One of the many excellent organizations I get to work with is the
Sightline Institute, based here in Seattle. They are a think tank focused on urban sustainability, social justice, and environmental health.
They ask interesting questions, and every once in awhile, they will ask me to help them answer these questions with maps. In June, I was asked by Alan Durning to make a geographic comparison between three Northwest cities and three European cities: Seattle and Paris, Vancouver and Barcelona, and Portland and Vienna. His article, "
What Would Our Cities Look Like if We Took Our Climate Change Values Seriously?" is thought provoking and makes some good points about the disconnect between the way we in Seattle talk about fighting climate change and the land use and transportation policies we actually put in place.
Making these comparisons was fun, but finding the data for five different countries was not always straightforward. I obtained data from a
number of
government sites, but the excellent
Boundary.Now and
OSMexport tools ultimately proved to be the most useful.
The maps themselves were very simple to make once I had the data--each required three layers: the city boundary, waterbodies/rivers, and parks. Since we are comparing the size of these cities, I used the Europe Albers Equal Area Conic projection for the European cities, and the North America Albers Equal Area Conic projection for the US/Canadian cities. The city pairs are displayed at the same scales:
Portland, OR , and Vienna, Austria: 1:220,000
Seattle, WA, and Paris, France: 1:210,000
Vancouver, BC, - Barcelona: 1:125,000
I generated a set of simple maps for each city, shown with its companion below (click to embiggen):
Vancouver / Barcelona
Seattle / Paris
Portland / Vienna
I sent these files in Adobe Illustrator to the talented
Devin Porter, and he worked some graphic design magic to remove smaller parks, rotate Seattle from the original projection so north is oriented up, and produce side-by-side comparisons with labels and stats:
Finally, he extracted vectors from the AI files to create these cool animated GIFs, which are featured in Alan's article:
My favorite comparison is between Seattle/Paris, not only because I live in Seattle, but also because there is such a stark difference between the number of people in each place.
Which comparison made the biggest impression on you?
