stamen design

Jun 26, 2012

Trees, Cabs & Crime in the Venice Biennale

by Shawn

We're proud to announce that Trees, Cabs and Crime will be on display in the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale this fall. The Institute for Urban Design was chosen by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs to organize the pavilion this year, which they dubbed Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good and features "projects initiated by American architects and designers aimed at bringing positive change to the public realm."

The Process

I made the original rendering on a rainy Sunday in February, 2009, using three data sets:

1. The locations of trees under the care of Friends of the Urban Forest, a community of volunteers who plant and maintain nearly 1,000 new trees in San Francisco every year.
2. A single day of Yellow Cab taxi locations from Cabspotting.
3. A week of SFPD report locations from Crime Reports (crime data wasn't publicly available until later that year, when we launched San Francisco Crimespotting).

My goal was to overlay the three data sets in such a way that overlapping areas would produce new color combinations. So, rather than just overlaying each dot on top of one another, I put each data set into its own "color channel" and combined them with subtractive blending, just like what happens in the CMYK printing process:

The resulting image didn't inspire the a-ha! moment that I'd hope it would, but it turned out to be beautiful nonetheless. And, more importantly, it shows us San Francisco through a lens that nobody had thought to look through before. Without a coastline, streets, or park outlines as reference points, you can still make out the rough shapes of urban activity. You can see that not only is it hard impossible to catch a cab in the Outer Sunset, but that the neighborhood also has one of the lowest concentrations of trees in the city, and that crime occurs almost exclusively on the named streets running east-west, rather than on the numbered streets running north-south:

The effect works especially well with differently shaped data. Last year we experimented with it on one of the data themes from VPRO's Netherlands from Above, and it looked amazing:

Abstracting Awesomeness

2009 feels like a long time ago, so I'm not too ashamed to admit that I created the original Trees, Cabs & Crime with Flash and a screenshot. Thankfully, though, the IFUD gave me an excuse to recreate the image when they requested a higher resolution copy for printing. So this time around I did it in Python (using Mike's awesome Blit module) and published the source code on Github. I also made a less serious image using nine years of SFPD reports. As you can see, the Mission and the Tenderloin like to party:

The U.S. Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale will be open from August through November. If you're lucky enough to find yourself in Venice for it, we'd love to know what you thought. And be sure to tweet @stamen if you make something cool with the code!

Jun 21, 2012

Creepy Maps: Quarantine Your City

by Shawn

Earlier this year we worked with Warner Bros. to create an interactive map called Quarantine Your City on which fans of the latest Oren Peli thriller, Chernobyl Diaries, could vote to see a special screening in their city. The plot follows a group of modern-day American tourists on an "adventure tour" of Pripyat, the site of the infamous nuclear catastrophe at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant on April 26, 1986. As you can probably imagine, things don't go quite as planned.

Radiation Levels

The idea behind the screening competition was that users could "quarantine" their city by voting for it on Twitter or Facebook, which would raise the radiation levels over a certain threshold, and after a couple of weeks would Warner Bros. select the 20 most popular. Here's what it looked like early on:

And after the voting was done:

We used ModestMaps and Easey to build this map. One significant improvement we made over the PA3 map was to squeeze all of the label positioning information for the most populated US cities into a single data file, which makes the whole map feel much more responsive when zooming in and out. We even used image sprite to pack all of the different radiation symbol sizes and color combinations into a single image. Browsers are getting faster by the day, and it's not hard to imagine a near future when we could put a hundred times as many labels as this on a slippy map:

Cartography

Drawing inspiration from the rusted metal and concrete textures used in the film's advertising materials, and using the same process that we developed for our watercolor maps, Zach and Geraldine created a new map in which land masses are rendered as hunks of crusty, mottled concrete.

Check out the standalone slippy map, or click on the images below.

The texture changes subtly at each zoom level, getting more messed up and contrasty as you go in:

The coastline treatment gets really interesting around places like the San Joaquin River delta and the Chesapeake Bay:

And inland lakes and rivers look more like craters, cuts, fissures and scars:

We're obviously having a lot of fun pushing the boundaries of what's possible with online cartography, and we're getting better and faster at making worldwide maps in the process. If you're looking to get your own maps of the world, and especially if you're looking for maps that look like they've been attacked by a horde of radioactive zombies, do get in touch!