How Flanders Has Changed in 50 Years

The Flanders region of Belgium has changed a lot in the last 50 years. If you want to know how the area has changed then you can explore the 50 Years of Concreting in Flanders interactive map.

50 Years of Concreting in Flanders uses aerial photography from 1971 to show how the region looked from the air half a century ago. Using the map you can search for any address and compare modern aerial imagery with the historical aerial imagery to explore how the area has changed. The 1971 imagery has a spatial resolution of 1 meter, which means that it is of a high enough resolution to be able to identify individual houses.

The map was made by Maarten Lambrechts, who has also written an interesting blog post on how the map was made. In A look through history map of Flanders - the making of Maarten explains how he made the historical imagery into a map tile layer which could be viewed using an interactive map. He also explains how he developed the functionality to share a location on the map. This allows users to simply cut & paste the URL of a location on the map which they can then share with friends or family.