Flow Maps

Flow Maps are cool, but really tricky to actually design & make look good. Here are two good resources:

• Flow Maps (by Esri) shows some hacks in ArcGIS Pro & ArcGIS Online that can be used to make flow maps.
• Flow Mapping (by PennState) is a great overview & introduction.

Urban Plannning & Washington DC

Great scrolly map from the NYT for our history & urban planning nerds: Washington Has Been Carefully Planned for Two Centuries

Ozone Pollution From Space

Air Pollution’s Daily Pulse Over the Northeast is a cool example of how we can now monitor air pollutions from space & how it changes over the course of the day! You start with the NO2 plumes from car exhaust & how they dissipate over the course of the day. Then you can look at the plumes of ground-level ozone created from the NO2 & their spatial patterns which are impacted by wind patters.

Recent Land Use Changes: USA

This is interesting: A Shift in What’s Shaping U.S. Landscapes

The three main types of land use changes are urban sprawl, logging, and agriculture & here the New England has remained pretty stable over the last 40+ years or so. Why? The main land use changes had already occurred by 1988.

Outdoor Recreation Data

Great data, great data viz, great interactive maps, and all the data are free to download as CSV files: Outdoor Recreation Data

Food Deserts / Grocery Deserts

Great web map: Mapping Food Deserts and Grocery Store Consolidation

Now...if they would only offer a way to download the data!

The Global Building Atlas Downloader

The Global Building Atlas is cool, but most people (and especially my students) cannot handle a GitHub respository. But, thanks to Maps Mania, we now have a convenient downloader into GeoJSON: The Global Building Atlas Downloader. Thanks!

Urban Mobility: CAVs

Good article here about how CAVs (connected autonmous vehicles) can be integrated into new urban mobility systems within 'smart' cities. Yes, a lot of techo buzzwords here, but worth a read.

The Cost Of Living

Excellent data set & web map from the Economic Policy Institute: The Family Budget Map. This map shows (by county) the cost-of-living for a 'normal' two-parent, two-child family broken down into housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities.

Even better: the data are accessible as MS Excel!

The Romans Google Maps!

This is really cool: a high-resolution digital map allows people to plan their routes along the ancient roads of the Roman Empire.

• Summary in Nature
• De Soto, P., Pažout, A.,Brughmans, T. et al. (2025) Itiner-e: a high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire. Nature Scientific Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06140-z
• https://itiner-e.org/

Projections & Distances

Geodesic or planar: which to use for distance analysis (by Esri) is a nice overview of the issue. Take-home message: use geodesic distances!

USA: Counties & Population

Very cool animated map of the basic problem of human geography in the USA and anywhere: most people live in small & densely-populated area while most of the country is pretty much empty.

https://walkerke-county-population.share.connect.posit.cloud/#3.85/38.98/-96.7

Census Dots

Finally updated for the 2020 Census: Census Dots (1 person = 1 dot)

Rail Transit Access vs Population Density

Rail Transit & Population Density compares and ranks 250 cities around the world - the side-by-side map and table comparison is great!

Let's Eat!

America’s Chain and Independent Restaurants maps out all restaurents across the USA coded by their degree of 'chainness' from the 310,000 or so single-location restaurants to the 24,333 Subways. Now if they only would make the underlying restauranr address data available!

More @ https://friendlycities.gatech.edu/data-interactive/

The 15-Minute City

The 15 min City platform lets you explore how much worldwide cities are close to this ideal, by merging open data about venues within cities, population grids and routing algorithms. With 15 min City, you can check which activities or places are accessible to a neighbourhood on foot and by bike, and compare it to other urban areas. You can also check which city is the closest to the 15 minutes ideal looking at our city rankings in the map. In the following we address the main tools that are present in the platform.

Try it here: https://whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity/15mincity.php

Passenger rail services in 1980 and 2024

Nice, simple, and clear: https://walkitect.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/media/index.html?appid=49cce9647b164c43aa5c373f05290c78 

The 15-Minute City Platform

Cool web map / app: The 15-Minute City Platform. You can explore the interactive map and/or open the interactive rankings below the map to explore the map that way.

Superblocks

Superblocks could be a way to create more pedestrian-friendly urban environments while still allowing for effiecient vehicle access. More here: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/03/05/are-superblocks-future-urban-living

Open-Source Streetview

Google Streeview is obviously great, but (also) obviously a proprietary system. Here's a new open compilation of 10 million street-level images from 688 cities: https://ual.sg/project/global-streetscapes/