A roundup of maps of venues and facilities for the 2024 Paris Olympics from competitive swimming website Swim Swam; the maps are small and mostly sourced from social media. The map on the Paris 2024 website is interactive, comprehensive and confusing: a case of doing everything but nothing well.
Tag: Paris
Apple Maps Roundup for July 2023
Downloadable maps are coming to Apple Maps in iOS 17 this fall. Ars Technica looks at how they’ll work, and how they’ll compare to Google Maps’ offline maps (at the moment—which to be sure is with the iOS 17 public beta—Apple’s offline maps take up much more space but also offer more detail).
James Killick considers Apple’s forthcoming Vision Pro headset and wonders whether something might not be afoot in the mapping space. “The real kicker for geospatial is its ability to immerse you in a truly 3D experience. […] So given a truly immersive 3D experience is possible, think of the wonders it will do for maps and mapping in general.”
After expanding its new maps to central Europe—Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia—in April, Apple brought detailed city maps to Paris, cycling directions to the whole of France, and its new maps to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Slovakia in June. As usual, Justin O’Beirne has all the details at the above links.
When Artists Drew Maps: A New Exhibition in Paris
A new exhibition opens today at the Archives Nationales in Paris: Quand les artistes dessinaient les cartes (“When Artists Drew Maps”), an exploration of vues figurées —what we might refer to today as chorographic maps or panoramas—drawn by artists from the 14th to the 16th century. “Presented for the most part for the first time to the public, these works shed new light on the landscapes and scenes of everyday life at the turn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.”1 Nearly 100 original maps on display. At the Hôtel de Soubise site in Paris until 7 January 2020, 8€/5€. [Tony Campbell]
The Incredibly Granular Maps of Data.Pour.Paris
Data.Pour.Paris is a collection of interactive maps about the city of Paris. It’s a lot more interesting—and granular—than it appears at first glance, though. The traffic and real-time metro maps you might expect, but the map of street lights drills down to individual streetlights—and their wattage. Public order complaints are mapped individually, and there’s even a map of the 2018 Paris marathon that tracks the progress of individual runners. They’re the work of French engineer Benjamin Tran Dinh, and they’re neat. They speak as much to the availability of such data as the ability to map it. [Maps Mania]
Previously: Le Grand Paris en Cartes.
New Books for May 2018
Art
Helen Cann’s How to Make Hand Drawn Maps: A Creative Guide With Tips, Tricks, and Projects (Chronicle, 1 May paperback, 22 May ebook). “With wonderful examples and easy-to-follow instructions, this beautifully illustrated how-to book makes it simple and fun to create one-of-a-kind hand-drawn maps. Helpful templates, grids, and guidelines complement a detailed breakdown of essential cartographic elements and profiles of talented international map artists.” Amazon, iBooks
Academic Monographs
I trained as a historian of the French Third Republic, so Kory Olson’s The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris, 1889-1934 (Liverpool University Press, 4 May), which “looks at how government presentations of Paris and environs change over the course of the Third Republic (1889-1934),” would have very much been up my alley twenty years ago. “The government initially seemed to privilege an exclusively positive view of the capital city and limited its presentation of it to land inside the walled fortifications. However, as the Republic progressed and Paris grew, technology altered how Parisians used and understood their urban space.” Amazon
Chris Barrett’s Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety (Oxford University Press, 22 May) is about “the many anxieties provoked by early modern maps and mapping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A product of a military arms race, often deployed for security and surveillance purposes, and fundamentally distortive of their subjects, maps provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain. […] This volume explores three major poems of the period—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials.” Amazon, iBooks
Related: Map Books of 2018.
Redesigning the Paris Métro Map
Last June I told you about Constantine Konovalov’s redesigned Paris Métro map, a map based on concentric circles. Now, in Smashing Magazine, Konovalov does a deep dive into his own design process, which took more than two years. Quite a bit more detail than on his own website. [Alejandro Polanco]
Konovalov’s Paris Métro Map
Designer Constantine Konovalov and his team spent more than two years creating this reimagined map of the Paris Métro system. Its design is based on circles: lines 2 and 6, which encircle the city core, are presented as a perfect circle, and the tramlines that follow the Péripherique form a circular arc as well. It’s quite well done; don’t miss the video on the site that timelapses through every iteration of the map’s design. Could someone navigate the RATP’s network with this map? I think so (though it’s been 19 years since I’ve been to Paris). See also Transit Maps’ analysis of the map.
Paris Pneumatique
A high-quality scan of a 1967 map of Paris’s pneumatic tube network, which remained in service until 1984. [via]
BatiParis: Mapping the Age of Paris’s Buildings
Le Grand Paris en Cartes
Le Grand Paris en Cartes is a collection of interactive maps and infographics about the Grand Paris Express, a multi-billion-euro project to extend Paris’s Metro and rapid transit network deep into the surrounding Île-de-France region (if you can read French, the official site and French Wikipedia page provide a lot more information). These maps not only illustrate Parisians’ commuting routes and Metro usage, but also (see above) the kind of sociological data that underpins transit planning: employment centres, population density and so forth. In French. [via]