Interactive maps showing the age of buildings in a country or city, the so-called Building Age Maps, appeared not so long ago: their creation boomed in 2013. It all started in Amsterdam. The map developed for this city quickly expanded to the scale of an entire country and today covers the whole of Holland; and there are two such cards. Portland became the first in the United States. Justin Palmer, a young GitHub employee, came up with the idea of plotting the addresses and construction dates of all the houses on a map of his hometown. He also realized his plan, so much so that the Portland map became a model and inspiration for many subsequent developments. The largest metropolitan areas of the world took the baton quickly and willingly: Brooklyn, and a little later the whole of New York, Barcelona. Just last year, similar maps were developed for London and Paris. The Moscow map is already working in full, St. Petersburg is at the filling stage.
Interactive age maps of buildings allow you to visually trace the development of a city, identify characteristic features in its structure, and understand morphology. In addition, the cards have a wide variety of designs. Buildings painted in bright colors, on the scale of the city map, turn into an artistic canvas - akin to the stained glass windows and mosaics of Chagall.
We present a selection of the most interesting maps:
Europe Netherlands-1, 2013
Development: Waag Society
Map Data: TileMill, CitySDK
Data: Open Inventory of the Netherlands
A map with the markings of houses by construction time was developed by the team
Waag Society and covers not a single city, but the whole country - from Amsterdam to Utrecht. As the developers explain, such a large-scale work required attention and study of each of the nearly 10 million houses located in the country. The houses on the map are painted in the desired color depending on the construction time. There are eleven periods in total. The first includes buildings before 1800. The last one is from 2005 to the present day. When you hover the cursor over a building, information appears about the city in which it was built, the exact address, the number of inhabitants in the city, the date of construction and the building area. Such a map makes it possible to identify some patterns: for example, it is clearly visible how "rings" of new houses grow around the historic center of cities.
Netherlands-2, 2012
Development: Steven Ottens
Map data, etc.: OpenStreetMap, The iBag Viewer
Data: Open Inventory of the Netherlands
Another interactive map allows you to conveniently view the desired period using a scroll. By stopping at the desired date, you can see what percentage of the territory has been built up to that moment. Here, in contrast to the above-described map of the Netherlands, the buildings of the 17th and 18th centuries are divided in more detail in time, since the first period covers all buildings up to 1600.
London, 2015
Development: Oliver O'Brien & James Cheshire
Map Data: OpenStreetMap
Data: National Statistics, CDRC Data, Consumer Data Research Center
The map of London and other cities in England was created by Oliver O'Brien, Senior Research Fellow at University College London (UCL). This is the first such map of Great Britain to cover all of England and Wales, including small towns. Several building periods are shown in different colors on the London map. The first one covers the time period from the day the city was founded until 1900. Further, it is analyzed literally every decade. Thus, separate "age" groups of buildings are formed, for which the building areas and the number of houses are calculated. An important caveat is that the age classification is accepted on average for the entire local area, and not for an individual house. When you zoom in on a map of London, you can see that, for example, the famous West End area has remained virtually unchanged since the 19th century. If we look at the beginning of the XXI century, then it is clearly visible how on both banks of the Thames, in place of the liquidated docks and piers, residential real estate was rapidly growing. The map also reflects recent events, such as, for example, the construction of the Olympic Park.
In addition to the general map, an interactive map has been created that analyzes the development of post-war London since 1945. In addition, using the same resource, you can study the housing price map for the second quarter of 2015, as well as maps of public transport and industry.
Paris, 2015
Development: Etienne Côme
Map Data: OpenStreetMap
Data: Ministry of Culture, Mérimée database and Paris Urban Development Agency l'APUR
The development of an interactive map of central Paris was carried out by Etienne Comme, a researcher at the French Institute of Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR). On a map of the city, he marked the main construction periods from the pre-1800 era to the present. Each stage can be included separately and trace the years in which these or those districts of Paris were built up, see the stages of the most intensive construction and, conversely, lulls. So, the map shows that from 1851 to 1914, 1231 hectares of territories were built up, while after the 2008 crisis, the developed area did not exceed 49 hectares. In addition, when you zoom in, special markers appear on the map, which mark architectural monuments and iconic buildings. That allows you to find out more about them - the date of construction, address, name of the architect. The map of Paris stands out not only for the quality of development and the amount of data; unlike the smoky gray map of London, it is also as beautiful as the violets of Montmartre.
