#maps

Robert Simmon’s slides from NACIS 2025. He regularly posts on his bluesky account, it is worth following: https://bsky.app/profile/rsimmon.bsky.social

HOLC’s infamous residential security maps usefully highlight the relationships between race and value that were articulated in the landscape through projects like the Newtown Pike extension project. It is often tempting to correlate redlining with a great many modern social problems. Doing so, however, risks ignoring the many other histories and geographies that have accumulated in the margins of those striking splashes of red—lives lived, neighborhoods changed, and roads that leave a mark even before they are built.

Transitioning to orthographic view is so trippy! Orthographic view from the top gives you the standard isometric feel, but try panning and rotating the viewer to view cities like New York from the sides; completely new perspectives and feel.

It is pretty cool that you can do this outside of the Google Earth interface now, even if the Google logo remains.

Over the last three years, as a part of the Sustainable Mobility Network, Sensing Local, along with other partners, developed the Urban Revamp Design Challenge (https://sensinglocal.wixsite.com/urbanrevamp), which invited design proposals from Architects to re-imagine under-utilised public spaces in Bengaluru, supported by active citizen groups in the neighbourhood. Two successive competitions resulted in 70 design proposals for 4 sites.

Great map of public spaces in Bangalore by Sensing Local. Categorized under labels such as food streets, places under metro lines and flyovers, walker streets and so on, I think it would be neat to have a Slow Routes type routing map that optimizes for pedestrian friendly features on OSM and takes you through some of these POIs. At a high-level I understand that this is an orienteering problem.

h/t Vonter for sharing.

I love this. Crowd-sourced ‘slow’ walking routes for places around England, added by people who walked them and not an algorithm. I would love to recreate even a smaller version of this for our walking routes around Bangalore.

Lotssssss of free OSM basemap servers with previews to show how they look, most of which are free. This is for the contextily python library but all of them come with details for the XYZ tiles, for example:

url:	https://data.geopf.fr/wmts?SERVICE=WMTS&VERSION=1.0.0&REQUEST=GetTile&STYLE={style}&TILEMATRIXSET={TileMatrixSet}&FORMAT={format}&LAYER={variant}&TILEMATRIX={z}&TILEROW={y}&TILECOL={x}

Related: https://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/

I recently discovered the David Rumsey map archives and spent an hour or two looking through all the various tags and keywords. These maps and charts by Survey of India, mostly from 1895, are fascinating. The visualizations are clear, the maps are well-designed, and it is a pleasure to browse through. Not to be one to hark back to the supposed greatness of the past, but this is clearly leagues better than the kind of work we see come out of government publications today.

They have a habit to ask conductor about bus timings, and my map did not mention the timings- Instead of asking "does this bus goes to XYZ stand?" people ask "What bus is this?" followed by various questions. Most of the time the driver and conductor answered but when they are busy or tensed they tell people to ask their queries at the enquiry window.

We've been discussing making schematized, London-style spider-maps for BMTC bus routes over on the Bengwalk discord (which I definitely recommend joining if you live in Bangalore and are interested in public transportation) and that has sent me into a rabbit-hole of learning about octilinear, hexilinear and all those other kinds of transit maps. Professor Mundar Rane's (IDC) blog is quite a nice find for me, and this particular post discusses their process and observations on making such a bus map for Pune. It's easy to get caught up in the tech and design of things while missing things like the questions above because we take that for granted. Good read.