, which is to say that it is simply becoming "traffic."
The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, which resides at the University of Texas at Austin, has an online resource for nearly 400 years' worth of U.S. city, street, sewer and topological maps. Most are rather pretenseless, but some have intricate and ornamental features that evoke thoughts of long lost treasure maps. Thanks to Stephen Coles for the tip.
In 1939, a movie was made by the American Institute of Planners that presented an alternative to urban chaos. Is it suburbia or is it smart growth? One may draw their own conclusions as to how this "new city" would have been realized. If the music and camera work don't grab you, perhaps you'll enjoy the entertaining narration. One tasty soundbite from this flick: "You can't tell where the playing ends and where the work begins. We mix them here." Sounds like my kind of utopia.
OK, so these are sort of random, but they are all more or less historical. These WPA maps of los angeles are pretty cool. You could spend much time wandering the LA basin with this as your guide. but of course, you'd have to be in LA ... and who wants that? The Art and Architecture Thesaurus online might be a helpful assistant to such a trip. On a completely different note, common-place is the site of the american antiquities society, so on first blush you might think that it has nothing to do with what you're interested in, but it does. The current special issue is all about Pacific routes, and hence not as much about urban cartography thing, but other articles and issues have some pretty cool historical mapping stuff. And the best for last: sewer history is one of the coolest poo sites you'll have checked out in awhile. One highlight is a 16th century poem that places a priest and the devil in conversation about whether or not one should pray while on the toilet. Of course there's also a ton of info on various historical sewer systems, including Paris, London, Egypt, Japan, and of course Tucson, Arizona.
Conservation technicians at the National Museum of Natural History take great care in preserving artifacts, maps and drawings. See this link for pictures of some beautifully-preserved maps and artwork in the National Anthropological Archives.
The archived website of the Big Apple Garbage Sentinel depicts the history of New York City's life among the detritus. One notable fact about the now-defunct Fresh Kills landfill, gleaned from this 10-chapter saga, is that its highest mound was only slightly shorter than the Washington Monument (555 feet). Oh yeah, and also that it was the largest landfill in the whole world (allegedly).
Today, Fresh Kills is filled over and covered with wild grasses. Staten Islanders have been eagerly providing their ideas in a series of community outreach efforts that will determine its future use as it transforms from landfill to landscape.
It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. In ____ there will be no slum areas because we won't let them develop. There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed.
Who said this? Where is he/she talking about? The Answer. Of course, it didn't quite turn out as planned.
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
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