Archinect - News

CityLAB's new tree mapping feature calls Berliners towards a greener future

2023-08-23T12:21:00-04:00

The maintenance of urban tree canopies is one of utmost importance to planners in the fight against heat and subsequent efforts to make cities into effective carbon stores that are dually resilient against climate change while improving public health and well-being overall.

A new digital map developed by the technology incubator CityLAB Berlin now helps to improve the care of these vital green infrastructures using data and an inspired citizenry whom they also credit with helping to streamline its development since 2020.

The data includes a register of over half a million trees with information on their water levels and age culled from previous government projects. The map it creates draws inspiration from the NYC Tree Map, and others developed in cities like Athens and Washington, D.C.

Locals who use the app frequently have begun to adopt individual trees as their own, surpassing participation levels that "ignited a debate between different local district authorities as to what e...

Ohio State researchers use machine learning to create 3D digital models of lost historic neighborhoods

2023-07-21T12:38:00-04:00

A team of researchers from The Ohio State University has developed a machine learning technique that converts old urban maps into three-dimensional digital models. According to the team, the models could potentially revolutionize research involving historic neighborhoods and the economic impact of their demolition.

The study, recently published in the journal PLOS ON, involved extracting and digitizing data from Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. The maps, created during the 19th and 20th centuries and frequently updated, were used by fire insurance companies to estimate their liabilities in about 12,000 U.S. cities and towns.

"We now have the ability to unlock the wealth of data that are embedded in these Sanborn fire atlases," said Ohio State Geography Professor Harvey Miller, a co-author of the study. "It enables a whole new approach to urban historical res...

Move over, Google Earth: Swiss tech startup uses enhanced aerial photography to create better 3D models of cities for urban planners

2022-12-19T17:06:00-05:00

A new approach uses aerial imaging to generate 3D models of cities and regions with advanced precision, enabling urban planners to incorporate full-scale designs of all types of architectural and urban structures.

Tech start-up Uzufly operates out of the Le Garage space located inside the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)’s expanding Innovation Park. "The company's 3D models incorporate a wide range of urban-planning data and can accommodate any type of architectural design at full scale," reports Tech Xplore's Sandy Evangelista.

Previously on Archinect: Scientists are using deep learning data to map structure damage from wildfires

"We basically use the same technology as Google Earth — that is, aerial photography," Uzufly co-founder Théo Benazzi explains. "But while Google uses airplanes to take huge numbers of pictures at high altitudes, we use drones that have smaller cameras and capture images much closer to the ground. That's why we can generate 3D models at the level of a neighborhood or an entire city."

The team is currently working with the EPFL's Arts of Sciences Laboratory (LAPIS) and the Swiss National Science Foundation to produce a digital twin of an unnamed Egyptian...

Segregation by Design: Using visual data and spatial analysis to highlight the racist legacy of urban renewal

2022-08-29T15:12:00-04:00

What started as a self-funded project from New York-based architect Adam Paul Susaneck is gaining attention over its unique ability to paint a picture of the effects of racial segregation in the 180 American cities included in the controversial Federal Highway Act of 1956.

Inspired by Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Susaneck launched his Segregation by Design project in early 2021 to "reveal the extent to which the American city was methodically hollowed out based on race."

Susaneck is in league with others who have been calling on the Biden Administration to dismantle the legacy of race-based discrimination laden in America’s aging highway network and says the trifold goal of the project is to: 1. Create an "Atlas of Urban Renewal" in book form; 2. Create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion; and 3. Continue to grow the followership of Segregation by Design’s social media channels (which to date number some 132,000).

Related on Archinect: St....

A new tool provides wildfire risk data to American homeowners in the face of climate change

2022-05-18T20:15:00-04:00

Wildfires are becoming an increasing threat to American homeowners with the acceleration of climate change, and now a new tool from the nonprofit First Street Foundation will allow them to access probability-based data about the potential risk their property may face over the next 30 years.

By incorporating open-source tax information, satellite imaging, and advanced computer modeling, the Foundation was able to produce a Fire Factor metric and interactive map that details both the intensity of future burns and their ability to move across varying topographies. An individual structure’s score is thus determined by its available defensible space, roof and construction type, and proximity to fuels like trees, shrubs, and wild grasses.

Currently, there is no publicly available data on fire risk similar to the flood damage assessments required by the federal National Flood Insurance Prog...

Now Google Maps can see inside buildings thanks to AI

2022-05-13T12:06:00-04:00

Google launched a new mode for Maps on Wednesday, designed to give users a more real-life look at the places they’re going before they even go. The new Immersive View is sort of a Street View in the sky: you can look over a location from above to get a sense of the neighborhood and then drop to street level to see the specific spots you might want to hit up.

