This stunning little map-site of Reykjavik city centre is THE prettiest thing. Hand-drawn and interactive, it does the mundane work of any number of BIA/tourism/retail/neighbourhood/destination websites, with 10,0000x the style. Love the closeup drawings/photos of each point of interest.
Produced by design group Borgamynd; funding in part through grants by the City of Reykjavik.
Amazing interactive website about a diverse little local neighbourhood. Click on a building pictured on the beautifully-designed site, and you’ll get poignant (really!) audio stories and documentary-style photos about its inhabitants.
It feels like a sort of a super-modern, and more human-centred, take on Stan Douglas’ Every Building on 100 West Hastings Street.
Okay, Internet, I stand corrected — a brief Google search tells me that this website by David Look is the super-modern take on the Stan Douglas piece: it’s called “Every Building on 100 block of West Hastings Street (in Google StreetView): after Stan Douglas”.
Cool! Mapnificent is a great little location-analysis tool that lets you map how far you can get on public transit from a single location, in any direction, based on the amount of time you’ve got.
It’s a different take on the kind of work that the WalkScore folks have been doing, sussing out how connected you are, based on your transit mode of choice.
Clean and basic Google-map base, very user-friendly interface, with handy sliders that let you see quickly see the differences between a 15-minute trip and an hour-long one.
(via Jesse T.)
Lost the text of my last post in the wake of Tumblr’s growing pains. The Paris map handcut is by studiokmo, an architect with an xacto blade or two. She’s got her own etsy shop, but I spotted her first while strolling through Supermarket.
I liked the Paris and Baltimore handcuts best. Lots of her work look nice, but my bias towards street grids clearly prevails.
Singapore would make for interesting wall decor, all organic and coral-reefy and such, but the contoured quality of these make it hard to really imagine the experience of moving through the city — which is the nicest thing about maps, if you ask me.
Just got back from Portland, a city with the urban planner’s dream street grid — the blocks are small, the building heights varied. When I’m not being awed by Gotham-style vistas of unrelentingly straight boulevards lined with supertall buildings, this is exactly the kind of downtown I like to navigate.
So wildly different from the neighbourhoods outside Portland’s downtown — take a look at the grid analysis from the Portland Plan.
The neighbourhoods really form the heart and character of the city, but in many ways it seems to be done in the absence of what we think of as “best practices” in planning. I’ve picked up on the licensing and zoning before — in conjunction with cheap real estate, Portland’s countless liquor licenses and strip clubs (and the potent combination of both: the State of Washington doesn’t allow stripping and drinking to happen in the same place (!!), which drives some traffic across the state border) are accompanied by an excellent range of incredible happy hours, great food and innovative bar/restaurant/entertainment venues.
The grid is another thing. Downtown Portland is pretty beautiful, and has done a great job with their public art, infrastructure and several of their parks and public spaces — but it still doesn’t really capture the essence of what makes Portland special.
It really hit me on this trip that Portland is really still a city made for driving — being in a car at least speeds up travel time through all those curiously uninspired spaces between the awesome walkable neighbourhoods, and allows for odd one-off commercial spaces in the heart of a residential area to flourish.
Next trip, I think it’ll be time to check out what East Portland is all about.
Grid links I’ve found interesting and/or useful:
Florian Pucher’s Farmland rugs — patterned by continent. !!! That’s Africa there…
U! S! A!
…Europe.
(Cows and other farm animals not included.)
via hindsvik
