Archinect - News

This tool instantly draws all of the streets in any city

2020-01-24T15:13:00-05:00

City Roads, an online tool developed by software engineer Andrei Kashcha, allows users to search any city and instantly receive back only the streets by pulling data from OpenStreetMap. Simply search, click, and enjoy the beauty of urban planning. You can print your city of choice on a mug for purchase, save it as a .png file or even as a vector file.

Here are a couple of US cities generated from the online tool:

And here are some outside of the US:

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.

Urban Omnibus travels the Brooklyn-Queens Divide

2015-01-16T14:57:00-05:00

As a researcher interested in the intersection of urban form and place, Joseph Heathcott set out to explore how one of New York’s borders shapes the lived experience and physical environment of its surroundings. Through historical research, photography, and deep observation, he traces the city’s only major internal land boundary — the Brooklyn-Queens border — and draws out the social and spatial conditions of this largely invisible urban seam.

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.

Relocation or Adaptation: From Sprawl to Archipelago

2014-12-08T16:05:00-05:00

1. By current estimates, if the polar ice caps melt, sea levels around the world will rise by between 80 and 100m. 2. Many cities (and, by default, around 70 per cent of the world's population) border on a body of water of some kind. According to 2010 government figures, 39 per cent of US population live on a coast. Half live within 50 miles of the ocean.

Based on worst-case scenarios for sea-level rise, cartographer Jeremy Linn imagined the future of three of America's major Western cities. He used topographic information to speculate on what an 80m – ≈262 ft – rise would look like as well as coming up with new names for this new geography. While such an increase in sea levels won't occur in our lifetime, our grandchildren could one day live in cities like this (if drastic food shortages, violent conflict, drug-adapted 'superbugs,' drought, and extreme weather don't get them first...). Such a rise in sea level would require every ice sheet on the planet to melt.

In Linn's imaginings, Portland (pictured above) has become a veritable archipelago of islands dominated by the spine of what-is-now Northwest Portland.

Likewise, much of contemporary Seattle will be replaced by a network of waterways. Only the city's hills would remains as isolated islands.

Los Angeles-of-the-future is almost entirely inundated. To get from Baldwin Island (Hil...

New map tool reveals NYC's vacant lots zoned for revitalization

2014-11-11T11:46:00-05:00

Developed with the help of a team of volunteer researchers, urban planners and designers, this new online tool allows anyone to view the staggering amount of publicly-owned lots that once had an urban renewal plan in the pipeline but were scrapped due to bureaucracy. By mapping out all of the vacant spaces across the city, 596 hopes that we as a community can take a top-down approach to turning these urban blights into public gardens, play lots, and spaces where people can “co-create.”

From 1949-1974 NYC took on an urban renewal project that resulted in the bulldozing of "slums" across Manhattan. The vast majority of the proposals planned for the land floundered and today nearly 15,000 lots across the city lay vacant. 596 Acres, a grassroots land access nonprofit, had developed a map tool called Urban Reviewer that pinpoints all of these spots—most owned by the public—already zoned for action.

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.”

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.

Analyzing the tensions of transnational negotiations through kinetic cartography

2014-01-17T20:23:00-05:00

Negotiated edges – one world, different systems is a kinetic cartography "world machine" currently featured at the 2013-14 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Hong Kong. Created by multidisciplinary design team Chiu Ning, Yuet Chan, Lau Wai Kin, and Andrew Ng, the piece is relevant to the Biennale's overall discussion of boundaries in various architectural and urban contexts ranging from an individual to a global perspective.

If you're based in Hong Kong, you can check out Negotiated edges at the Biennale until Feb. 23, 2014. You can also watch the video below to see it in action.

Here's more info on the project:

"'Negotiated edges – one world, different systems' owes its inception to an architectural thesis on boundaries as strategic exploitation of resources through transnational linkages against the backdrop of globalization. The team further developed the concept by looking beyond restrictive binaries to the multiplicity of sites and context.

Negotiated edges, be...

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 [...].

Buckminster Fuller Institute Selects DYMAX REDUX Winner

2013-08-07T16:57:00-04:00

Just a few days ago, we published the eleven finalists of DYMAX REDUX, an open call launched in April by the Buckminster Fuller Institute to create a new and inspiring interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's 1943 Dymaxion Map. Now the winning designs have been announced.

Previously: Buckminster Fuller Institute Announces DYMAX REDUX Finalists

Buckminster Fuller Institute Announces DYMAX REDUX Finalists

2013-07-22T14:21:00-04:00

The Buckminster Fuller Institute has unveiled the eleven finalists of DYMAX REDUX, an open call to create a new and inspiring interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map from 1943.

UPDATE: Buckminster Fuller Institute Selects DYMAX REDUX Winner