Londonist does a good job introducing us to two maps of old London published by the Historic Towns Trust a few years ago—a map of medieval London (1270-1300) published in 2019, and a map of Tudor London (1520) published in 2018 (and updated in 2022). The Historic Towns Trust publishes many maps of British towns and cities—historical maps, not reproductions of old maps (in fact, Londonist points out that no maps of London prior to about 1550 currently exist). The Trust’s London maps are also available as overlays on the Layers of London online map: Tudor, medieval. Some maps from the Trust’s British Historic Towns Atlas, which began publishing in 1969 and the earliest volumes of which are out of print, are also available as PDF downloads; here’s the page for London.

See the Guardian’s interview with Berman (thanks, Michael); the Strong Towns interview focuses specifically on Los Angeles.

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In a 15-minute video posted to YouTube, Adam Savage ruminates on the advantages of paper maps, the Los Angeles institution that was the Thomas Guide, and navigating by paper map in general (with digressions on the Knowledge and trap streets and such).

Previously: The Rise and Fall of the Thomas Guide.

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.

Previously: A Naïve Look at New York’s Subway Map.

Speaking of georeferencing old maps, the Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library has a collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century urban atlases. Their Atlascope platform presents 101 of them in a web interface overlaid on a modern street map. The Leventhal is now looking to expand Atlascope’s coverage beyond the Boston area to towns and counties across Massachusetts, and is raising funds to do so (it can apparently take 60 hours to process one atlas). Details on sponsoring an atlas here. See their Instagram post.

Opening today at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases is an exhibition that explores street-level changes to Boston in the period between the Civil War and World War II. Media release.

Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases features rare materials from the BPL’s historic collection of maps and atlases alongside lithographs, photographs, and sketches of familiar local landscapes. Visitors will discover how the atlas collections opens up a world of fascinating stories, with vignettes including the city’s first African Meeting House in the heart of Beacon Hill, landmarks of leisure like the “Derby Racer” and “Giant Safety Thriller” amusement rides in Revere, public health infrastructure on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor, and many more.

The in-person exhibition at the BPL’s Central Library opens today; a digital version will follow online. Runs until 19 August 2023. A curatorial introduction will take place next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition, Becoming Boston: Eight Moments in the Geography of a Changing City, also opens today at the Leventhal: “In the eight cases of this exhibition, we follow the changing spatial forms of the place we now call Boston—from before the landscape carried that name all the way through the struggles, clashes, and dreams that continue to reshape the city today.”

See the Leventhal’s exhibitions page and their preview of 2023 events for more details.

The impressive and/or insane thing about the New York City Tree Map is that it maps individual trees: now about 860,000 of them, all managed by the city’s parks department on city streets and in parks, down to the species and trunk diameter, which also means you can filter for those parameters, plus get most recent inspection and tree care data on specific trees. You can even favourite individual trees. If trees had social media accounts, they’d be here. [Bloomberg CityLab]

Previously: Mapping Central Park’s 19,630 Trees.

Plenty of cities’ subway maps have been reimagined in the style of the London Underground map. Cameron Booth, for example, has redone New York’s subway map in that style. But a map posted by a graphic designer named Sean to Reddit does the exact opposite: it reimagines the London Underground map in the style of New York’s subway map. Bringing the design language of Michael Hertz to Harry Beck’s sovereign territory is probably blasphemous in some quarters, but as a pastiche of the New York style? Cameron says: “Sean has absolutely nailed the New York Subway map style, and perhaps even improved upon it in places—I note with pleasure that all of his station labels are set horizontally, instead of the many varied angles used on the official NYC map.” His bottom line? “One of the best style mash-ups I’ve seen: technically excellent, well-researched and actually really informative. Wonderful!”

It’s available as a print on Etsy, because of course it is.

On the Library of Congress’s map blog, World’s Revealed, Julie Stoner takes a look at a rather unusual example of a bird’s-eye (or panoramic) city map. “The Geography and Map Division has over 1,700 of these beautiful panoramic maps in the collection, but one item stands out above all the others as one of the crowning achievements of the art, Camille N. Dry’s 1875 atlas, Pictorial St. Louis; The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley. A visually stunning atlas, instead of only one sheet, it was produced on 110 plates, which if trimmed and assembled creates a panorama of the city measuring about 9 by 24 feet.”

