Housing Terraces in Wales : a minor addressing conundrum

Two terraces of housing off the Holyhead Road (former A5) in Llanfair PG.
Penucheldre and (to the right Britannia) Terrrace. A typical type of housing throughout Wales, they provoke some addressing conundrums.

In May 2015 I attended the funeral of a relative in the Anglesey village of Llanfairpwllgywngyll (usually referred to as Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG, but perhaps better known for having an extremely silly long form of the name). This is the ancestral village of my maternal great-grandfather: the funeral marked the end of around 150 years of members of the family living in the same house that he grew up in.

I know the house well. As a small child I visited frequently. It was only a short excursion by bus from Bangor, where we lived. My mother knew it much better: in the early part of WWII she and her grandmother lived here with my great-grandfather's sister. Even when I was small the village was not very large. When my mother was a girl there was much open land between the old part of the village (Pentre Uchaf) and the newer part (Pentre Isaf) next to the railway and main road to Holyhead. By the late 1970s the village had grown immeasurably with lots of overspill suburban housing for Bangor.

The big change between 1939 and the end of the '70s was that streets started to be named and houses numbered along the street. Prior to that building development had been piecemeal: most usually a mix of individual houses and most typical of many parts of Wales: named terraces. By this I mean short terraces of houses where the terrace rather than the closest street provides the name used in the address. Elsewhere there are plenty of terraced houses where individual terraces have names (often shown on a carved stone set into the brickwork of the terrace), but the numbering of houses solely relates to the street.

Finding ones way around Buenos Aires in 1870: a proof-of-concept for routing with OpenHistoricalMap data

A critical point about using OpenStreetMap technologies in OpenHistoricalMap is that we should get lots of useful tools for free.

Plaza de Mayo 25, Buenos Aires in the 1860s
Source: Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA

We touched on this point during our end-of-year Google Hangout. In particular Karl Grossner. wanted to know more about how one might use the data for routing. Karl is part of the team behind the awesome ORBIS project at Stanford, which allows routing across Europe during the Roman Empire.

City Stripping : building historical road layouts from todays data

Street map of Buenos Aires 1895 (plano de Basch)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

For at least one year I have been thinking about the best way to create vector streetmaps for different historical periods for the same city. The basic principle is simple: take the existing street layout and remove what is new! Essentially, this presumes that any current vector data will be more precise than digitising vectors from old maps.

I have even given the process a name: "City Stripping", but in practice my attempts so far have been less successful than I hoped. I think that  I kept too much existing OpenStreetMap data in my first attempts, because in practice I found it easier to re-trace the old data (as here for Tartu/Dorpat).

Editing historical road layouts : Persistence in the Urban Landscape 3

It's a while since I've written a post on the theme of persistence in urban landscapes, and this despite covering some additional examples in my talk at SotM13 in Birmingham. This post takes one example I included in that talk: how road layouts persist.

However, I have also used it as a convenient hook to discuss how we might enable the capture of such data for something like OHM (Open Historical Map). I hope the latter discussion might provoke further ideas from those interested in developing OHM and both links with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata in the future.

Derby Road, Nottingham

Current OSM Map of Derby Road compared with
Sanderson's Map of 1835. Changes in alignment marked with arrows

I've touched on the history of Derby Road before. Here I'll show what I know of it's history in detail from around 1800. The key point is that the basic line of the road has changed very little: the major changes being well understood and mostly comprehensively documented by the Lenton Local History Society.

Persistence in the Urban Environment : 2 Portland Oregon Buildings and experimental clustering

Areas of the Mutlnomah County, Oregon grouped into 5 clusters based on patterns of building age.
Each building is plotted individually using the colour assigned to its own cluster.
(data from City of Portland Open Data Initiative, background OSM)

A few months ago I wrote about how different parts of cities have radically different development patterns. I illustrated this with examples from three cities which I am familiar with, but all my interpretation was subjective. I was therefore very interested in a blog post by MapBox about the Open Data building footprints for the metro area of Portland, Oregon. Apart from the fact that this is a comprehensive data set the most interesting thing is that most (around 87%) of the buildings have a data associated with them. It therefore seemed like a perfect data set to see if one could classify areas of a city in terms of the profile of building activity.

My basic idea was to do something along the following lines:

• Partition the buildings into contiguous equal sized groups
• Create some kind of time-series for each group reflecting building history
• Run a clustering algorithm against the latter data
• See if it produced interesting results

Persistence in the Urban Environment : 1

Anyone reading this blog should have realised that I am interested in using maps to understand how the environment we live in has changed over time. I know I share this interest with many other OSMers. There have been many proposals, and discussions about how we might use some of the principles and technologies of OSM to create maps representing an area at some historical time point. I am greatly heartened that a new mailing list (http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic) has appeared for interested parties to share ideas on this subject:

Wollaton Park Estate from the E, (June 1928)

One problem which has exercised my mind, and particularly from my exercise at looking at the OSM edit history of Berlin, was how adding a history (or time) dimension to geographical data might impact on data volume. In thinking about this I have been struck that a very large proportion of the urban environment of cities in Europe and North America is remarkably static. This was brought home by the recent availability of historical aerial photographs of Great Britain (at the Britain from Above website).

Wollaton Park Estate on OSM