The Great Tokyo Air Raid Map

Seventy one years ago, in March 1945, over 300 U.S. B-29 bombers dropped around 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo. The raid killed more than 100,000 Japanese men, women and children and left over a million people homeless. The NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation have marked the 71st anniversary of the Great Tokyo Air Raid with a new interactive map.

The Great Tokyo Air Raid Map includes a number of videos from survivors of the air raid. These first hand witness accounts are plotted on the map in the districts in which the participants were living at the time of the raid.

The map is in Japanese only so unless you speak Japanese you probably won't learn much from the witness videos. However the map also includes shaded areas which indicate the areas burned by the incendiary bombs and the evacuation zone. The red shaded area provides a shockingly clear indication of the devastation caused by the air raid on Tokyo. You can also view the damage caused by the bombing in two archive news reels (accessed via the little arrow on the right-hand side of the map).

The Worldwide Noise Pollution Map

The OSM Global Noise Pollution Map uses OpenStreetMap data to map the levels of noise pollution across the world. At the heart of the OSM Global Noise Pollution Map is the very clever but simple idea of assigning noise pollution levels based on OpenStreetMap tags.

Map features in OpenStreetMap are assigned a tag to describe what has been mapped. These tags can also be assigned a value. For example all roads are tagged as a 'highway' but are also assigned a value such as 'motorway', 'secondary' or 'residential;.

The OSM Global Noise Pollution Map use these tags and values to assign a noise pollution level based on general assumptions. For example highway, trunk, primary and secondary roads are deemed to be noisier than normal street or service roads. The OSM Global Noise Pollution Map also assumes that railways and retail & industrial zones will also have a level of noise pollution associated with them.

Such a blanket approach obviously has its limits. Looking at the map around where I live in London I'd agree with the majority of the noise levels but there are one or two buildings which definitely aren't as noisy as the map suggests.

However, quibbles aside, this is a neat idea and I'm sure that it can be refined further. For example there are a lot of different types of retail outlet tags in OpenStreetMap, so there is possibly room to refine the levels of noise pollution assigned to each type of shop and store on the global map.

Mapping the Hipster Hotspot Apocalypse

On April Fools Day Trulia released a handy interactive map called Hipsters Apocalypse. To create this heatmap of Hipster hangouts Trulia has used all their local knowledge to show where all the overpriced barbershops, dive bars and food trucks are concentrated.

The Trulia Blog has embedded ten maps of U.S. cities where they say Hipsters are most abundant. However the map seems to work in most U.S. towns and cities, Just use the search bar to center the map on your location.


Another easy way to find venues frequented by hipsters is by using the Yelp Wordmap.

The Yelp Wordmap is a series of heatmaps of common words used in Yelp reviews. One of those words just happens to be 'hipster'. If you select 'hipster' from the available words in the map sidebar and then select a city (from a choice of 14 cities worldwide) you can view a heatmap of the hipster hangouts in your town.

 It is also possible to view heatmaps for other words used in Yelp reviews. The words are different for each city, which presumably reflects the geographical popularity of certain words in Yelp reviews.


If you live in the Australian city of Melbourne you also have access to an interactive map which can show you all the best hipster hangouts. The Hipster Map of Melbourne is a handy guide to venues that are popular with the skinny jeans crowd.

It's really up to you whether use the map as a guide of venues to visit in Melbourne or whether you use it to find places to avoid.

Mapping the Most & Least Deprived

The Index of Multiple Deprivation is the official measure of relative deprivation in England. The index ranks every area in England from the most to least deprived. Over the years the indices have proved a popular data-set to map as a mapped visualization is a logical way to allow users to quickly explore relative deprivation in England by geographical area.

Alasdair Rae of Sheffield University has created a new interactive map which visualizes the 10% most and least deprived areas in England based on the index. IMD 2015: The 10% colors the most deprived areas in England red on the map and the least deprived blue. If you zoom in on a city on the map you can quickly see where the areas of most and least deprivation are.