At Worlds Revealed, the Library of Congress’s map blog, Tim St. Onge looks at, and provides the background on, a series of six maps prepared by Frederick E. Pierce for a report on living conditions in New York’s tenement housing in 1895, including a stunningly bizarre map of ethnic groups living in the city.

Pierce’s map of nationalities, however, is a more memorable, if confounding, centerpiece. Aiming to convey diversity among immigrant communities in New York, the map depicts the proportion of major “nationalities” in each sanitary district of the city. The result is a dizzying array of zigzag stripes and scattered points. As Pierce writes in his explanatory notes accompanying the Harper’s Weekly publication, the original map was produced in color and adapted to black and white for publication, but the reproduction “is almost as effective and quite as illustrative as the original.” Despite Pierce’s confidence, perhaps the average reader could be forgiven if they find the map to be more difficult to parse. In fact, the map seems to resemble more closely the dazzle camouflage, a design aimed at confusing the observer, used on British and American warships in the first half of the twentieth century.

Inspired, he says, by Itchy Feet’s maps of Every European City and Every American City, Alfred Twu has come up with a Map of Every Chinese City. (Chinese version here.) Twu is no stranger to these parts: he worked on rail maps for California and the Northeast Corridor some years back.

Previously: Itchy Feet’s Map of Every European City; Itchy Feet’s Map of Every American City.

But counting maps would miss the difference in Maier’s approach. To invoke xkcd, this is depth-first rather than breadth-first: there are fewer maps here, but they’re discussed in much more depth than the two-page spreads of the hundred-map books, and provided with much more context. This is a history of Rome in maps in which history, Rome and maps all get their proper share of attention.

The Eternal City is divided into ten chapters, covering Rome from antiquity to the present. Each of those chapters explores not just an era but a theme via close study of three or four maps. The chapter themes can sometimes transcend the chapter periods: the first chapter, for example, talks about how Rome has been delineated by its walls, and discusses how walls have defined what is and isn’t Rome; Chapter Two’s discussion of Roman travel networks invokes not only the Tabula Peutingeriana, but also Sasha Trubetskoy’s Tube map of the Roman road network.

Maier also asks deeply historical questions: in Chapter Seven and Eight, which discuss tourism by the leisure class (i.e., Grand Tours) and mass tourism (exemplified by package tours and Baedeker guides), respectively, the question of these maps’ audience—where do these maps come from, and who were they produced for—gets considered, which is something I’d like to see more of. And in her close study of Antonio Tempesta’s 1593 bird’s-eye view of Rome, she notes what is omitted (the sex workers’ quarter) and what is deemphasized (the Jewish ghetto).

Maier’s art-historian approach manages to extract the big picture from a close study of historical images. We are always reminded that maps are a means to understanding their object: in these maps that object is the city of Rome, but the Rome being perceived by one map is not necessarily the Rome seen by another. Rome as historical site, as cultural capital, as tourism destination—and yes, as a place real people actually live—exist at once. For Maier, Rome is a cartographic palimpsest.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Featured image: Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarium (1493), from The Eternal City, pp. 68-69. Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection.

The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
by Jessica Maier
University of Chicago Press, 24 Nov 2020 (U.S.), 7 Dec 2020 (U.K.)
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Fire insurance maps are an invaluable resource for historical researchers: they’re extremely detailed snapshots of the built environment of virtually every city and town, and there are usually several such snapshots (I’ve seen at least three for my little village, for example), so you can chart a town’s growth over time at a level of detail an OS, quad or topo map can’t match.

The New York Times maps the distribution of COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles. “County officials recently estimated that one in three of Los Angeles County’s roughly 10 million people have been infected with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. But even amid an uncontrolled outbreak, some Angelenos have faced higher risk than others. County data shows that Pacoima, a predominantly Latino neighborhood that has one of the highest case rates in the nation, has roughly five times the rate of Covid-19 cases as much richer and whiter Santa Monica.”

