Ten cities, ten maps, ten framings
Not every city gives the same result as a poster. A strict grid, a meandering river, and a belt of canals call for different framing and do not take the same themes. Here are ten cities annotated one by one, with the framing and theme that suit each.
Paris
France
Paris has two structures layered on top of each other, and both read well as linework: the Seine, cutting the city east to west in a wide curve, and the Haussmann avenues radiating from circular squares.
Lyon
France
Lyon is one of the few large cities whose shape comes from two rivers rather than one.
Marseille
France
The coast decides everything: it occupies the left or bottom edge of the poster depending on orientation, and the city unfolds against it.
Bordeaux
France
The Garonne traces a curve in front of Bordeaux so regular that it gave the city its nickname, the port of the Moon.
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Few cities have a shape this immediately recognisable.
New York
United States
Manhattan is the exact inverse of Paris: a strict grid, no stars, no radial avenues, whose interest comes precisely from the three things that break it.
London
United Kingdom
The Thames does not cross London in a line: it makes several tight loops, including the Isle of Dogs, nearly closed on itself.
Lisboa
Portugal
Lisbon has a rare property: two urban logics sit within a few hundred metres of each other.
Barcelona
Spain
The Eixample is not an ordinary grid: every intersection is cut on the diagonal, which on the map produces a texture of repeated octagons rather than squares.
Tokyo
Japan
Tokyo is the city on this list that demands the most attention to framing, precisely because it has no dominant structure: no grid, no radial stars, a very fine and very dense network.
This list is deliberately short. The generator covers more than 50,000 cities: every one of them can be created in the editor, but only those with something particular to show get a page here.
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