Sydney No Harbour Bridge

DX Lab's Pano-scope allows you to view some of the vintage historic panoramic photographs in the New South Wales State Library Collection. The library owns historical panoramic photographs taken in Sydney and elsewhere in New South Wales dating back as early as 1876.

Pano-scope is a wonderful way to explore the NSW of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It allows you to see how Sydney (pictured above) looked before the Sydney Opera House and before the Sydney Harbour Bridge were built.

The Pano-scope viewer uses an interactive mapping interface. This means that users can pan and zoom in on the vintage panoramas using the familiar controls of online maps. Pano-scope was created using Pannellum, which is a lightweight, open source panorama viewer. You can see more examples of the panorama viewer in action in the Pannellum library documentation (including an example of the viewer being used to display a 360 degree panoramic video).

You can also make simple interactive maps from panoramic images using Leaflet.js. Check out this Maps Mania post on Making Vintage Panoramic Maps for more examples of panoramic maps and instructions on how to make them yourself.

Fried Chicken Dividing Lines

Fried chicken shops are now the most important tool in demographics. If you want to know the economic health of a city's neighborhoods you can ignore census data and instead just count the number of fried chicken shops in each neighborhood. The lower the number the greater the wealth.

We have looked before, in Fried chicken vs. coffee shops and in Fast Food England, how the 'fried chicken method' can be used to determine deprived and gentrified neighborhoods in England. The method has now also been used to map out the economic divide in Sydney, Australia.

Food fault lines: mapping class through food chains looks out how fast food chains can be used to map Sydney's poorest and richest neigborhoods. At the center of this new fried chicken map of Sydney is the Red Rooster Line. The 'Red Rooster Line' is a line on the map which runs through all of Sydney's Red Rooster fast food restaurants. A line which also seems to be the border between Sydney's richer and poorer areas.

The Food Fault Lines Map also includes a number of other overlays which use different restaurant chains to create new Sydney neighborhoods. Borders have been drawn on the map around all the outlets of these different chain restaurants. The Iku Wholefood neighborhood, the Cha Time neighborhood and the Vintage Cellars suburb fall on the richer side of the Red Rooster Line. The poorer side of the Red Rooster Line is home to the Outback Steakhouse neighborhood and the borough of Wendy's.

The Price of Renting in Sydney

Renting in Sydney is expensive. Prohibitively expensive if you live on the minimum wage.

The Sydney Morning Herald's Renting on Minimum Wage map shows that if you want to rent in Sydney on minimum wage you'll probably need to work double shifts every week. The map shows how many hours you would have to work in each neighborhood to be able to afford the cheapest rent.

Thankfully the situation is a little better for those earning the minimum wage. A second map shows that those earning the minimum wage in Sydney could just afford a one bedroom unit in 78% of the city's suburbs.

Sydney Drive Time

Sydney's Motorists is a leaflet map of Sydney driving patterns based on data from the NSW Bureau of Transport Statistics.

Select a Sydney neighborhood on the map and you can view how many motorists drive to the neighborhood for work. You can also see from which neighborhood motorists have driven from. When you select any of the neighborhoods on the map a choropleth map view shows the number of motorists driving to the neighborhood from every other Sydney neighborhood.

Once you have clicked on a neighborhood you can also mouse-over any of the other neighborhoods on the map to view the exact number of motorists who drove from that neighborhood to your selected neighborhood.

Mapping the Languages of Sydney

The Sydney Morning Herald has created an interesting mapped analysis of the languages spoken in the city. The map shows the top non-English languages spoken in each of the city's suburbs, the density of English as a first language and the linguistic diversity in each neighbourhood.

Sydney's Melting Pot of Language reveals that east Asians predominantly live in the north shore while Arabic speakers dominate the western suburbs. Over 250 different languages are spoken in the city and nearly 40 percent speak a non-English language as their first tongue.

Accompanying the mapped visualization is a bar graph showing the numbers of speakers of each of the non-English languages spoken in the city. The graph groups the languages into global regions but you can select any of the region bars to view a percentage breakdown of the individual languages.  

Sydney's Historical Maps

The Dictionary of Sydney has put on-line a collection of historical maps, The Atlas of the Suburbs of Sydney. The Atlas is a series of maps of Sydney created by map makers Higinbotham, Robinson and Harrison in the late-nineteenth-century.

You can view each of the maps overlaid on Google Maps by selecting the 'full record' link provided with each map (click on a map image, then select 'full record'). Once the map loads you can use the familiar Google Maps navigation tools to explore the historical Higinbotham, Robinson and Harrison map in detail.

Via: All Things Spatial

Shopping in Sydney with Google Maps

Urban Walkabout is a comprehensive on-line shopping guide to the popular shopping areas in Perth and Sydney, Australia.

The site includes Google Maps for both Perth and Sydney, displaying all the best shops in all the popular suburbs of both cities. The shops on each map are categorised into Fashion & Bodycare, Objects & Art, Food & Drink, Stay & Explore and Shopping Centres.

If you click on a shop's marker on the map you can then click through to read Urban Walkabout's full review of the establishment.

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