An Animated Map of a City's Growth

Housing Plans is an animated map of new housing projects in Amsterdam. New housing plans are shown on the map with colored building footprints. The colors of the footprints indicate the planned year of each building's completion

What I really like about this map is the animation feature. This really gives you a sense of where and how Amsterdam plans to meet its housing needs over the next 25 years. As the animation plays, and the years pass, new buildings appear on the map as the city grows

 I've been expecting for a while for someone to do this with building age data, to show a city growing over time.


Bert Spaan's Netherland's Building Age Map. created for the Waag website, visualizes the age of a staggering 9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands.

All of the buildings in the Netherlands are colored on the map by their age of construction. I'd really like to see a similar building age map of Amsterdam but animated in the same way as the Housing Plans map. An animated timeline would provide a great visualization of how the city has grown through the centuries.

The Netherland's Building Age Map uses data from BAG. Using the BAG data for Amsterdam building ages it should be fairly straightforward to create an interactive map which resembles the amazing data visualizations created by 422 for the Netherlands from Above series. For example, check out this visualization of the growth of Amsterdam in the amazing Urban Growth video.

Now imagine that as an interactive online map.