Maps of cities - Topics

A misspelling on an official sign can outlive everyone who noticed it The spatial turn taught urban historians to read maps as arguments rather than background Official city maps routinely leave informal settlements off the sheet Disputed borders and disputed place names both surface on the same digital map How reliable is the building footprint data your city publishes? OpenStreetMap fills in the places commercial maps never bother with Why does your navigation app still route you down a street that no longer exists? Harry Beck's London tube map threw away geography and every transit system copied it Shrinking a city onto one sheet makes some neighbourhoods look central and others vanish Cadastral maps settle property lines long after the surveyor has died Historic fire insurance maps record building materials block by block Street view cameras started a privacy argument that nobody has settled Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City maps San Francisco through essays instead of streets Every map of a city tells you who paid for the survey Sanborn fire insurance maps let you reconstruct a city block by block Emergency crews still carry paper maps of the city for a reason John Snow's cholera map is still the textbook example of mapping an outbreak Photographic and map collections belong in a city bibliography alongside the printed books