city of memory

I’ve done a lot of architectural maps in my life. To architects, maps are two-dimensional plans. They are only used to indicate location and orientation. However, the new generation of map designers has pushed the boundaries of storytelling by embedding data into the mapping process. The informative maps speak.

I start with a web-based interactive map City of Memory. It is an online community map of personal stories and memories organized on a physical geographical map of New York City. Interactivity seems to be one of the major advantages. The database is enhanced by public participation as simply as clicking ‘add story’.

Another earlier example is Yellow Arrow. It began in 2004 as a street art project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since then, Yellow Arrow has grown to over 35 countries and 380 cities globally and become a way to experience and publish ideas and stories via text messaging on your mobile phone and interactive maps online.

As Wikipedia states,

Interactivity helps to explore maps, change map parameters, navigate and interact with the map, reveal additional information, link to other resources, and much more… The use of the web as a dissemination medium for maps can be regarded as a major advancement in cartography and opens many new opportunities, such as realtime maps, cheaper dissemination, more frequent and cheaper updates of data and software, personalized map content, distributed data sources and sharing of geographic information.

Iphone has also been widely used as a dissemination medium for maps. Phantom City is an iphone app designed by Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder. Users can view images and descriptions of speculative projects ranging from Buckminster Fuller’s dome over midtown Manhattan, to Antonio Gaudi’s unbuilt cathedral, to Archigram’s pop-futurist “Walking City,” all while standing on the projects’ intended sites.

Similarly, Netherlands architecture Institute (NAI)  launched a  AR-app called SARA early this year. With SARA, an urban augmented reality application, you can see and experience the built environment of the past, present and future, via Layar Browser. The NAI has set itself an incredible challenge: to make the Netherlands the first country in the world to have its entire architecture viewable on smartphones thanks to augmented reality.

From above we can see that technology makes invisible information visible. New media is integrated into the mapping process, and also our lives. Dan Hill in his post Transport Informatics shows how urban informatics can be amazingly applied in our transport system. He makes us believe that it happens not even in near future, but now.

The invisible cities are memorable.