The feature was revealed at Google’s I/O 2022 Keynote address in which CEO Sundar Pichai also introduced a new flood forecasting feature and expanded capabilities of the 15-year-old Maps project made possible through advancements in AI technology. Pichai says the company now has 1.6 billion buildings and over 60 million kilometers of road to date as part of the project.

The Immersive View feature will now allow the interiors of a good portion of them to be seen using a machine learning technique called neural rendering. Pichai used London's Westminster area as an example and said the feature is useful in providing pedestrian and vehicle congestion information to users in real-time.

Check out this new map of Canadian Architecture award winners since 1968

2021-08-26T14:59:00-04:00

Looking for some Maple-flavored architectural inspiration? You’re in luck now, thanks to a new interactive map published by The Atlas of Research on Exemplarity in Architecture and the Built Environment in collaboration with Canadian Architect magazine.

The new map showcases a comprehensive list of the more than 500 winners of the magazine’s annual award since 1968. Featuring both built and unrealized projects, the list was compiled thanks to data collected by M.Arch students at the Université de Montréal.

The project was funded in part by the Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Competitions and Mediations of Excellence Social Sciences as well as the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The full database can be accessed here.

The New York Times uses neural network to map every building in the U.S.

2018-10-12T13:25:00-04:00

The New York Times has made a map of every building in the United States. Using a neural network to analyze satellite imagery, the team's program then traced the shape of buildings across the country. Users can enter a city, zip code, or address, and explore these areas in detail.

It's pretty fun to play with, but the tool also helps illuminate the underlying patterns of cities and places that make them feel the way they do. Looking at these different patterns, we can detect the imprints of geology, the effects of suburbanization, the intentional designs of cities, and the traces of culture embedded within. By looking at the physical infrastructure, the maps tell us so much more about people’s connections, stories, and experiences relating to a specific environment.

Take a look here.

How NYC got its grid and a tiny little mosaic known as the "Triangle of Spite"

2018-07-25T14:15:00-04:00

"Property of the Hess Estate Which Has Never Been Dedicated For Public Purposes", reads a small mosaic in Manhattan's West Village. A peculiar sight, artist Chaz Hutton recently recounted in a fascinating twitter thread how this small piece of New York Real Estate, also known as the Triangle of Spite, came to be.

In the 19th century, as the city was growing—and expanding with landfill—a commission was put together to create a grid for future development. Called “The 1811 Commissioners plan”, the blueprints drawn up laid the city out into a series of rectangular blocks. As the grid was built out, undergoing alterations such as the addition of Central Park, the Commissioners Plan began running up against the older grids of the city going in different directions. The result was a number of little triangular blocks.

Triangle detail. Courtesy of Atlas Obscura.

On one of these awkward intersections sat the Voorhis building, owned by a man named David Hess. Eventually, when the city decide...

Win a “Concrete New York” map city guide!

2017-11-30T12:00:00-05:00

Explore New York City the (mostly) old-fashioned way with the “Concrete New York” Map, the latest paper architectural map by Blue Crow Media. This unique two-sided city guide highlights a selection of NYC's most celebrated concrete buildings as a gateway to discovering historic gems like Battery Hill at Fort Tilden or contemporary works like Steven Holl Architects’ Hunters Point Community Library or Dattner Architects' Spring Street Salt Shed. Thanks to Blue Crow Media, Archinect is giving away five Concrete New York maps to our readers!

The foldable map includes an intro by Brooklyn-based writer Allison C. Meier, photographs by Jason Woods, and project details of over 50 of NYC's concrete buildings and structures, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist Begrisch Hall, and the Eero Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Center.

Detail of the Concrete New York map. Image courtesy of Blue Crow Media.

Begrisch Hall at Bronx Community College by Marce...

As the cities change, Google Street View records

2017-05-26T15:27:00-04:00

It’s been a decade since Google Street View launched, giving folks all the tools they need to virtually travel to far-flung places without leaving the comfort of their couch. But the tool is also useful for those who are curious about the evolution of places over time—and few places have experienced as drastic a change to their landscape in the past decade as New York City.

Consider how much NYC has transformed in the past ten years. It is hard to even imagine the city's appearance in 2007 — prior to 20 skyscrapers' rising above the southern side of Central Park, before projects like Hudson Yards, the High Line, Pacific Park even begun their construction, and back when Williamsburg and Long Island City were not nearly as dense as today.

To see it for yourself, head over to Google Street View for some time-traveling. The feature can be activated by pressing the clock icon below your location.

