London - The Information Capital [antikvár]

im1I't-m I .'ilav-'i,:ii'l.''Vii.i!im a:INTRODUCTIONThis book could not have been made ten years ago. Computers weren't powerful enough. Data weren't as detailed or freely available. Technologies like Twitter and smartphones did not exist. And, we Oliver and I did not know each other.His world oi design and my world of mapping first united in 2010 when he was working at Nat/onol Geographic. I was studying for a Ph.D. that focused on the geographic patterns of millions of surnames in Europe and beyond. Oliver contacted me for help producing a map of the most popular surnames in the US. When the resulting graphic was short-listed for the 'Information is Beautiful' awards in 2012, Oliver flew to London for the event and stopped by my office at University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis to say hello. On that day, the collaboration for this book was born: What if we took all the data we could find -on happiness, house prices, art, violent crime, life expectancy - and created a new visual guide to London for the twenty-first century?All cities can be captured in maps that depict street layouts or the locations of landmarks, but London is a city defined by them. Its maps are special. They were drawn by pioneers such as Charles Booth, who revealed (he full extent of the city's poverty, and Phyllis Pearsall, who mapped 23,000 streets in her hugely popular AtoZ guide, But the map Londoners are probably most familiar with belongs to Henry Beck. His 1931 Tube map eschewed geographic accuracy for a more diagrammatic display of the city's Underground lines. Instantly recognizable the world over, it remains one of the most beloved representations of the capital, lis multicoloured lines have become part of the urban fabric alongside London's red buses and black cabs. Remove maps from London and you damage the city itself.00