The Exposed City: A Brief History of Mapping the Urban Invisibles | Brain Pickings
▻http://www.brainpickings.org/2011/08/16/the-exposed-city-nadia-ambroso
The Exposed City: A Brief History of Mapping the Urban Invisibles
by Maria Popova
From Ptolemy to MIT, or what Edward Tufte has to do with Google Earth and the future of understanding cities.
Cities, maps and data visualization are frequent obsessions around here, and the intersection of the three hits a sweet spot of the finest kind. But how did urbanism, cartography and information visualization first come together, and where are they going as bedfellows? That’s exactly what Nadia Amoroso explores in The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles — an ambitious study of the invisible elements of the city, from demographics to traffic patterns to crime rate to environment, through “map-landscapes.” With a foreword by iconic information architect and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, the book traces the work of pioneers across cartography, information design, urban planning and other disciplines that have historically shaped our understanding of place and spatial relations, alongside bleeding-edge projects from contemporary innovators across data visualization, open-source mapping and other facets of technology-empowered urbanism.