Barcelona, 2014
Development: Pablo Martinez and Mar Santamaria, company 300.000 km / s
Data: Cadastre and Catalog of Barcelona Heritage
An interactive map of Barcelona records the age of the city's buildings and provides complete information about the city's architectural heritage. Almost 70,000 urban areas and 3,000 protected monuments have been analyzed here, from ancient Roman fortress walls to modern street art. The developers have combined information from two large-scale databases - the open cadastre of the city and the Barcelona heritage catalog, making all information, including archival information, available to users. When you hover the cursor over the building, the construction date pops up, when you click, the text is redirected to the heritage register for b about more details. Protected natural, cultural and archaeological areas are color-coded. The developers believe that with the help of such a map, you can trace the past of Barcelona and find its reflection in a modern city that has been forming for thousands of years. Apparently, the map was made without using an external cartographic base.
There is
version of Barcelona map for Android.
Ljubljana, 2013
Development: Marko Plahuta
Map Data: TileMill
Data: Cadastre of Slovenia (GURS)
A slightly different approach to creating an interactive map is demonstrated by a resource developed by Marko Plahuta for his hometown of Ljubljana. He also made a map showing the dates of the buildings' construction. Each individual period of time is highlighted in its own color. The difference from other similar maps was the line graph compiled by the author, clearly showing the years of active construction and, conversely, the construction recession. Serious ups and downs are visible on the chart. The author connects this with historical events. Thus, the construction activity of 1899 is explained by the devastating earthquake that occurred in the city four years earlier. Many buildings appeared after the world wars: in 1919 after the first world war, and in 1949 after the second.
In addition to the map, Plakhut made a video showing how the city grew from 1500 to 2013.
Reykjavik, 2013
Development: Matt Riggott
Map Data: OpenStreetMap
Data: Cadastre, Register of Iceland
The Reykjavik map is one of the most complete. Due to the fact that the author used several open sources of information at once, it was possible to visualize data about each house in the capital of Iceland. As in other similar maps, the color indicates the construction period: the darker the color of the building on the map, the older it is. The color scheme of the Reykjavik map looks very restrained. It is possible to find out its age and location when hovering over a building. However, you cannot “turn off” individual construction periods.
North America
Portland: The Age of One City, 2013
Development: Justin Palmer
Map Data: TileMill, MapBox
Data: Portland Archive
An interactive map of Portland, a city in Oregon, was developed by a young GitHub employee, Justin Palmer. It was based on open archival data from Portland, which describes more than half a million city buildings, erected over different periods of time. 544,033 buildings Palmer painted in certain bright colors so that you can easily track how old neighborhoods merge with new ones. The aquamarine-colored buildings date from the 1890s, the purple neighborhoods date from the 1950s, and the bright pink buildings date back to 1970. The result is a beautiful picture, which, meanwhile, allows you to analyze the structure of the city. The map, however, lacks the ability to disable a particular period or find out details about a particular building.
Today, the map covers not only Portland, but also nearby cities such as Beaverton, Gresham and others. It was this map that inspired most of the developers and programmers to create such maps for their city.
New York, 2013
Development: Brandon Liu
Map data: PLUTO, OpenStreetMap, TileMill, MapBox.
Data: nyc.gov
One of the most detailed maps was created by Brandon Liu, a 24-year-old programmer from San Francisco. His New York City map displays building age data for five metropolitan areas - Brooklyn, Manhattan, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. Information is available on over one million buildings (1,053,713). Neon-luminescent colors, selected by the author for the visual separation of different construction eras, together with the clear construction of streets, quarters and houses, create a very futuristic image. At the same time, color helps to analyze urban fabric. So, shades of lilac define the buildings of the 1830s, blue - buildings built at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, and yellow - the mid-1990s. Considering that New York is a relatively young city relative to European capitals, information about buildings on the map dates back to 1820-1830, and there are few buildings of the early 19th century, as the map shows, in the city.
By maximizing the scale, you can see in detail the individual quarters and houses; when you hover the cursor over a building, data on the construction date and the exact location of the house become available. Thus, you can find little-known historical buildings in New York: for example, old wooden houses on Hicks Street, sandwiched in a row of modern buildings. The earliest buildings in New York are concentrated on Willow Street and nearby streets, including one of the oldest houses, built in 1824.