In most countries, what we are taught about our own nation in school does not correspond much to reality. And Norway is no exception. We are made to believe in myths surrounding our own nation and are given a perfect mirage of excellence and good intentions in our history lessons. Stories of abuse, greed and war are often swept under the carpet, and it seems that, by some twist of faith, we are born into the best country in the world, and that all other nations are beneath us. Is Norway really the most happy place, the most environmentally conscious, the most peace loving or the most ethical? Hardly!

In this map I aim to correct a few myths, point to some problematic aspects of  Norway and Oslo. And I wish for this map to be a contrast to the mindless commercially motivated map you’ll receive at the tourist information centre.

In a short video, Markus tries to stunt-distribute the map on the streets of Oslo:

Blue Crow Media, which for the past few years has published a series of maps focusing on urban architecture, sent me samples of two of their most recent maps. The Great Trees of London Map is the first of a series of maps highlighting noteworthy trees in a city’s urban forest (Amazon). (A similar map for New York is forthcoming.) The second is another in their line of architecture and urban design maps: Pyongyang Architecture Map features 50 buildings in the reclusive North Korean capital, and includes text and photographs shot by Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright (Amazon). An architecture map of Tbilisi, Georgia, in English and Georgian, has also been released (Amazon). Each map costs £8.

Previously: Architectural Maps of London; London Underground Architecture and Design Map.

Last year I told you about Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps, a book collecting and analyzing the maps produced by Booth’s block-by-block survey of poverty and the social classes of late 19th-century London. Somehow I missed the fact that there has been an online, interactive version of said maps for several years now. [Open Culture]

Previously: Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps.

Mark Ovenden has made a career of publishing books about transportation systems and their maps that are both comprehensive and copiously illustrated. These include books about transit maps, railway maps and airline maps, as well as books about specific transit systems like the London Underground and the Paris Metro.

His latest, Underground Cities (Frances Lincoln, 22 Sep), is in some ways a natural progression from his past work: in the introduction he muses on the link between transit geekery and wondering about “what else lies down there beyond the walls” (p. 6). But in other ways this is quite a different book.

For one thing, Underground Cities is a book about cities’ underground infrastructure in general: not just subway lines and stations, but pedways, sewers, pneumatic mail systems and other utilities. For another, though maps, diagrams and other illustrations are found throughout this book, it’s about the infrastructure, not the maps.

The book is organized by city: 32 in all, 19 of which are in Europe, starting on the west coast of North America and moving eastward across Europe and Asia. Each chapter has a short essay on the underground infrastructure of the city, and is illustrated by photos (mostly of subway stations) and diagrams. Twenty of the chapters come with more detailed diagrams and maps. There are three types. First, each has a vertical scale showing just how deep the sewers, pipes caverns and subway stations go. Second, there’s a featured three-dimensional cutaway diagram showing the layout of some key facility, like a subway station or shopping mall. (London’s Picadilly station and Paris’s Forum des Halles are absolute standouts here, as are the facilities you wouldn’t expect, like Tokyo’s bike vaults, Helsinki’s swimming hall, or the Boring Company test tunnel in Los Angeles.)

Finally, there’s a two-page map spread of the underground city, which includes subways (and some surface rail lines), sewer lines and pedestrian passages. Each map spread uses a single colour scheme; all subway lines are orange regardless of the colour assigned to them by the official subway maps, which means that the Red Line and the Blue Line are all depicted with orange lines. A dense subway network like Paris’s becomes cluttered and indistinguishable. The map shows that there’s a subway line there, but it’s decidedly not for navigation. It’s an overview. So too is the text an overview, though there are some interesting gems there, like the cheese storage in New York City, and the tunnels carved into the Rock of Gibraltar.

