Less trees, more asphalt in Victoria

Trees! Glorious Trees!

Fortunately for us, the streets are really green in this city. And I don’t just mean the mentality of the masses. Between the parliament buildings, cobbled Government Street, horse carriages, and the entire neighbourhood of Oak Bay, Victoria has always been considered a Little London of sorts – much to the  chagrin of the young locals striving to define this city as anything other than the City of Gardens (those hanging baskets will be the death of me).

One aspect of this city where the newlyweds and nearly-deads do find common ground is our love for the amount of greenery or tree cover lining our streets and shading our backyards.  We seem to keep our urban foliage close to our hearts, but overall Victoria is no poster child for protecting natural areas with ecological value.

A recent study commissioned by a local environmental non-profit has had a lot of press coverage in Victoria (Times Colonist, Metro News, Victoria News, Chek News, CBC Radio). This is likely because of this shared interest in greenery between millennial environmentalists and centenarian traditionalists that make up most of the city. The study is a map (yes!) of the Capital Regional District looking at land cover from 2005 to 2011, which includes tree cover but also impervious surfaces, exposed soil and agricultural fields.

My apologies in advance to those who are R/G colourblind, this is not a good scheme for you. I will change this and re-post again. For now, this is an image of  2005 land cover (left) and 2011 land cover (right) around Langford Lake. The red is impervious surface/buildings, grey is exposed soil, green is tree cover, yellow is grass.

It is clear to me in this image that there has been a relative increase in impervious surfaces in the form of development, some on exposed soil, some on tree cover.

The spatial analysis of one hectare grid cells with six classes of percent tree cover. Those cell classified as total tree cover can be anything greater than 75% tree cover. The result indicated that the three higher density classes (>25%-100% tree cover) are all decreasing while the three lower density classes (0% to 25% tree cover) are all increasing.

In other words, we are losing areas of high density forest and gaining low to no density forest.

Although the media preferred to make this more of a blame game for the biggest loser of all municipalities (“Saanich lost the most treed land over the six-year period: 378 hectares, equivalent to 146 of the University of Victoria’s Finnerty Gardens” Times Colonist), there is a lot of interesting information to be gathered from this data (not to mention their method of classification had an impressive 94% accuracy after field testing)…

One of the more intriguing aspects in the full report of this study is the inclusion of all First Nation Reserves in the CRD, which went completely unmentioned in the media. It was also interesting to find that for the entire region, the decline of exposed soil/rock (-1.5%) is close to the decline in tree cover (2%). Another interesting factor to look at would be the agricultural fields in terms of food security and production: have they increased or decreased? Are they replacing high density forest? Are they being replaced by impervious surfaces?

This looks as though it will be the source data for a number of projects across the region. Very exciting!

Here’s an image of the view from Mount Finlayson – a recent development that is visible from the land cover mapping analysis completed between 2005 and 2011.

It is a big development but these were not the primary source of tree cover loss. Read the report to find out more! I hope that this report will empower the community to request their local municipality strengthen the tree protection bylaws and provincial government reinstate a parks acquisition fund. Oh, and support the local land trusts in the meantime.

Visualizing the city of lights and city of dreams

This data visualization is blowing my mind.

Created by four third year students from HETIC (Higher Studies in Information Technology and Communication), this digital map uses 2009 Census data called DataParis with nodes centered around the subway stations. It takes the average of 17 different factors (higher education, unemployment, income) and maps them on the nearest station.

It is very simple and visually clean, with no hard borders and only icons to represent each factor. I do wish I could overlay multiple factors somehow, to make a comparison say with higher education and unemployment. But this is a pure genius mapping project.

It reminds me of the project put out by Larry Buchanan displaying Inequality and New York’s Subway, an interactive infographic (with a small map, see below) that also uses subway stations and lines to display the shift in median household income. The short blog entry describes the largest gap in median household income between two consecutive subway stations on the same line is $142,265. Woah.

TUS mapping meets the Beatles meets the Yolngu

The most interesting of all Pop Chart Lab prints reminded me of this mapping class I took last semester with this great professor on Use and Occupancy Mapping for Indigenous nations using an amazing textbook from Terry Tobias. The ending of the course was quite bittersweet because once we finished all of the really interesting and practical training of mapping over 100 culturally significant places and spaces, we realized the method we spent hours pouring over can never fully represent the breadth of an entire culture. Hindsight is 20/20.

Current Method of Use and Occupancy Mapping

So now I am always looking for different ways to map use and occupancy, and I thought this Beatles Song Chart would be an alternative when mapping out a person’s activities. Each icon (instrument) could be an activity (fishing, collecting clams, etc) connected to a central line (the songs) could be a timeline, or maybe a river.

Beatles Song Chart

It seems almost impossible to capture an entire cultural history on a 2D piece of paper. As a testament to well-crafted Use and Occupancy Mapping, I wanted to bring up a dynamic duo of anthropologists who have done some of the most inspiring mapping work with the Yolngu peoples in northern Australia’s Blue Mud Bay. Although the maps created were not for public display, I was fortunate enough to see a glimpse of these maps in a presentation by those anthropologists. Part of the research and mapping was based on the art created by the Yolngu.

Yirrkala Church Panels

The Yolngu have this astonishing artistic technique of mapping out the tidal currents that are representative of their ownership, religion and law (See Yirrkala Church panels above). The anthropological work is really remarkable, and helped bring about some significant legal action to the Yolngu community.

pop culture meets cartography

Pop culture for me is a strange addiction. I read an article about why people get obsessive about checking their newsfeed with every notification (guilty), and then I read another and another with kids about why the average young internet user’s attention span has changed to rapid fire snippets (I can tell you right now I did not read the entire articles mentioned above).