The developers in the description of the map make a reservation that not all dates can be reliable: some are approximate or inaccurate. For example, the map indicates that the Natural History Museum was built in 1995, while it is known that this happened much earlier.
Brooklyn: past and present, 2013
Development: Thomas Rhiel
Map data: PLUTO data set, NYCityMap, OpenStreetMap, MapBox
Data: NYC City Planning Department
The Brooklyn map predates the map of New York itself. It was developed by Thomas Rhiel, a programmer and resident of Brooklyn. As a basis, he took data from the New York City Department of Planning, published in the public domain in the spring of 2013, where even the smallest buildings in the city are thoroughly described. On the created interactive map, each building in Brooklyn is shown in the desired color with a coded year of construction. The color traditionally carries information about the construction time: the oldest houses are marked in blue and green, yellow is used to highlight buildings of the turn of the century, light red is the middle of the 20th century, dark red is modern houses. It is easy to see that, say, the area to the west of Prospect Park includes mainly townhouses marked in yellow, i.e. built in 1900 and 1930. On the east side of the park, a tiny blue dot marks the historic home of Continental Army Lieutenant Peter Leforth, built in 1783.
Chicago, 2013
Development: Shaun Jacobsen, Transitized
Map Data: MapBox and TileMill
Data: Open Data of the City of Chicago
The designer of the Chicago map is Shaun Jacobsen, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Based on open data from the city of Chicago, he described almost every house, assigning it information about the date and place of construction. In total, there are five categories that characterize the construction epochs: XIX century, 1900-1950, 1950-2000, 2000 - present. Moreover, each period can be disabled or viewed separately from the others. Scaling allows you to see all the details. Geolocation determines the user's location.
Los Angeles, 2015
Development: Omar Ureta
Map data: Mapbox, OpenStreetMap
Data: Los Angeles County Open Data and GIS
The Los Angeles map provides an opportunity to look at the dense development of the city as a whole, or, closer to see the details. It also provides information on the construction date and address of each house. The color scheme resembles the Portland map, and the developers do not hide that they were inspired by it. The bright blue color highlights the buildings of the first half of the twentieth century (Mid-City, Exposition Park), the purple hue is responsible for the buildings of the 1950s (Granada Hills). Each period can be viewed separately. In addition, a stopwatch button is provided, after pressing which, an animation of the gradual development of the city is shown - from 1909 to the present day.
Vancouver, 2014
Development: Ekaterina Aristova
Hosting: loveyourmap
Data: Vancouver Open Directory, Cadastre and Tax Services
Ekaterina Aristova, a graduate of the University of Waterloo, created an interactive map of Vancouver using publicly available data about the city. Each color on the map represents one decade in which the buildings were built. Those houses whose age remains unknown are highlighted in gray. Aristova draws attention to the fact that the map is still under development. There is no pop-up information about the address of the houses yet. However, geolocation is available.
Edmonton, 2016
Development: hometribe.ca
Map data: Mapbox, OpenStreetMap
Data: Edmonton Open Data Catalog
The map of the Canadian city of Edmonton is one of the most recent. Age and address are displayed on hover. It is possible to separately view the selected construction periods. If you press the buttons in chronological order, you can trace how the city grew during the 20th and 21st centuries.
Edmonton-2, 2016
Development: Rickard Hansen
Map data: Mapbox, OpenStreetMap
Data: Edmonton Open Data Catalog, GIS
If the previous map offers some research knowledge, then here the history of the city's development is divided into decades, following one after another and marked with their assigned color. There is no information about individual buildings.
Russia and Ukraine
Moscow: "Mercator", 2013
Development: Konstantin Varik, Mercator company
Consultant: Andrey Skvortsov
Basis: OpenStreetMap
Data: Reform of housing and communal services and the Government of Moscow
There are six main stages of development: pre-revolutionary Russia (1491-1917), the USSR under the Bolsheviks and Stalin (1918-1953), the time of the transformations of Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964), Brezhnev (1964-1982), Chernenko, Andropov, Gorbachev (1982- 1991) and the last stage - the era of the construction boom under Luzhkov (1991-2009).
Each period is color coded; periods can be turned on and off. When you hover the cursor over a fragment of the map, information appears with the exact address and year of construction of buildings. A graph has also been created where you can see how many houses were built per year in a given period.
