Taxi Taxi

No, not the decently high quality yet reasonably priced used clothing store on Westheimer Road in Houston, TX. Why would you think I'm talking about that? I'm referring to this map animation from the New York Times:



It's a heat map showing frequency of cab pick-ups at every single block of Manhattan for every single hour of the entire week. Animatable. Zoomable. Rolloverable for the specific number for any single block and a corresponding graph for the entire week. Really just a gratuitous display of data triumphalism from the Times who, one senses, are just sort of showing off at this point. This map, for instance, doesn't really tell you anything you don't already know - people take cabs in Midtown during the day, in the Village at night. But if you're of a certain bent you might find the sheer detail and comprehensiveness of the presentation here sort of jarring.

It does seem like we're approaching a point, rather rapidly, where almost any information about spatial conditions, processes, or events can be instantly translatable into cartographic form. I am looking forward to the day when I can zoom in close enough on Google Earth to see a real time image of myself sitting at the computer using Google Earth. The image will narrow in on the computer screen... closer, closer, until-

Olympic Medals Map

The NY Times has an interactive map of Olympic medals won by country:



This represents medals won in the Vancouver Olympics thus far. You'll notice that the United States has a larger circle than Canada. This is because the United States has won more medals than Canada. I draw attention to this fact because the Canadians were all bragging about how they were going to win the most medals. Clearly they are going to fail to do so. Their hubris rankles; hubris belongs to Americans and Russians. In Canadians it is just... unbecoming. Also, as a United Statesian, it's fun to root for my country on the rare occasions when we are the underdog, like in the winter Olympics and the World Cup.

The map has medal winners going back to the first Winter Olympics in 1924. You can see that it was basically a meeting of Europeans, with a few odd North Americans thrown in, until the last few cycles. Now the North Americans are a much bigger presence, as are the Asians and even the bleepin' Australians, who need to knock it off with the excelling at sports all the time. Are there even any ski resorts in Australia?

Meanwhile, The Vancouver [de]Tour Guide 2010 team sends along their effort to google map some stuff of interest around Vancouver. They describe it as "a mixture of google bombing, counter-cartography and psychogeography that uses Google Maps to contest the online/offline representations of Vancouver during the Olympics." I link to them here mainly because I enjoy the words "counter-cartography" and "psychogeography."

The Spread of Swine Flu: Blame it on Louisiana

Nate Silver has a map based on data from Google Flu Trends that shows the timeline of the spread of swine flu around the US:



Google Flu Trends works by applying the Google Panopticon to searches that correlate with CDC data on actual flu cases, and has the benefit of being immediately responsive to trends in outbreaks of influenza (CDC data tends to lag by a week or two).

Says Silver:

This map is fascinating on a number of levels. Although the initial outbreak of H1N1 back in April was centered on Texas, California, New York, Illinois and South Carolina, the place where the flu first hit critical mass several months later was in Louisiana. It then slowly radiated its way outward to most of the neighboring states -- Maine finally hit the 5,000-point threshold just last week. There also appear to be other points from which the flu spread -- a less prominent 'epicenter', for instance, centered in Minnesota and the Dakotas. And somehow, there came to be quite a lot of flu at various points in both Alaska and Hawaii -- Hawaii's peak actually came way back in June and July, well before the one in the Deep South.

Here's something I don't begin to understand: everyone kept saying there'd be a second wave of swine flu in the fall, because the slu likes colder temperatures. Sure enough that second wave came to pass - but it looks like it actually erupted in one of the warmest regions of the country at the height of summer. That makes the opposite of sense to me.

Anyhoo, here's some good news, according to Nate: "the flu is pretty much on the decline in all states except Northern New England." Though if you're looking for a reason to feel glum, you should be informed that more people have died in the US from swine flu than died in the attacks of September 11, and most of them were fairly young.

Meanwhile, I see that Google is going global (or at least semi-global) with their flu map:



Bad times for cold places.

