The Road to Rio

Rio de Janeiro has experienced a huge number of construction projects over the last few years, many of them related to the upcoming 2016 Olympic Games. However these are only the very latest developments to take place in a city which has been continually growing since it was founded in 1565.

You can now explore the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro since its foundation on the imagineRio interactive map. At the heart of imagineRio is a timeline control which allows you to view historical maps, plans and images of the city from 1500 up to the present day. When you choose a date from the timeline the map sidebar updates to show the media you can add to the map. For example, most dates include a number of vintage maps of Rio which you can select to view them overlaid on the interactive map.

When you use the timeline to change the date the interactive map also updates to show the building footprints of important Rio buildings of the time period selected. You can select the individual footprints on the map to learn about their name, date of construction and owner /creator.

If you want to know more about how these elements on the map were made interactive you can read Probing on a Tiled Map, a blog post explaining how PostGIS is used to query the imagineRio map and return data based on that query.