Supporting New Cities

[thompcd]

Is there currently any way somebody could use another city? How could somebody contribute to expand the cities supported?

[tomgp]

Hi @thompcd we are considering expanding this to other cities and have done a bit of preliminary design work to that end -- finding out how far the techniques we used for London are transferable to other cities. From our point of view London was easiest because we live here so we have a good understanding of what physical features help with orienting oneself on a city map and a kind of instinctive feel for what works in terms of the compromises between geography and the cartogram. Getting that level of insight for other cities is going to be a challenge so we welcome any contributions :)

Worth noting that as the code currently stands it doesn't really lend itself to supporting multiple layouts so any extension will probably entail a breaking change to the API.

Having said that we have a couple of branches where we've been testing out some of those preliminary designs I mentioned...

• New York: https://github.com/aftertheflood/londonsquared/tree/new-york-squared
• Stockholm: https://github.com/aftertheflood/londonsquared/tree/stockholm

The basics of the city definition are in the ls-layout.js file, (a list of grid coordinates and associated id/ name information)... https://github.com/aftertheflood/londonsquared/blob/master/src/ls-layout.js and the paths (written out in SVG path description syntax) for the irregular shapes are defined in the ls-path.js file in the same directory.

By editing those two files (or just the first one if you're happy with just square areas) you should be able to create a new city layout.

Hope that helps,
Tom