In spite of everything that maps can do, the ones I enjoy most are the simplest of all, those that reveal geography by stripping away all but some particular phenomenon and showing little or nothing more than where it exists. It’s the challenge of interpretation, or the self-satisfaction of recognizing something, or the imagining of a world to fill in the gaps, or something.
And so it was nice to run across this map of every building footprint in Montgomery County (Dayton), Ohio while idly browsing the “Maps” folder on my computer. I cranked it out from GIS data some six years ago. Give it a click for a large version.
Granted this map is more interesting if you know the area, but nonetheless it’s fascinating how much something like this can indicate about the patterns of human settlement in a typical American city. It’s not too difficult to see where settlement has followed or been bounded by highways and rivers. Industrial areas are discernible from residential areas, and city from suburb from rural. (By the way, this map only shows a sliver of Greene County—including my hometown of Beavercreek—where a good chunk of additional suburbia is located.) Owing to its simplicity, I believe this map shows urban patterns much more clearly than a satellite image or a road map.
If you’re familiar with the Dayton area, check out the patterns that probably confirm what you already know. See how to the north, settlement extends in spokes between the Mad, Stillwater, and Miami Rivers. Notice how immediately south of west Dayton, there’s hardly anything on the west side of the river. And look at the difference in suburban density on the west and east sides of Far Hills Avenue through Oakwood and Kettering.
If you’re not familiar with the Dayton area, the wonderful thing is that despite being nothing more than polygons, this map can probably teach you a bit about it.
In the past I have mentioned here an ongoing project to trace my every movement on a map, using memory and mouse-clicking rather than technology that costs money. Well, the advent of 2010 marks a full calendar year of doing this and a good moment to show some results.
Obviously this is not a novel concept (to choose a single example, I must link to UrbanTick here), and nobody besides me cares about the particulars of my travels. Shut up, it’s fun anyway. There are two reasons why this originally sounded interesting. First, I work from home, and there is very little routine in my trips out of the house, both in timing and destination. Rather than a predictable daily grind, I could hope for a an unknown awesome-looking pattern. Second, I keep the tracks separated by mode of transportation (foot, car, train, bus, and bike so far). A portrait of urban mobility or some such. As I bonus I will add that for a urban geography and cartography nerd, this project works as motivation to get out and explore different parts of town. There are witnesses to my excitement over being able to add a new line to the map.
Anyway, below is a little Flash animation of daily travels, with some transparency to highlight hot spots. I gave up on trying to do this beyond the immediate local area (Cambridge, Massachusetts)*, so there are some noticeable pauses where I disappeared for weeks on various out-of-town trips.
Goals for 2010:
Cover more ground! I still haven’t made it to half of Cambridge, and there is a lot of neighboring Boston and Somerville to explore.
Use a bicycle more than four times in a year. It is perhaps the best way to get around town and shouldn’t be collecting dust.
Collect more data, such as distance, for summary statistics. This may require more sophisticated techniques than simply drawing lines, though, which would conflict with my New Year’s resolution to be more technologically lazy.
* Sorry for making this an increasingly Boston-centric blog, but hey, for your own projects you start with what’s outside your front door too, right? Not that I actually have a front door.
Apparently in Maine they have a saying, “you can’t get there from here” (spoken in a Maine accent), said when giving directions as an observation of the impossibility of traveling a direct route between certain places. It seems to have something to do with lakes and the organization of roads in the vast rural areas of the state. To some extent it also holds true in other parts of New England.
I have been learning my way around the Boston area for some fifteen months now, and I do not wish to suggest that the challenge in an urban area measures up to what the good people of rural Maine face, but I think of the phrase often as I’m puzzled by how to drive between two points in town. Compared to most American cities, the street network here can be rather chaotic, and absurdly simple trips like driving across a street or around the corner can require a convoluted route and an intimate knowledge of the local streets. It’s just another good reason to leave the car at home.
Anyway, while spending some time dreading getting in the car to finish a bit of Christmas shopping, I was curious to see what some of these ridiculous routes look like on a map. Here are a few of the not-so-simple paths required for simple trips in and around Boston. Bits of intersecting streets are shown to illustrate that there’s no such thing as just going around the block.
Only twenty more miles to Cleveland, where OH MY GOD A TRICERATOPS IS FIGHTING A T-REX!
The compass rose or north arrow on a map is an easy place for a cartographer to leave his or her artistic mark on a map, in the GIS era usually to laughable effect. Or for a more corporate production, it’s a good place to stick a logo. In the days when American road travel was a bit more of an exciting adventure than it is now, gas stations distributed some heavily-branded highway maps encouraging travel powered by their fuel. As I browsed through a few of these in my possession (acquired from items discarded by the Arthur Robinson Map Library over a couple of years), this lovely north arrow from a c. 1937 Sinclair road map of Ohio stood out as particularly amusing.
I don’t think this was ever Sinclair Oil’s actual logo—rather, it’s long been the still-familiar green apatosaurus—but the company has associated itself with dinosaur imagery in general. The map, by the way, was made by Rand McNally.
