🗺️ Maps of the Month

Something interesting happens with the names of places in cities. There’s almost a sense of intimacy that develops between you and the writer who gave his name to your street. A feeling of proximity that comes from seeing everyday the name of that particular historical figure at the entrance of its eponymous metro station. The namesake figure becomes alive - which is why it’s so important to have the streets of a city represent its population, notably in terms of gender distribution. This is a great mapping of the overwhelming proportion of streets in Barcelona named after men (84 %) vs. women (15 %). We also liked this one - in Spanish - that considers the other namesakes of the city: plants, places, animals too!

 📖 Book of the Month

When we said (data) visualizations about cities, we meant it - this book is a visualization in and of itself. An incredibly beautiful novel by the Italian author Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities consists of 55 prose descriptions of fictitious cities - but Calvino played a game of embedding hidden categories and patterns, adopting a somewhat mathematical structure (there’s a matrix and everything!) in the structure of the book. A beautiful example of “combinatory literature”,  Calvino meant it to be read as a polyhedron - we invite you to take a walk along its edges…

🔊 Sounds of the Month

A universal property of cities worldwide: their noisiness, for the best or the worst. Sometimes, it’s the racket of cars, vehicles and people on a busy street that wakes you up like clockwork at 8am. Or, the cheerful greeting of birds in the park as you leave the office on a Friday afternoon. The sounds of a city can be deeply nostalgic - embedded in a time and space, a memory and moment. This is why we like radio aporee so much - a beautiful crowd-sourced project, where people have been adding recorded sounds from their cities (with a given place and time) since 2006, building over time a crowd-sourced soundmap of different environments and places around the world. A plane ticket sitting right in your earphones. 

These are our top 3 - but we also wanted to highlight some other resources, views, and maps we liked - honourable mentions, if you will: 

• “Les villes rangées”, re-ordered cartographies of a few big cities, by artist Armelle Cafron 

• A Barcelona skincare store, designed by Mesura, built from quarry stones from the city’s most historical buildings and sites

• Second Sea, an interactive calculator for financial damages due to the rising of the sea level, in different cities across the world

• WikiBarrio, a mapping of socio-demographic data across Spain

We hope this gives you new perspectives on the cities we know, love and curse. See you next time, and ‘till then-

Concrete jungles of digital frenzy, numbers fraught and hazy-

From those, who, with their data, refuse to be lazy xx