The Shrinking of Detroit

Detroit is shrinking, and this map by architecture professor Dan Pitera shows just how great has been the extent of the depopulation:



Back at its mid-20th Century peak - before the race riots, before white flight, before the decline and fall of General Motors - Detroit had a population of close to 2 million. Since then it's shed more than half its population and now, according to City Farmer, "about 30% of Detroit is now vacant land — about 40 square miles, by one estimate." Forty square miles is roughly the size of San Francisco.

You can see the change in the city in these maps of population density from Wayne State's Center for Urban Studies:





For a concrete illustration of the effect of this diminution on the urban fabric, here's a Google maps image of a neighborhood in central Detroit:



This smattering of houses amidst vacant lots looks positively pastoral, but it's within walking distance of the old Tiger Stadium as well as the once-illustrious Michigan Central Station (pictured below). Places like this are common around Detroit

So what can be done to save a city that seems to be evaporating away? The Telegraph discusses one approach that might make sense:

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

The problem is that economic growth in the US over the past several decades has largely been driven by urban development (for which read: suburban sprawl). In some ways, the old manufacturing base of the economy has been replaced by construction - of housing, strip malls, glass office boxes - and associated financial activities (a model for growth that met a bit of a notorious end in the last few years (at least one hopes it was an end)). As short-sighted as such a growth model might have been, its legacy - as well as the legacy of the history of a country that has grown from a few towns dotting the East Coast to a continental empire with the world's third-largest population - is that contraction seems synonymous, in the American context, with defeat. As Kildee says: "The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there's an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they're shrinking, they're failing."

But changes in cities like Flint and Detroit don't have to follow a pattern of collapse. Kildee proposes another metaphor for the process of urban contraction in the Rust Belt:

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again".

For more, see this Google street view tour from James Howard Kunstler's podcast, as well as this site on the ruins of Detroit.

A Tale of Two Very, Very Different Cities

I've lately been listening to the KunstlerCast, a podcast about "the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl," featuring James Howard Kunstler. If you don't know Kunstler, he's a sort of one-man media empire of urbanist criticism of American cities and culture. I think his criticisms of suburban sprawl are generally spot-on, and while I'm sympathetic to his predictions about peak oil and the imminent (or nascent) decline and demise of the "happy motoring" culture that has characterized the US (and, increasingly, the world) over the past 60 years or so, I tend to find his predictions a bit horologically over-aggressive. (For instance, in a recent blog post he anticipated "that the current mood of public paralysis will dissolve in a blur of blood and spittle sometime between Memorial Day and July Fourth, even with Nascar in full swing, and the mushrooming ranks of the unemployed lost in raptures of engine noise and fried cornmeal. It doesn't take too many determined, pissed-off people to create a lot of mischief in a complex society." Watch your clocks - we've barely a month before the uprising begins.) But for my money, the somewhat overwrought pronouncements of doom are more than compensated for by the skill and undiluted vim with which he writes.

Anyways, the KunstlerCast has done a couple of episodes recently which have cleverly employed Google Street View. One was a Virtual Walking Tour of Paris. You can follow along with an embedded Street View player as Kunstler and Duncan Crary talk about what makes Paris such a pleasurable city to visit or to live in.



And, for a happy contrast, they also did an episode in which they toured Detroit. Poor, poor Detroit.



Detroit has been really done in by the decline of the auto industry in the US, of course. But it's also been a victim of clueless leadership, segregation, race riots, suburbanization, and the prioritization of the automobile over the human being in urban design. Now there are entire city blocks, even neighborhoods, once teeming, where most of the buildings are simply gone - razed by demolition crews or burned down (arson being a popular pastime in the Motor City). It's a city that's dying.

Anyway, it's a clever use of Street View, and if nothing else, Kunstler is an expert diagnostician; he does an excellent job of explaining, in detail, what is alienating and depressing about the project of suburban development in the US - and, for that matter, what is pleasant and ennobling about well-constructed cities like Paris.