But hey, I love the internet as much as the next cubicle colleague with unrestricted access. Especially when it comes to INFOGRAPHICS which, according to the wikipedia definition, are basically a form of map. Only it’s not geographic and really about mapping out connections.

And when infographic meets pop culture, my worlds collide.

Taxonomy of Rap Names

I found Pop Chart Lab that sells prints of these. Now I hope they make some money from this, because most of these look like they weren’t just whipped up on a lazy holiday Monday, but what do I know about graphic designers.

Just look at these veggies!

Veggie Varieties

I’ll have more on infographics in the next post. Check out Pop Chart Lab’s print collection in the meantime.

Reinventing the WorldMap

I love hearing about free ways to utilize GIS. The monopoly put on GIS software combined with the huge learning curve makes it really difficult to use for people who just want to create a few maps and not get a degree in ArcGIS. In an interview with Suzanne Blier, Professor at Harvard, it is clear that finding a middle ground between the easy-to-use GoogleEarth and painstaking, wallet-crushing ArcGIS is not easy. Her project is designed to find that middle ground.

So what we have here is WorldMap, an open source GIS platform that began its creation in the late 1990s by a mapping whiz Ben Lewis at Harvard. It was at first AfricaMap designed to pull all different kind of data into one spatial display. It spread across the globe and now is available for anyone who wants to learn how to use it.

One of the maps on WorldMap is the Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the American City. It is a spatial analysis of Race and Realty in the city of St. Louis throughout history, especially the racial restrictions on land use in the 1940s and 50s.

Layers in Mapping Decline: St Louis and the American City

Although the maps were composed in ArGIS software, they can easily be displayed on WorldMap.

It seems like it could be another potential open source mapping software, but I will test it out and report back. Check out the full interview with Suzanne, and be sure to peruse the Sustainable Cities Collective site.

BC Archives: Old Maps Galore

It is always exciting to re-discover historical maps. BC Archives has provided a number of maps in (very inconvenient) tile format as images from all over Vancouver Island and across BC. Here is another image of a lost feature of Victoria – the James Bay marsh, which was filled in 1901 by damming the inner harbour at the current location of Government Street. At the time, the street was James Bay Bridge and the bay was a repository for the city’s garbage and soon became the site of the Empress Hotel.

Admirality Chart of James Bay, Victoria from 1860

It is difficult to imagine a fairly undeveloped (but intensely inhabited) landscape in Victoria now, but this image shows a glimpse of the little bays and points that create the complicated coastline.

Bays and Points of Victoria by 1849

The map images can be found here: http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/sn-269A414/cartogr/general/maps.htm

more rad than the TMNT

IT HAS ARRIVED. I ordered this Atlas of Radical Cartography from Amazon a collection of 10 maps and 10 accompanying essays about social issues. Their website describes it as addressing “issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. The map is inherently political– and the contributions to this book wear their politics on their sleeves.” Awesome.

Maps. GLORIOUS RADICAL MAPS

Tapping in to an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography, and activism. As they mention these were published to provoke new understandings of networks and representations of power and its effects on people and places.

One of the maps was put out by Trevor Paglen called “Mapping Ghosts” and is centered on Washington, DC showing a selection of CIA Aircraft Routes – selected for their association with the Rendition practice (extralegal kidnapping of a terror-suspect). This practice is described as an active process of erasure – creating invisibilities in order to repress. For the essay component, Trevor is interviewed by the Visual Collective about his work. This cartographic image provides a visual representation of CIA Rendition flights – and the movement (disappearance) of people living in their own countries and moved to DC. Crazy amazing.

Selected CIA Aircraft Routes, 2001-2006.

A really interesting pick up so far, and looking forward to all the maps and cant wait to read about them. See previews of all the maps and essays here.

The little tram that couldn’t

After obsessively scrolling over archived pages of resources on Quentin Mackie’s Northwest Coast Archaeology Blog a few years ago, I saved this drool-worthy source of historical maps and paintings at viHistory are available free for download, including the map (below) of the planned street car routes around town. It is also neat to see Ring Road not even register between Finnerty and Cedar Hill Cross Roads by stop #10 before Victoria was a college/old money town with more brunch places and dog parks than street lights.

Map of Victoria Street Car Routes that never were. 1936.

There is a larger version image with amazing detail of the stops and routes that this San Francisco-esque tram system would look like (below). It would be a completely different city having mass transportation like this moving people all over the place. Not sure what it would be like taking the tram beside the Sealing Fleet Headquarters though….

Tram-way detail from down near Store Street. 1902.

I dont think it is unreasonable to think this is a possibility in Victoria’s future, but with the only Rapid Transit Plans in the works being one that attempts to support the suburban sprawl of the Westshore, and another that supports the local-business-killer entity that is Uptown Mall, I don’t know what kind of priorities Victoria has for building a more sustainable city. It seems unlikely that BC Transit is considering the environmental implications of encouraging residential development in the less populated places like Langford, Sooke, or Metchosin. As it becomes easier to make the extensive commute from the ever-expanding affordable housing on the outskirts of town, demand goes up and development follows. It’s a funny cyclical relationship, but those of us choosing to live a block from convenience are paying an arm and a leg for it – yet we do not an in-town rapid transit system coming to the city any time soon. Maybe we should be building up, not across – and making it accessible, no?

Vic Hoods

Demographic Map of Victoria: Found this many moons ago. Fairly ridiculous, but I love seeing how people visualize their own cities.

the beginning

Does the first post of a blog set the stage for the rest? I have no idea, so lets start with me. I am below, and this blog will revolve around my favourite subject: maps. Everything maps – any subject, any style, any purpose. Interesting maps or map-like items found in the cartographic corners of the internet.