The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 was a visionary approach that reshaped New York’s underlying structure, separating Manhattan from the old organic cities, while still defining it today. To acknowledge the success of the grid model made possible by John Randel, Jr., and celebrate its 200^th anniversary this year, The Center for Architecture opened an exhibition, Mapping the Cityscape, on July 6, exploring the ways in which mapping influences our perception of the environment. The exhibition includes maps ranging from 1609 to present day interpretations, taking into account the technological advances and methodologies that are shaping our urban landscape.

Spanning across the walls at this exhibition are a wide range of cartographic representations, including ecological, cultural, planning, civil data, location-based, user-generated, Google and Tauranac transportation maps.  Read more…

A Cartagen map of Berlin, color-coded by the users who submitted map data. (Click to view a larger image.)

Scarcely a week goes by without an excited report on Google Maps: the breadth and depth of its coverage, its multiplying features, and all the innovative uses people are finding for it. But could the ubiquitous program be stunting the field of map design?

“Before Google Maps, designers thought much more broadly about what maps could do,” the MIT researcher Jeffrey Warren says. “Now, most mapping on the Web consists just of using Google Maps and sticking pins on it.” In the name of reclaiming some of that creativity, he’s created a software platform called Cartagen, the latest version of which debuted last week. It uses Google’s geographic data as a starting point, but lets people choose which features to include on their maps—streets, parks, churches, and so on—and how to visually represent those features, creating their maps from the ground up. Users can also add new data, which Cartagen can represent not just as points on the map but as outlines, polygons, overlapping shaded clouds—the possibilities are still expanding as Warren’s team brainstorms new potential uses for its creation. Read more…

Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read previous posts in this series.

Before I moved to New York, I told people I wanted to live here so that I could walk to the corner for the newspaper and an aspirin. Twelve years later, my priorities have changed: now I want to be able to walk to the corner to throw out a bag of dog poop. Half of the residents in my eight-unit East Williamsburg building have dogs, and we routinely complain about the lack of trash receptacles in the neighborhood. I went to a community-board meeting to ask for additional bins, and while they seemed to think the request was reasonable, none ever appeared. In fact, a passing comment from a fellow attendee should have alerted me that resources aren’t so easy to come by. “Yassky doesn’t even know that’s a residential area,” she said about my semi-industrial street.

I decided to document the situation by creating a Google map, so I spent several days noting the number of trash cans at every intersection I pass through in my thrice-daily rounds. Much to my surprise, the map makes it look like there is fairly reasonable coverage. That’s when I realized that, to members of the planning and sanitation departments, there probably doesn’t appear to be a problem. The two main arteries, Graham Avenue (pedestrian) and Metropolitan Avenue (vehicular), have bins every block or two. But there is nearly as much foot traffic on the side streets, and we dog walkers tend to choose the scenic routes, comfortably far away from the sonic rattle of trucks on Metropolitan. Read more…

It’s hardly news to architects and planners that the increase in security after 9/11 has changed American cities, with bollards, blockades, and security cameras sprouting like toadstools after a rainstorm. But exactly how much space is affected?

A new Web site called Secure Cities is helping to quantify the issue. Professor of urban design Jeremy Németh and his partners at the University of Colorado, Denver, surveyed the civic centers and financial districts of New York (left), Los Angeles, and San Francisco, evaluating public spaces on three criteria: accessibility (are the entrances blocked off?), mobility (are there restrictions within the space, like security checks?), and surveillance (are security personnel present?). Read more…

Design followers, your social calendar is about to get a whole lot busier. New York Design Week begins today in DUMBO with BKLYN Designs and kicks into high gear next weekend at the Javits Center with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF). We’ve got the goods on all the parties and events, so now it’s up to you to decide: Should you pop by Artemide to see DJ Kreemy (aka Karim Rashid) work the turntables Sunday night? Head over to MoMA for the annual ICFF opening night party? Attend Monday’s full-day Metropolis Conference @ ICFF—Design Entrepreneurs: INNOVATE? All of the above? Thinking that a map (or five) would help you navigate, we created a series of Google Maps for the long weekend of ICFF-related events:

Pre-ICFF Events

Saturday, May 16

Sunday, May 17

Monday, May 18

Tuesday, May 19

Multi-Day Events

If you prefer a simple list format, click on over to our Live@ICFF page, where you can find all of Metropolis’s 2009 ICFF coverage in one place. Consider it your definitive guide to the upcoming week in design. See you around town!

I’ll admit that I’ve been thinking about maps a lot these days, particularly our evolving relationship with space and planning now that we have access to so much mapping technology. The way we see the world is changing thanks to innovations like Google Earth and perhaps it’s my recent obsession with bird’s eye views that drew me to Storefront for Art and Architecture this weekend to see Work AC: 49 Cities, Mapping and Measuring the Utopian Metropolis. Read more…

Most of us have a general sense of the geography of our planet through the maps and globes we’ve seen since we were little. But how often do we step back and think about where those images come from and what they mean? There’s an air of certitude to the contours of the Earth, but the outlines of its graphic representation have cultural and political biases any way you slice it. In today’s world of connectivity and data access the capacity to map has become an increasingly democratic enterprise with real power for change. Read more…