Bird’s eye Vancouver: mapping time, culture and biosphere

Cities are now the dominant form of human habitation. How they are managed and developed will have global sustainability consequences. In the design and planning of cities, maps are a tool for cataloguing and organizing infrastructure, but they are less often used in a creative or strategic capacity. Two forces that have a significant impact on the development of cities—their ecological context, and their culture—tend to be invisible on maps. This study investigates ways of mapping these forces using the affordances of digital media, particularly 3D computer graphics, to support new ways of mapping the dynamic space that surrounds the infrastructure of cities. This new mapping is informed by artistic and cartographic traditions of visualizing space, and brings a representation of time to the map form.