Creative Cartography: Mapping the Invisible City

A book examines architects, designers, and other thinkers who have figured out how to visualize the urban experience

Cities, maps and data visualization are frequent obsessions of mine, and the intersection of the three hits a sweet spot of the finest kind. But how did urbanism, cartography, and information visualization first come together, and where are they going as bedfellows? That's exactly what Nadia Amoroso explores in The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles -- an ambitious study of the invisible elements of the city, from demographics to traffic patterns to crime rate to environment, through "map-landscapes." With a foreword by iconic information architect and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, the book traces the work of pioneers across cartography, information design, urban planning, and other disciplines that have historically shaped our understanding of place and spatial relations, alongside bleeding-edge projects from contemporary innovators across data visualization, open-source mapping, and other facets of technology-empowered urbanism.

"It's Man's Ability to Perceive, it's the MAP. It's also the map through time with the ease of quick time and computer graphics and morphing, changing one pattern with another. Time telling a story through a day, a week or a year. Time showing change, it's the transparency of information combined with other information creating a third piece of information." - Richard Saul Wurman

By Maria Popova

Aug 16 2011, 11:59 AM

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http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/08/creative-cartography-mapping-the-invisible-city/243691/