View of 339 11th St in 2009 vs 2016

Unfold Berlin's modern architectural history in this nifty paper map

2016-12-02T14:22:00-05:00

At nearly 350 square miles, [Berlin is] a difficult city to tour without some guidance. Its vastness is doubly inconvenient for architecture buffs...The [Modern Berlin Map] documents 50 buildings, selected by Berlin-based journalist Matthew Tempest. Unfolded, the front of the guide displays the landmarks on a map of Berlin, while the reverse catalogues the buildings in chronological order. This provides a unique lens through which to track the city’s political shifts.

Want more travel tips for Berlin? Check out Archinect's Berlin Travel Guide, which features recommendations from Jürgen Mayer H:

Let Jürgen Mayer H. help plan your next trip to Berlin with his own travel tips

Help fund this Kickstarter for 3D printed maps of Tokyo

2016-10-11T13:39:00-04:00

The confluence of Google mapping, 3D printing and the desire for inventive home decor has produced a Kickstarter for One Hundred Tokyo, a fully-fledged three dimensional map of Tokyo that is divided into 100 handy pieces. Pick your favorite palm-sized square(s) or collect all 100; it's up to you and your available display space. Nonetheless, these minutely detailed urban segments are cool/notable both for their immediacy and their accuracy; Zenrin, the same urban data providers that work with Google Maps and Microsoft, have "specially equipped vehicles" that compile the metropolitan deets used to produce the models.

What else is going on with 3D printing? So glad you asked:

See 2,000 Years of Urban Growth Around the World With This Interactive Map

2015-12-22T19:20:00-05:00

Back in 1 A.D., ancient civilizations like the Mayans experienced “urban booms” of their own. This mind-boggling interactive map made by Esri puts thousands of years of global population growth into perspective, ultimately showing us that NYC is kind of just a blip on the radar—or in this case, the 2,000-year timeline of life.

A melancholic tour of Sad Topographies

2015-10-07T18:32:00-04:00

Humans have sculpted the landscape in their image ever since the age of the anthropocene began – but aside from our delusions of grandeur (Mt. Rushmore) or engineering marvels (Panama Canal), our sadder, more pathetic selves have also made their mark on the Earth.

Sad Topographies, a selection of spitefully named geographical features culled from Google Maps screengrabs, gathers the instances where we couldn’t help but project our miseries onto an unassuming Earth. The collection includes such melancholic gems as Mt. Despair, Crazy Woman Creek, and Mistake Island.

Let's take a despondent tour, starting with a walk down Sad Road...

Continuing woefully through Hopeless Pass...

Before questioning our life choices by Point No Point...

Followed by shamefully relieving ourselves "Where the devil urinates"...

In the terrifying shadow of Bloody Dick Peak...

As we consider shuffling off our mortal coil along Shades of Death Road...

Until asking ourselves why we even try anymore as the sun sets out...

Explore Manhattan When It Was Just Forests and Creeks With the 1609 Welikia Map

2015-09-28T14:29:00-04:00

The Welikia Project, formerly known as the Mannahatta Project, has gotten a powerful update that now lets you explore New York City's historic ecology using a satellite map that imagines how Manhattan might have looked back in 1609—and all the years between then and now.

Map Shows the Best Neighborhoods in the World’s Top Cities Are Still Cheaper Than NYC

2015-09-14T11:43:00-04:00

With real estate prices soaring so high and so quickly, a lot of us are questioning if we even want to live in New York anymore—not to mention if we can. According to NeighborhoodX‘s latest map the price paid for a Bed-Stuy or Harlem apartment could get you a pretty sweet pad in the South of France or even trendy Paris.

Apple Maps puts its own cars on the streets, in uphill battle against Google Maps

2015-06-10T13:47:00-04:00

So will Apple’s version of street-based imagery simply be a direct copy of Street View? Possibly not. A patent filed back in 2013 mentions “3D Position Tracking for Panoramic Imagery Navigation,” and the filing is disparaging of existing imaging software, calling it a “tedious experience,” though it doesn’t mention Google Street View by name.

Waze and its new uneasy bedfellows

2015-06-08T14:44:00-04:00

The L.A.-Waze partnership is, at least in theory, an initial step toward allowing the city’s planners and engineers to regain a healthier role in mediating the kinds of longstanding cross-town conflicts that Waze has renewed and amplified. Whether the deal will help to resolve fundamental long-term issues related to the city’s growth and inadequate infrastructure is another matter.

built: LA maps the age of every building in Los Angeles

2015-05-29T15:41:00-04:00

Construction in Los Angeles may have exploded during the postwar era, but as a new interactive map shows, the wide age range of its buildings might surprise you. Using open data from local governments, built: LA visualizes the age of roughly 3 million buildings across L.A. County constructed between 1890 and 2008. Drag your mouse to explore the vast web of communities and neighborhoods, hover over individual properties to discover birth years, and double click to zoom in further.