More Swine Flu Maps

Search Engine Land has links to some more maps of the porcine influenza. You know how google has a flu map for the US based on web search activity? Well, they've added an experimental flu map for Mexico, based on the same principles.



A few bits seem to be missing in this map of Mexico, but you can make out some trends: Oaxaca, Morelos, the Distrito Federal, and Quintana Roo (the best-named Mexican state) are showing the most "flu activity," as per Google's algorithms. One wonders, though, if their method holds up when there's so much media attention on the flu: couldn't all the news stories influence rates of Google searches?

Meanwhile, Tech Crunch looks at searches for "swine flu" across the 50 states. It's not as precise as Google Flu. As Tech Crunch notes, "this method is less likely to be predictive of the actual spread of the disease because it just measures raw searches." So think if it as one interesting data point, and nothing to hang your epidemiological hat on; and what that one data point shows is that the top ten states for swine flu searches are: Texas, Indiana, New York, Vermont, New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and California. Again, this goes into the "for what it's worth category;" but it's interesting that several of those states have already had reported or suspected cases. That's probably just a reflection of media attention on reported cases, but if, say, Vermont and New Mexico pop up next in CDC reports, this map will have been prescient.

HealthMap is tracking swine flu by posting news reports and even some anecdotal reports from around the world.



The redder the marker, the more serious the news: "Swine Flu: Zambia Takes Steps" is a light yellow, "Fort Worth Schools Close for Swine Flu" is a rather more ominous crimson. (HealthMap also follows news of outbreaks of all sorts.)

Another map shows reported cases as well as the travel paths of infected individuals, according to news reports. And this heat map, at UMapper, gives a good picture of areas where the virus is currently spreading, with higher concentrations in white, shading towards purple at the peripheries.



Of course, if you like your swine flu maps to have the imprimatur of big media officialdom, you can check out the New York Times' characteristically high-quality maps of the outbreak in both the States and throughout the world.



And the BBC's map has a slider that lets you see the spread of the disease in pseudo-animation. Meanwhile, remember that google map of swine flu I posted a couple of days ago? Turns out it was put together by Dr. Henry Niman, an expert on viruses at the University of Pittsburgh. So that's good! Niman talks about his map in a video interview here.

Well, I guess I've gone and contributed, in my tiny way, to the media frenzy over swine flu. But I couldn't help it - this thing is just so eminently mappable.

Swine Flu: The Inevitable Google Map

It was only a matter of time before this showed up.



A Google map of the spread of the global health scare du jour. Pink markers are suspected cases; purple markers are confirmed or probable; deaths have no dot in the middle of the marker; yellow markers are negative cases. Click on markers for copious details on individual cases.

That someone would make such a map may have been inevitable, but nonetheless: note how cool it is. The map format, combined with (theoretically) near-time updates on reported cases and free 'n easy public access make this an ideal medium for monitoring the spread of an epidemic like swine flu.

Nuclear Armageddon and You

Well, here's a useful tool!



It's a Google Maps Mashup that lets you see the damage radius of nuclear strikes on given locations. It also lets you select by size of weapon - from Hiroshima's "Little Boy" to the 50-megaton "Tsar Bomba" of lore, the most powerful nuke ever detonated.

Yrs. truly would be a sure goner if anything above about 100 kilotons made a direct hit on my local downtown. That's actually a little better than I would have expected to do - I'm not far from downtown, and I would have thought any sort of nuclear direct hit would vaporize me instantly. It makes me wonder, actually, if the post-War move towards suburbanization in the U.S. was actually motivated by nuclear fear to a greater degree than I'd realized. I had sort of assumed that if you lived in a major metro area, any sort of large-scale nuclear war would do you in. But this makes it look like even your inner-ring suburbanites would have at least a fighting chance - especially if they'd made prudent investments in those backyard bomb shelters that were all the rage back then.

Here's a Wired write-up of the "mapplet."