Monday, April 22, 2019

Mega Monday Map Quiz


Can you name these three European cities?

The maps above show three different cities. To make the question harder each map only shows building footprints. All other features, such as roads, rivers and parks have been removed from the maps.

It isn't easy is it? 

How about if I told you the first city is in Switzerland, the second map shows a small section of a city in Germany, and the last map shows a section of a city in England.

Still stuck?

What if I tell you that one map is from Berlin, one is from London and the other Basel?

OK, so that isn't exactly a 'mega' map quiz. That's because each of those three circular maps comes from a different quiz. The first map comes from Tages Anzeiger's Do you recognize the Swiss city?. The second map comes from the Berliner Morgenpost's Do You Recognize the Area?. The third map comes from my own quiz London Squares, Markets & Circuses.

The first quiz, from the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, includes 12 maps of different cities in Switzerland. The second quiz, from the Berliner Morgenpost, includes 12 maps of different areas of Berlin. My quiz includes six maps of different areas of London. Now that's a bit more mega

All of these three quizzes were made with Hans Hack's Figuregrounder. Figuregrounder is a very easy to use tool which allows you to make map posters for any location in the world using OSM data. The posters are simple circular building footprint maps. So if you want to create your own map quiz you can just use Figuregrounder to make maps of different cities, towns or neighborhoods.


Alternatively you could use the Street Patterns tool for making map posters from city street patterns. Street Patterns is a very similar tool to Figuregrounder, except it uses data from OpenStreetMap to create maps from just streets and roads (instead of building footprints).

The image above shows street patterns found in Paris, London & New York. Can you guess which is which? The answer can be found here.

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