Tag Archives: maps
County of London Plan 1945
I found a set of images from the County of London Plan 1945 booklet which marks a milestone in visualising and planning for cities. Already being produced before the end of WWII when it came out in 1945 the brainchild of Patrick Abercrombie. The set on flickr is however missing a great map of Social and Functional analysis of London which probably prefigures the common idea that the city is made up of a ‘city of villages’ , also worth noting the ideas about redeveloping the South Bank, an area which is still being struggled with today.
Genetic Map of Europe 2
Another map and model of predicting where a person will come from in europe based on his genetics.(via) It is only based on common variations and not rare ones so the chances are that the map can be made more accurate in the future at least until the genetic pool gets more mixed up with the increasingly common sight of mixed nationality marriages (even in Finland!).
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
Amazon.com | uk
Compare a bacteria with a human, with a city, with the planet. Weave in two personal stories and the clash of ideas and of the inherrant messiness of progress, and you may get the outline of this book. The Ghost Map is at once a real map, but also a metaphor for progress, for navigation of the future using the past. The scale at which this book is written jumps all the time and could have collapsed in on itself because it constantly pans and zooms through its subject matter, yet it always stays focused and gripping.
The books main story are the events around an outbreak of Cholera in London in 1854 around Broad Street, Soho. Two very different people, John Snow and Henry Whitehead, became entangled in the outbreak and eventually through their efforts the battle against Cholera was won, mega cities became possible and the foundations for modern epidemiology were laid. But to sum it up thus would be to rob this book of its layered approach and the way it branches out to touch on lots of other subjects.
Old Maps
A beautiful set of very early world maps and nice article about them. From a time when a map was just as much about your world view, religious convictions and contacts, as about your map making ability.
Genetic Map of Europe
Biologists have made a genetic map of Europe which as you can see roughly resembles Europe Geographically.
The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders.
A couple of things come to my mind on seeing this map. One is the surprising genetic distance between Sweden and Finland, although Finland was part of the Swedish Empire for over 400 years, suggesting that Swedish immigration over that time really was small. Also that Poland faces Finland on the map but where do the Eastern Eurpean states figure, countries like Estonia for example, and it would be really interesting to map Russia onto this too.
Via actHeliski & NYT
Also found a periodic table of Europeans.
Tactile Maps
The image above is of a tactile map made by the Inuit of parts of the coast of Greenland. It seems the Inuit mapped their territory by songs, legends and these tactile maps. It also shows how the empirical world of space as the empty side of a binary relationship with place is badly flawed.
The Inuit like the Aboriginal songlines show in these artifacts that place can equate to person hood and space. That they are embodied in a personal and spatial relationship to a whole.
I saw these hand maps and also thought of my mobile phone which has gps built in. Now wouldn’t it be possible to make gps phones become like tactile maps buzzing and vibrating when you take a wrong turn for instance. Moving through space would become an experience of touch not just vision.
via tightgrid & middlesavagery (& the images)
