Cartography, or map making, has played a critical role in representing spatial concepts for thousands of years. While the earliest forms of maps displayed geographic information carved into clay tablets and etched onto cave walls, the maps we use today have significantly evolved to creatively show a range of different information. These visualizations draw conclusions about population sizes, historical events, cultural shifts, and weather patterns to help us understand more about our world and how we impact it.
Some of the first known maps date back to around 17,000 BCE and were images that showed constellations of stars, landscape features like mountains and rivers, and other physical markers that helped people to navigate from place to place. In 600 BCE, the Babylonian World Map was created and is believed to be the first representation of the earth, or what people could survey of it at the time. Other ancient civilizations, like the Greeks, began to use paper maps for navigation based on observations by explorers and mathematical calculations. Maps of this time were important because they depicted Greece as the center of the world, surrounded by vast oceans. Later maps began to show two continents, Asia and Europe, largely influenced by literature written by Greek philosophers.
While it was important for these civilizations to draw the world around them, they also focused on representing their cities through other forms of mapping, oftentimes using variations of maps to plan out entire future towns. The Nolli Map is one of the most important drawing techniques that is used to understand the flow of space within a city. The first ever Nolli Map was drawn by an Italian Architect, Giovanni Battista Nolli, after whom the map is named. In 1736, Pope Benedict XIV commissioned Nolli to create the most accurate plan of Rome that had ever been drawn. The goal was to understand how the space could be divided into different areas to plan for future expansion and public needs.
The first Nolli Map documents every building and every public space, including publicly accessible spaces located within buildings, to fully understand what was shared space and what was private. The map is drawn only using black and white to represent open space and building mass. This technique has been replicated many times since to quickly analyze the relationships between spaces, analyze planning patterns and understand how to create a better urban experience. Maps with more white space indicate that there are more streets, yards, porches, commercial spaces, lobbies, and other public areas that make neighborhoods more navigable human-scaled cities. Similar techniques have been used to document things like outbreaks of cholera and trace them to their sources on London sewage maps and track movements of militaries during battles.
Maps significantly evolved over the last two centuries, becoming increasingly accurate and elevated through technology. Today, most maps are created using GIS (Geographic Information Science) software, combining data points to understand a city’s current state and future needs. Satellite imaging, aerial photography, and sensors help us understand land and infrastructure, and data points on populations and use of space give us information to balance priorities of cities, from understanding how to optimize a new project being constructed to understanding what types of public infrastructure should be located in certain places. GIS data can help understand both extremely dense cities and more rural, informally planned areas. While this information is always changing, it allows planners to make projections about what cities might look like and how they can be improved.
The future of maps and the mapping process will include even more technological advancements. While maps have always been seen as a tool that represents a snapshot of a moment in time and a beautiful image to look at, maps of the future will give us real-time information and pull data from thousands of sources to give us information about our cities.