Even with the included photographs, maps and diagrams, compared to some of Mark’s earlier books Underground Cities seems a bit sparse, if only because Transit Maps of the World and Paris Underground (the two books I’ve seen and reviewed) were so lavish and colourful. (Also, 12 out of the 32 cities have no maps or diagrams.) It occurs to me that this is probably a function of its subject matter. Transit systems have maps, posters and other ephemera that can be reprinted; sewer systems, pneumatic tube lines and bomb shelters, not so much. Those systems may (like Moscow’s secret Metro-2, or Tokyo’s mystery tunnels, both of which are tantalizingly and all too briefly mentioned here) be unmappable, though it may simply be that the systems are just unmapped, at least not in an accessible fashion. Rather than reprinting, Mark must have maps (by Lovell Johns) and cutaway diagrams (by Robert Brandt) made for purpose, which is (I’m guessing here) an impediment to going all-out.

For the purposes of The Map Room’s audience, this is not a book where the maps are front and centre; it’s an interesting introduction to a map-adjacent subject, and it’s got interesting maps and diagrams, though not nearly enough of them. This was a pregnant book that left me wanting more: more cities, more maps, more detail in the text and illustrations, as though every chapter ought to have been a book in its own right.

Disclosures: I received an electronic review copy of this book from NetGalley. Mark and I are acquainted in an online sense, and I’ve published an essay of his on The Map Room.

Underground Cities
by Mark Ovenden
Frances Lincoln, 22 Sep 2020
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Ottawa Public Health has partnered with the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study to produce this interactive map of COVID-19 rates in Ottawa’s neighbourhoods. Both the map and its underlying data are subject to many caveats: the differences between rural and urban zones, between where people live and where people are tested, and other factors affecting testing and susceptibility. Most notably, the map is updated only monthly, so the current map (screenshotted above) does not take into account the rapid increase in positive cases over the past week or two as Ottawa entered the second wave. [Ottawa Citizen]

The Leventhal Center’s latest online map exhibition, Mapping a World of Cities, draws examples of city maps from ten map libraries and collections across the United States; those examples range from a 1524 map of Tenochtitlán (above) to a 1927 map of Chicago gangs.

Looking at maps helps us to understand the changing geography of urban life. Maps didn’t just serve as snapshots of how cities looked at one moment in time; in the form of plans, maps were also used to build, speculate, and fight over urban form. Historical maps reflect cities’ ethnic and economic transformations, systems of domination and oppression, sites of monumentality and squalor. They capture good times and bad, expansion, decay, and destruction. City dwellers take great pride in their cities, as part of a shared sense of place that embedded in a historical trajectory. Maps tell the stories of a city’s past, present—and perhaps its future.

The Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division contributed five maps to the exhibition; see their post.

In the summer of 2019, a research project spearheaded by Monument Lab asked St. Louis residents and visitors to draw personal maps of the city’s monuments and important sites. “Some maps celebrate famous sites like the St. Louis Zoo and the statue of St. Louis himself atop Art Hill in Forest Park. Others point to things that have been removed from the landscape, like the mounds built by native Mississippians,” St. Louis Public Radio reports. “Another shows a street map of downtown St. Louis with notations for ‘incidents of racism, from microaggression to racial violence.’” A total of 750 people contributed maps, which you can see at this Flickr gallery as well as on the project website, which has accompanying data and analysis. [Osher]

Building Boston, Shaping Shorelines is a Harvard Map Collection exhibition going on now at Harvard Library’s Pusey Library Gallery. “This exhibition allows you to trace the projects to reclaim land and build the infrastructure that has produced a city out of a peninsula. Come learn how much of Boston is on man-made land and what impacts that has had and will have on the city.” There is no online version, but Harvard Magazine has a writeup. Until 1 May 2020.

Previously: The Atlas of Boston History.

There have been a lot of Beck-style maps—maps done in the style of the London underground map. This one’s a bit meta. Arturs D., a student living in London, has created a map of the present-day London underground using Harry Beck’s original style. The current TfL network map (PDF) is, of course, a Beck-type diagram, but there have been a lot of changes to the official map since 1933. It’s also a lot more complicated. Arturs’s map, which limits itself to the Tube proper, reminds us just how many changes there have been. [Mapping London]