Talking Headways Podcast: Color Your City Outside the Lines

This week I’m joined by cartographer Gretchen Peterson to talk about mapmaking and her new book, City Maps: A Coloring Book for Adults. We discuss why she made the book and why she chose the 40 city maps she included in it.

Listen in and hear from Gretchen about the art of cartography, including the importance of color, fonts, good data, and whether you have to be a designer to make maps. We also get into why maps are important in reports, maps we might regret, as well as tips for future cartographers. Enjoy.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Talking Headways Podcast: How Media Has Shaped the City

By Jeff Wood |
Author Shannon Mattern joins the podcast this week to discuss her new book, Code+Clay, Data+Dirt: 5,000 Years of Urban Media. We talk about why the perfect future interface humans are looking for does not exist, and how digital mapping can overlook important aspects of the urban spatial landscape.

NACTO Wrap-Up: Cities Are Doing It For Themselves

By Dani Simons |
The leaders of the nation’s big city transportation agencies have formed a tight-knit circle, brought together by the National Association of City Transportation Officials to share best practices, and yes, battle scars. As NACTO’s first ever national conference drew to a close Friday, transportation chiefs from Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and New York all […]

Talking Headways Podcast: The Freeway That Never Was  

By Jeff Wood |
This week we’re talking with Brendan Wittstruck about St. Louis’s never built freeway, I-755, which he recently wrote about at Streetsblog member NextSTL. Brendan discusses the history of the project and how drawing lines on maps can be seductive to planners, who always have to be careful about trying to “fix” cities. He also talks about the racial politics of freeway […]