Electronic Atlas of Moscow, 2013
Development: company "Geocenter-Consulting"
Design: Art. Lebedev Studio
Customer: Moscow Department of Information Technologies
It reflects not only the dates of construction of a building, but also 219 thematic layers with information about 280 thousand objects. The map covers 12 administrative districts, 125 districts and 21 settlements. This resource with detailing to the house, displaying satellite images and panoramas shows the administrative division of the city, provides statistics for individual territories, information about state institutions of Moscow, including contact information and the possibility of online appointment with specialists, public transport, traffic jams. The electronic map contains all data on government facilities, parks, pedestrian zones, metro stations, parking lots, shops. Using the atlas, you can measure the distance between objects or build the most accurate route.
In the section "Territories" there is information about architectural monuments, objects of cultural heritage and protected areas. When you zoom in, it becomes possible with one click to find out information about the building of interest - the status of the object, the exact address, construction time, information about architects and engineers, etc.
The atlas was designed by Art. Lebedev Studio. For the design of maps operating in the "scheme" and "hybrid" modes, traditional and recognizable color designations of parks, reservoirs and buildings have been chosen. As you zoom in, the gamma becomes more saturated. In addition to the website, a mobile application is available based on the Electronic Atlas of Moscow.
Retrospective of St. Petersburg, 2015
Development: Pavel Suvorov
Resource: OpenStreetMap
Pavel Suvorov is a student at ITMO University, winner of Open Data Hackathon 2014 and 2015. Maps are created on the CartoDB platform. Some of the data is geocoded, some were entered manually. The project is called "Retrospective of the urban development of St. Petersburg". It includes three cards. With their help, you can find out
years of construction of buildings of interest, to trace how and in what quantity Petersburg was built up in certain historical periods, and also to analyze which architectural style dominates in the city. For example, constructivist and Art Nouveau quarters are highlighted on the map, classicist and Soviet buildings are indicated. True, so far only one Petrogradsky district of the city has been worked out in detail. But in the near future it is planned to cover its entire territory.
In addition to the map of the ages of houses, Pavel Suvorov also created interactive maps of the analysts of housing and communal services and district police.
Nizhny Novgorod, 2015
Development: Dmitry Volkov
Map Data: OpenStreetMap
Data: Address plan of the regional administration and real estate portal
An interactive map of Nizhny Novgorod was developed by cartographer and activist Dmitry Volkov. Houses on the map are marked with different colors depending on the time of construction. When you hover the cursor, information with the address, age and number of storeys pops up. All buildings are divided into nine categories and each is painted in a different color. The map shows the percentage of buildings that appeared at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. They are marked in orange and only a few have survived. In the central part of Nizhny Novgorod, there are significantly more buildings dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. Modern houses, built already in the 2000s, are also marked on the map - in bright blue. So far, the card is not completely filled and works intermittently.
Kiev, 2014
Development: Vadim Sklyarov and Vlad Gerasimenko, mapbuilders.org portal
Map Data: OpenStreetMap
Data: Real estate agencies
The map of Kiev was developed on the basis of information from real estate websites and advertisements for the purchase and rent of real estate. As the developers themselves explain, they failed to obtain data from the city administration and the Department of Urban Planning and Architecture of Kiev. Therefore, out of 80 thousand buildings indicated on the city map in OpenStreetMap, only about 8 thousand residential buildings were described. However, there are eleven periods highlighted on the map. The development of the city, starting from 1915, is examined in detail. When you click on a separate building, information is displayed with the exact address and year of construction. The development team plans to gradually fill the map of Kiev and compile such interactive maps for all cities of Ukraine.
Lviv, 2015
Development: Intetics team
Map data and more: OpenStreetMap, open-source JavaScript, Leaflet
Data: Lviv City Council
The map displays data on the age of most buildings in Lviv. When you hover over a building, the exact year of construction, as well as the address, pops up in the top panel of the map. The dark red color highlights the buildings that appeared in the city before 1800. The map shows that there are few such buildings in Lviv. The lighter the shade of red becomes, the more the building belongs to the later period of construction. And even in the absence of the function of turning off certain periods of time, one can notice the predominance of historical houses of the 19th – early 20th centuries in the center of the city, while Soviet and modern buildings dominate on the outskirts. The latter are marked in white.
