Tag: mapping | ArchDaily

Choreographing Lagos: Dele Adeyemo on Dance, Cosmology, and Spatial Practices

Romullo Baratto — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Having thrown a stone today, Eshu kills a bird of yesterday. The Yoruba proverb tells both a story of reparation and of ancestrality by joyfully bending spacetime conventions and accessing subjects from the past with present actions. The saying offers a poetic entry point to broader West African traditions and to the practice of Scottish-Nigerian artist and architect Dele Adeyemo. Named one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, Adeyemo's work brings together ecology, spirituality, dance, and territory, examining how embodied cultural practices can generate alternative spatial possibilities within and against the architecture of racial capitalism.

Mapping as Design: A Resource-Based Approach to Rural Design in the United States

Ankitha Gattupalli — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:30:00 +0000

In 1982, at a conference on earth building in Tucson, Arizona, an unusual presentation challenged everything architects thought they knew about rural resources. Instead of focusing on construction techniques, the presenter, architect Pliny Fisk III, spread out a series of hand-drawn maps that revealed something extraordinary - rural Texas wasn't resource-poor, as conventional wisdom suggested, but material-rich beyond imagination. The maps showed volcanic ash perfect for lightweight concrete, caliche deposits stretching across vast territories, and mesquite forests that could supply both hardwood flooring and insulation. The revelation redefined prevailing notions of value in architecture.

A Brief History of Maps and Their Role in Urban Development

Kaley Overstreet — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 04:00:00 +0000

Cartography, or map making, has played a critical role in representing spatial concepts for thousands of years. While the earliest forms of maps displayed geographic information carved into clay tablets and etched onto cave walls, the maps we use today have significantly evolved to creatively show a range of different information. These visualizations draw conclusions about population sizes, historical events, cultural shifts, and weather patterns to help us understand more about our world and how we impact it.

Sensory Maps: What the Sense of Smell Can Reveal about Urban Environments

Maria-Cristina Florian — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 07:30:00 +0000

Every city is a complex environment, bringing together people, cultures, architecture, commerce, and even nature. While experiencing a city, a lot of attention is given to its appearance, but appearance is not everything. The theory of sensory design aims to go beyond vision and explore the richness of the built environment through textures, smells, and sounds. For city officials and planners, a lot of attention generally goes towards how a city looks and sounds, but in terms of smell, the focus is mainly on managing waste or cleaning unsanitary areas. Yet the sense of smell, so often overlooked, is strongly linked to the creation of emotional memories. It contributes to our understanding of the world; it reveals otherwise hidden cultural practices, and it rounds up the experience of an environment.

Invisible Landscapes: When Digital Tools Fail to Document

Matthew Maganga — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 04:00:00 +0000

An online search away from any computer are eye-level views of many of the world’s cities. This technology is powerful – allowing people to have an in-depth look at the cities they might one day visit, live in, or work in. It’s a useful tool for understanding buildings on a more comprehensive level than photographs. This technology is, of course, Google Street View – which recently turned fifteen years old.

Eyal Weizman on Forensic Architecture: ''Mapping is Power''

Rebecca Ildikó Leete — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 05:30:00 +0000

“Since I remember myself, I have wanted to be an architect… I could see the way that neighborhoods were organized. I could see the separation. I could see the frontier areas between the Palestinian community and the Jewish majority,” expresses Eyal Weizman in conversation with Louisiana Channel, in regards to understanding the ‘political significance’ of architecture and the potential of the occupation as a critical tool for understanding the world.

Mapping Improvisation: The Role of Call and Response in Urban Planning

Randy Fertel — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 04:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Mapping the City of the 21st Century: Desplans and KooZA/rch Open up the Discourse to Young Creatives

Christele Harrouk — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 07:30:00 +0000

Desplans and KooZA/rch have revealed the three final winners of the #mycityscape competition. Inviting young creatives to this conversation, the open call questions the definition of the city, by asking “What establishes the identity of a city? What distinguishes one urban environment from the other? And What defines our relationship to the built landscape we inhabit?”

Matt Daniels Maps World Populations as Mountains

Eric Baldwin — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 04:00:00 +0000

Engineer Matt Daniels has created a new interactive map to visualize the world's populations. Called 'Human Terrain', the project includes extruded block-by-block population data for cities across the world to give viewers fine-grain insight into population distribution. Daniels used data from the Global Human Settlement Layer and processed it using Google Earth Engine to create a mountainous digital landscape.

BDA Prize 2019: INVISIBLE C'VILLE

Rene Submissions — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 06:01:00 +0000

The BDA Prize, an annual design and ideas competition, exists to generate forward-looking ideas to better our community through design and dialogue.

The 2019 theme, INVISIBLE C’VILLE, calls for imaginative and provocative works on paper that distill and describe a generally overlooked -- yet essential -- quality, system, spatial practice, experience or story that characterizes Charlottesville.

The goal of INVISIBLE C’VILLE is to create a kaleidoscopic view of our community. “Real” Charlottesville emerges from individual truths overlaid, overlapped, uncovered, and expressed. We are looking for imaginative and provocative work, executed with clarity and conviction.

Submissions should be single, original images on paper

This Online Tool Generates High-Quality Geographic Maps of Data in Seconds

Alya Abourezk — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 09:30:00 +0000

Have you ever had to create a map for your project, thinking you could get it done within 30 minutes, but then spent an entire afternoon on it? Between collecting data, creating a base map, choosing a color scheme, and finally putting together a graphic, creating a map can be a long, trying process, taking up precious time when you could be doing other work. Map-making shouldn’t be this way.

Citymapper, World-Renowned Urban Mobility App, Launches London's First Pop-Up Bus Route

AD Editorial Team — Tue, 09 May 2017 08:30:00 +0000

Citymapper, which is just over five years old, has become the go-to mobility app for the majority of the world's major cities. It's strength lies in its accuracy and integration: the app parses local data and always seems to deliver the fastest route, even in comparison to its leviathan, data-rich competitors – Google Maps and Apple Maps. Having always focused their attention on public transport, as opposed to cars and taxis, Citymapper has become embedded into the way large amounts of urbanites navigate cities both familiar and foreign. As of today, they are building buses—and bus routes—of their own.

Cut Maps Adds Contemporary Precision to Cartographic Objects

Vladimir Gintoff — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 16:15:00 +0000

Have you ever wanted to decorate your walls with old-style maps but been discouraged because they don't fit your minimal and contemporary aesthetic? Enter Cut Maps, the Virginia-based company that creates cartographic representations of cities and states using laser technologies to precisely define borders and streets. The resultant maps offer the illusion of their paper precedents, but with an otherworldly precision only possible in the digital age.

How Infrastructure Segregates Cities

Sabrina Santos — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 18:00:00 +0000

The Washington Post has published a piece looking at how infrastructure acts as a form of segregation in cities in the US. Using racial dot maps from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, they show how highways, railroads, historically uncrossable avenues, and similar urban design decisions have a huge impact on the physical isolation of different races. These types of infrastructure were also found to reinforce boundaries set by natural patterns of topography and bodies of water. Cities found to have clear infrastructural segregation include Pittsburgh, Hartford, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee. Read the full article, here.