Mapping Brooklyn: making sense of the world through art and maps

2015-04-21T19:17:00-04:00

This lively effort — mapping — is the subject of a rich exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) and BRIC [...] that pairs the work of 18 contemporary artists with 23 historical maps dating back as far as 1562. For Mapping Brooklyn, BHS opened its collection to the invited artists [...]. The goal of uniting these two components — map and art — is to uncover the common ground: to render, through judgment and artistic process, the world legible.

Mapping the City: maps through the eyes of street artists

2015-01-21T17:53:00-05:00

Street artists are showing how they’d map cities differently in a new show that lets visitors step into their clandestine worlds. [...] Mapping the City, an exhibition of the responses by 50 international street artists to being asked to map their cities “through subjective surveying rather than objective ordinance”. Conventional cartography this is not.

Wired looks at "Ground Truth", Google's initiative to improve Maps accuracy

2014-12-16T14:53:00-05:00

On a recent visit to Mountain View, I got a peek at how the Google Maps team assembles their maps and refines them with a combination of algorithms and meticulous manual labor—an effort they call Ground Truth. The project launched in 2008, but it was mostly kept under wraps until just a couple years ago. It continues to grow, now covering 51 countries, and algorithms are playing a bigger role in extracting information from satellite, aerial, and Street View imagery.

Actionable Cartographies

2014-10-24T13:27:00-04:00

Matt Knutzen performs a different kind of public service than Bruce Barrett of the School Construction Authority or Jeffrey Roth of the Fire Department of New York, two recent installments in our Profiles in Public Service series. He works at the New York Public Library, overseeing NYPL’s incomparable collection of maps, and looking for ways to turn items from the library’s vast catalogue into “actionable spatial data.”

Hunts Point | Memories of the Future

2014-08-27T14:51:00-04:00

In collaboration with fifteen poets and community activists from StartUp Box South Bronx, I recently created Memories of the Future, a location-based cinema project viewed on mobile phones. The group experimented with spoken word poetry, site specific performance, and on-site spectatorship to reframe the predominant view of Hunts Point and speak about possibilities for its future from a position of power.

Mapping the city, statistic by statistic

2014-07-21T17:19:00-04:00

The map, one of the central elements of navigation, has expanded in capability since the form has been translated to digital. Case in point, the MIT Media Lab’s “You Are Here” project is a collection of maps that visualize a variety of datasets over space. Things from bike accidents to coffee shops, graffiti reports, and transit connectivity are all laid out, using a variety of open data and other online resources, such as Google’s map directions services API.

Direct link to You Are Here.

Copyrighting Cartography with Fictional Places

2014-07-21T14:43:00-04:00

With all the time and energy cartographers spend preparing maps, it makes sense that they would want to protect their investment. One of the ways they do so — although they don’t always admit it — is by including “trap streets,” deliberate mistakes added to maps to catch unsuspecting copyright violators. These may include fake streets, as the name suggests, but the term is also applied to other erroneous cartographic data included to embarrass those who might steal it.

Apple Maps Is Painting Our World Strange

2014-03-26T14:19:00-04:00

The Rendering Eye: Urban America Revisited presents 3D screenshots of the urban US as they appear in Apple Maps: deserted streets, post-apocalyptic buildings and industrial plants, melting harbors. Cars and boats turn into shadows, trees into sculptures, containers into wax.[...] The cityscapes captured by artist REGULA BOCHSLER for the publication are abstract, machine generated, and cold. And yet they are poetic, not least because of their “mistakes,” which give them a painterly composition.

Labeling the city: Ghana's initiative to name its streets

2014-02-11T15:14:00-05:00

In a city with no addresses, it’s difficult for local authorities to tax property. And without tax revenues, it’s difficult to upgrade infrastructure and services in the slums [...] To fix these problems, Ghana is on a national quest to name its city streets. [...] Giving names to streets is only a means to an end. The real problem cities are trying to solve is service delivery. When properties have actual addresses and those addresses reside in databases, all kinds of things become possible.

The Quaint Plans for American Cities, as We Envisioned Them 200 Years Ago

2014-01-03T13:10:00-05:00

Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright produced an Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States in 1932 that remains, 80 years later, one of the most definitive collections of maps (many of them innovative in their time) from early U.S. history. [...] Just before the holidays, the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab unveiled an ambitious project bringing the entire collection online [...].