If you hover over a colored area on the map you can view the area's IMD decile and IMD rank.


If you want to explore how every area in the UK is ranked in the Index of Deprivation you can use the Index of Multiple Deprivation Explorer. This map visualizes the 2015 Indices of Deprivation for England and allows you to explore the data by any location in England.

The Index of Multiple Deprivation Explorer allows you to view choropleth layers for a number of the indices. If you select a Lower Super Output Area level area (LSOA) on the map you can explore the details for each of the indices. The details show how the area ranks within the 32,844 LSOAs in England for the selected index.

The map side-panel also shows how neighboring LSOAs rank for the same selected index of deprivation.


CDRC Maps allows you to find out how an area's deprivation rank has changed from the 2010 and 2015 Indices of Deprivation. It provides a useful visualization of which areas in England improved and worsened in terms of relative deprivation during the five years between the publication of the two indices.

The blue areas on the map are becoming less deprived at a faster rate than the red areas on the map. The red areas on the map have not necessarily become more deprived since the last Indices of Deprivation, they may also be actually becoming less deprived, but at a slower rate.

Suprageography has published more details about this new map layer on CDRC Maps and has also examined some of the areas of England which have shown the biggest changes since the last Indices were published. For example, the five London boroughs which hosted the 2012 Olympics are all areas which have become less deprived at a relatively fast rate.

Mapping the Monuments of Rome

When in Rome do as the Romans do and use Milestone Rome to find all the nearby monuments and points of interest.

One of the fantastic things about Rome is that wherever you are in the city you are never more than a few meters away from some amazing site of historical importance. Using the Milestone Rome map you can quickly discover the nearest historical sites to your current location.

The Milestone Rome interactive map allows you to discover the location of nearby events and sites of historical interest. Just enter your location into the map and categorized markers will show on the map the nearest points of interest.

To achieve this radius search I assume the map uses Mapbox js's 'distanceTo' function. This function allows you to display markers within a defined range of a specific location on a Mapbox map. You can find a demo map of this Marker Radius Search in the Mapbox.js documentation.

Considering that this radius search functionality is such a major feature on Milestone Rome it is a shame that the map doesn't include the option to find your current location automatically. At the moment you need to use the map's search function to find your location in Rome. It would be very simple for Milestone Rome to add the Mapbox.js Geolocation function to automatically detect the user's location.

Mapping the Murrumbidgee River

The Murrumbidgee River is the second longest river in Australia. In fact it's long enough to deserve its own art exhibition. 'Drifter' was an installation created by Mitchell Whitelaw for the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. The exhibition is now over but you can view an interactive version of the 'Drifter' map online.

Drifter presents a mapped view of the Murrumbidgee river system overlaid with historical newspaper articles about the river and thousands of scientific observations about the nonhuman life of the river. It also contains lots of sound recordings of frogs.

The map was created with Leaflet.js and the National Library of Australia's Trove API. If you select a newspaper article on the map you can click through to view details from the Trove API. You can also select the frog labels to view details about the recording and learn more about the species of frog.

The Transit Maps of the Week

This week saw the release of some interesting mapped visualizations of transit data. For example, Travel By Rail is a a great interactive map and data visualization of intercity rail journeys in Ukraine.

The map allows you to explore the number of outgoing and incoming intercity train journeys for towns and cities across the Ukraine (2014-2015) and provides a number of tools which allow you to explore the data by location and date range.

You can select individual cities on the map to show the intercity rail journeys taken to and from that city. You can also use the graph to select to view only those train journeys taken within a specified date range (either for all cities or for selected individual cities). It is also possible to view only internal train journeys in Ukraine, or journeys between Ukraine and Belarus or Russia, or both internal journeys and journeys taken to and from Belarus & Russia.


