A few years back, artist Nobutaka Aozaki started asking directions from strangers on the streets of Manhattan, then collecting those maps (hand-drawn from memory) to assemble into a huge and growing work of geographic wall art.

To aid his work, the artist pretends to be a tourist, donning souvenir apparel and carrying around a shopping bag from a popular tourist destination. He then asks New York pedestrians how to get from one location to the next, all in ways designed to fill in the gaps of his larger composition.

From Here to There, he explains, is a “map of Manhattan composed of hand-drawn maps by various pedestrians whom I asked for directions. I have collected and aggregated together small individual maps provided by strangers that constitute a contiguous map of the island of Manhattan.” Like a pre-digital version of now-popular subjective maps (like the one below, the result of this art project is a patchwork quilt made up of slips of paper ripped out of notebooks, even paper plates from street vendors — whatever is handy to draw on, scribbled upon with whatever is handy to write with, in whatever style and format is favored by the individual creators.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch evolve, and it may never be complete, but that isn’t really the point of the project. These days, few people rely on paper maps anymore, so it becomes a reflection of what people still know, or think they know, about the city around them. It also turns out to be a handy way to gauge the helpfulness of strangers on the streets of a big metropolis, showing how they respond when asked for a simple kindness from a stranger.

The map is not the territory, but the exception also proves the rule, as in the case of this book, which samples over 1,000 different maps to deconstruct their design approaches and inspire designers through their visuals. It’s not about the territories the original maps were made to represent, but all of the different design strategies embedded in the pages of past atlases.

Kerim Bayer combined over 5,000 small map images in Map Section. “Deconstructing them really did help me personally to double down on my interest in the graphics, in reducing them to their empirical elements and appreciating them mainly for their beauty,” he explains. “Although presented in a book the size of an atlas, it contains not maps of countries but maps of the graphic devices we use to translate and produce spatial information: lines, dots, colours, symbols, illustrations, shading, text, insets, hachures, legends, grids and contours.”

At first, Bayer considered selecting the thumbnails manually, but worried that would lead to biases in the results — instead, he tapped into his collection of scientific, transit and city planning maps programatically, letting randomness work for him. “For the purpose of highlighting the graphics of the maps and providing a resource, which is the mission of the project was anyway, randomisation worked just as well, if not better.”

“I’ve been looking for a way to better relate to my own maps for a long time,” says the book’s creator. “Maps always have been a learning tool, even if I don’t necessarily fully yet understand how. They’ve also been a resource and an aide for learning a great many other things.”

Amidst the modern architecture and undulating spaces of this station in Delft, one design detail stands out above the rest: a huge abstracted version of a map from the late 1800s that connects across a series of aluminum ceiling fins.

As travelers move through the space, their perspective shifts — overlaid on vertical slats, the map becomes abstract or concrete depending on the viewing angle, and periodically reveals details (like the name of the city) to new arrivals.

Developed by Macanoo over the last decade, this hub is more than just a station, containing a new city hall and municipal offices as well, but sited above the main transit tunnel is the grand open space connecting it all — an apt place for a massive map.

Within the station hall walls and columns are adorned with a contemporary reinterpretation of delft’s famed blue tiles. References to the region can be found in the facade and window designs, too.

The halls are separated with a glass wall and two further volumes that house the public counters, consultation rooms and technical services of the municipal offices, and the commercial functions of the station hall.

Historically, most maps use grid systems with latitude and longitude and distance measurements to guide users, but what if the emphasis was on time rather than space? Peter Liu of Mapbox has a new way of getting people from Point A to Point B based on the amount of time it would take someone to travel the distance.

Consider urban maps for tourists with circular overlays giving a sense of time-based distance through a single circular overlay — these often function in theory, but practically are oversimplified. Liu has developed a dynamic time map expanding on this idea, composed of concentric circles that serves as a reference for any (time-based) distance from any given point.

In essence, it is collapsing a step many of us already take — find places nearby, then plug the results into Google Maps, pick a mode of transit and see how long it will take. But it takes the idea to the next level: imagine rings radiating out from wherever you’re standing, giving you distances dynamically and using time, not space, as the metric for travel. Or an even more advanced variant: the rings rippling and bending like spacetime based on obstructions, traffic and other static as well as realtime factors.

A new geographical study of the United States reveals the functional boundaries of megapolises around the country, defining them by usage rather than arbitrary political borders. Unlike gerrymandered districts or state lines, these sprawling areas are rooted in deep data analytics versus historical accident.

Historical geographer Garrett Dash Nelson teamed up with urban analyst Alasdair Rae to publish a paper using commuting information and computational algorithms. Studying over 4,000,000 commutes, they traced interconnections between economically connected points and reported the results in An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions.

Taking it a step further, the authors also devised names for various megaregions extrapolated from the data – while semi-subjective, they start to give a sense of the real shape of metropolitan zones (and reveal areas where few residents and vast distances make it hard to define or confine regions).

Some cities at the heart of various sub-regions are not surprising — San Francisco and Los Angeles were givens — but others may be new to some people, like Fresno, California. Many cities trace influence across state borders, like Minneapolis into Wisconsin or New York City into effectively every adjacent state. Some overlap while others are isolated, especially in the west.

In the end, this is not a definitive way to look at geography within the Lower 48, but it does start to push the observer to rethink conventional regions of influence and defined borders. From the abstract: “The emergence in the United States of large-scale ‘megaregions’ centered on major metropolitan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography. We compare a method which uses a visual heuristic for understanding areal aggregation to a method which uses a computational partitioning algorithm, and we reflect upon the strengths and limitations of both. We discuss how choices about input parameters and scale of analysis can lead to different results, and stress the importance of comparing computational results with ‘common sense’ interpretations of geographic coherence.”