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bmount / blockphrase

sparkline-like visual phrases for city blocks
http://blockphrase.cityrewrite.com/more
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Toner tiles may not be best for some really interesting places (e.g. Yaounde, Cameroon) #1

Open tbuckl opened 9 years ago

tbuckl commented 9 years ago

perhaps they haven't updated globally in the past few years?

take a look at this place!

http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/331136682#map=17/3.86899/11.52133

bmount commented 9 years ago

There's definitely a lot of scope for updates. The main toner dependency is actually the 'toner-background' tileset, which has unlabeled streets and unfancy rendering, making the pixel-mashing work. There may be more options there now, have you seen any good ones? I also think the CORS limitation is less of an issue lately, maybe a complete non-issue, so it should be possible to make it a pure client library and render from arbitrary sources. Very open to a PR here or just some additional background tiles to target.

For sure, one limiting assumption built in to the project is that street-bound blocks are the relevant unit of urban layout, but there are probably lots of urban typologies this leaves out, ie this apparently densely populated part of Yaounde:

image

I like the example you give, here's what I am seeing:

image

Again I am sure these big blocks have a lot of small pedestrian routes through them, anything that does a better job finding them or highlighting them would be a very nice to have.

tbuckl commented 9 years ago

thanks for making those blocks @bmount! i might submit a pull request this week.