Chris Whong's NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life is one of the most impressive mapped visualizations of transit data around. Therefore if you want to map NYC taxi data you have to be aware that the bar is set very high. Michael Fogleman's 2015 Yellow Taxi Trips clears the bar.

This interactive map of over 77 million taxi trips from January to June 2015 allows you to explore the most popular destinations for taxi journeys from any location on Manhattan Island. Click anywhere in Manhattan and you can view a heat map showing the most popular destinations from that spot. The map also includes an hourly frequency graph which shows you the most popular times for taking a yellow taxi from your selected location.

The map was built with Leaflet, d3, jQuery and Bootstrap. The map itself responds impressively quickly. When you click on the map the heat map and hourly frequency chart update with lightning speed.


The first tram line in Vienna was constructed in 1865. This horse driven tram line ran between Schottentor and Hernals. Vienna's U-Bahn subway system didn't appear until over one hundred years later.

You can view the growth of Vienna's public transit system over time on a new interactive map. Zeitlinie is a timeline driven map which shows when Vienna's many tram, train and U-Bahn lines were first opened.

You can use the play button at the bottom of the map to watch an animated history of the growth of Vienna's transit system. Alternatively you can use the timeline slide control to explore the extent of the transit system in Vienna for any year from 1865 to 2016.

The map was made with the Leaflet mapping platform and uses the Leaflet.timeline plugin to add the transit lines to the map by date.

Showing City Improvements with Street View

Brazilian design collective URB-I have struck upon a brilliant use for the historical  Street View imagery available in Google Maps. They are using before and after shots from Street View to showcase improvements in street design made by city planners around the world.

URB-I's Before and After includes examples of places across the globe where public spaces have been transformed from car-oriented to pedestrian friendly locations. To illustrate these changes in street design they simply use Street View images from Google Maps taken before and after the redesign.


Google first added historical imagery to Google Maps back in April 2014. Unfortunately the Google Maps API doesn't provide a direct way to access this historical imagery. If you use the API to present a Street View panorama of a location the API always default to show the most recent Street View panorama.

However it is possible to force the API to show an historical Street View image. If you use the panoID method to show a Street View panorama you can use the panoID of an historical Street View panorama to ensure that it is displayed (the panoID can be found in the URL link for the Street View on desktop Google Maps).

Via: CityLab

Van Gogh is NOT a Cartographer

I don't imagine many people were taken in by my April Fools joke about Vincent Van Gogh's long lost map of Amsterdam.

The map is actually an old vintage map of Amsterdam which has been processed by a Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style. This algorithm allows you to combine the content of one image with the style of another image. To create my Van Gogh map of Amsterdam I applied the style taken from a Van Gogh painting to the content of an old vintage map of Amsterdam.

I was actually quite disappointed with the results. I hoped to be able to create a map which looked far more genuinely like a Van Gogh painting than the smudged map I ended up with.

In order to overlay the pretend Van Gogh map on top of a modern map of Amsterdam I used Mapbox. To do this I used the ImageOverlay with georeferenced scanned map example from the Mapbox documentation. I added an opacity slide control to the Mapbox example map. This opacity control can be found in the Opacity control Mapbox example.

The Yellow Taxi Heat Map

Chris Whong's NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life is one of the most impressive mapped data visualizations around. Therefore if you want to map NYC taxi data you have to be aware that the bar is set very high. Michael Fogleman's 2015 Yellow Taxi Trips clears the bar.

This interactive map of over 77 million taxi trips from January to June 2015 allows you to explore the most popular destinations for taxi journeys from any location on Manhattan Island. Click anywhere in Manhattan and you can view a heat map showing the most popular destinations from that spot. The map also includes an hourly frequency graph which shows you the most popular times for taking a yellow taxi from your selected location.

The map was built with Leaflet, d3, jQuery and Bootstrap. The map itself responds impressively quickly. When you click on the map the heat map and hourly frequency chart update with lightning speed.