Monday, November 26, 2012

Four Cities and Some Planets

Whew, it's been a while! Teaching has kept me busy, but now it's time for an update.

I'm very pleased to present a project by Daren Keene, who has been drawing a magical sprawling imaginary city using only a pencil and dozens of 8½" × 11" sheets of paper. Appropriately enough, he's named his city Pencilvania. Daren's maps share a sensibility with the well-known project by Jerry Gretzinger, but the aesthetic is quite different. Daren's maps mix high-tech, organic, and topographic forms into an incredibly detailed landscape that seems to oscillate between cartographic verisimilitude and pure abstraction. Start exploring!

I've also added several maps of my new home, New Haven:
    Maps of age, race, and income.
    Maps of foreclosures since 2008.
    A map of public housing.
    A map of wonderful things to do, contributed by Aaron Reiss.

Working with my fellow historian Sarah Potter, I made some historical maps of segregation in Chicago. These maps have appeared in Sarah's article in the Journal of Urban History and will also appear in her forthcoming book.

Would you like some simple wall maps of housing development in the DC/Baltimore area? They do a nice job showing the transitions between urban, suburban, exurban, and rural.

Finally, I also made some quick diagrams showing the relative sizes of the planets and added data for Venus to my planetary histograms. Exciting times indeed.