An inspiration for the Hongguang Atlas project was Denis Wood's A Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights, which is a series of unconventional maps describing one particular neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. Maps of things that are usually unmarked and unnoticed, like power lines...
...street signs...
...and of course, the Jack O Lanterns (dang, that word looks funny in print) pictured at the beginning of the post.
If you look at these maps in detail, it's surprising how much you can learn about a place (and of course, the people who live there) just by noticing where things are. That clump of pumpkins at the top of the map, for example, correlates very nicely with the area of town with the highest property values. How much energy we use, who uses it, who has power and who doesn't - it's all described by maps of objects that we usually take for granted.
It's also very interesting to look at maps of this well-gridded and amply provided for neighborhood while in here China, a place where the built structures seem much more improvised, and are changing from year to year and even month to month. How do the structures we build shape the way we live? And how does the way we live shape our built environment?
More about Dennis Wood and his maps here, and you also listen to an interesting radio interview with Ira Glass here.
Oh, and if you're looking for Christmas gifts for the map geek in your life (just sayin'..), his book is now out as well, and looks really cool...
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