In his latest round-up of urban data visualisations, Max Galka reduces English and Welsh commuters to animated dots, reimagines New York as a video game, and explores Lisbon with the ‘graffiti grannies’

This interactive map lets you watch who commutes to your city every day

This interactive map lets you watch who commutes to your city every day

If you’ve ever found yourself packed like a sardine on your train/bus/tube ride to work (every day, perhaps?), you’ll probably have wondered: “Where the hell do all these people come from?” Well now, thanks to a new map by Michigan-based data visualiser Mark Evans, residents of England and Wales can watch for themselves.



Using data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, Evans has built an interactive map that lets users explore the daily commutes made to, or from, any of the 348 local authority districts in England and Wales.



The journeys are visualised as animated dots, moving back and forth between place of residence and places of work. The size of each dot represents the number of commuters, with the top four incoming (or outgoing) regions coloured green, yellow, red and purple respectively.

For something as universally unpleasant as commuting, the resulting animations are surprisingly beautiful and hypnotic. “Even my dog seemed to go into a trance watching them, leading to minutes of human amusement,” writes Evans on his blog.

He credits the inspiration for the map (and for his US version, posted back in May) to Alasdair Rae, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield, who created a series of commuting maps for the San Francisco Bay Area last year.

And for a different take on London commutes, see this Tube Heartbeat map, made by Oliver O’Brien, a University College London researcher, on behalf of the mapping company Here. The impressively-detailed map visualises passenger traffic throughout the London Underground at 15-minute intervals over the course of one day.

The future of digital mapping?

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It’s unlikely any amount of money could have saved Encyclopedia Britannica from disruption by Wikipedia and its army of volunteer contributors. A similar fate may await the world of digital mapping.

While tech giants such as Uber, Google, and Apple spend billions competing in a mapping technology arms race, their proprietary technologies may ultimately be eclipsed by the map world’s equivalent of Wikipedia: a growing ecosystem of organisations, businesses and DIY cartographers collaborating on a new generation of free, open-source mapping tools.

One of the most interesting of these companies is Mapzen, an “open, sustainable and accessible mapping platform” that offers a suite of free, strikingly impressive tools.

Mapzen’s location search engine, powered by OpenStreetMap and other open data sources, already rivals the search functionality of Google Maps. But where Mapzen really stands out is in the stunning visuals produced by its Tangram mapping engine.

The latest Tangram creation, above, reimagines New York (or any other place you wish) in the style of Pokémon Go ...

Here is a Tron-themed map of New York, one of my favourite maps from last year.

And this map of New York City as a planet hints at the wide range of possibilities offered by Tangram – though the effect is not the same without the density of tall buildings you find in a city like New York.

What differentiates Tangram from most other web-based maps is its use of OpenGL, an esoteric programming library that communicates directly with your computer’s graphics card, allowing complex 3D visuals far beyond what would otherwise be possible.

You can find more Tangram examples on the Mapzen website and Github. Or if you’re feeling ambitious, try creating one of your own on Tangram Play.

Tracking Lisbon street art

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grans rule 4eva … one of the ‘graffiti grannies’ whose work is included in the street art map of Lisbon. Photograph: Rui Gaiola/REX/Shutterstock

From its brightly painted houses to its purple-blossoming Jacaranda trees, Lisbon is a colourful city all right. Nowhere is that more true than in the Portuguese capital’s street art – and the cast of characters who create it.



In honour of this burgeoning scene, Expresso has put together an interactive map that lets you explore no fewer than 600 pieces of geolocated street art throughout the city (and the rest of Portugal). The map allows you to browse the artwork by location, or you can select from an alphabetic list of artists.

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If you’re not sure where to start, here are a few street artists worth checking out:

Odeith – known for his anamorphic graffiti, which appears to be floating in 3D when viewed from the right angle;

Vhils – an artist whose portraits are often chiselled into building facades rather than sprayed on with paint;

Lata 65 – a street art workshop for over-65s, whose members have been dubbed the “graffiti grannies”;

Violant – a prolific street artist whose surrealist murals carry environmental or social messages.

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