There are many maps of New York City. There are the decorative maps, sold on Amazon, and the tourist maps, which focus, erroneously, only on Manhattan. There’s the iconic subway map, as well as the new MTA version. There are the Eater and Grubhub maps, which tell us where to eat.
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And then there’s the map that really matters: the city’s official legal map, which literally governs the streets, complete with boundaries and widths. It’s also the map that doesn’t currently exist, at least in a unique, user-friendly form.
But that is changing. On November 4, New Yorkers appeared poised to pass Proposition 5, a measure that will push the city to create a unified community. official map depicting its five districts for the first time. The effort should help officials finally catch up with unification efforts, which began more than a century ago, in 1898, when areas of what are now Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan and the Bronx were combined to form one municipal government.
While the city has streamlined most operations, New York’s maps were never synthesized into a single document, dispersing authority over these official maps throughout the city and resulting in thousands of paper survey documents. Today, the diffuse nature of these official maps slows housing construction, adding another obstacle to solving the city’s extreme housing crisis, advocates argue.
Approval of the proposal means that these paper maps will eventually be summarized into a single visualization and eventually digitized. The goal is to speed up any city process that typically requires checking against an official city map or updating a city map to mark a change in street geography.
Creating a unified map of the city should also help officials more accurately represent the city’s coastal zone, particularly as climate change alters the coastline. Furthermore, it should help eradicate the problem of “paper streets”, streets that are still recorded on official maps but no longer exist in real life.
fast company spoke with Casey Berkovitz, a staff member on the Charter Revision Commission, charged with considering New York City’s official charter and introducing ballot initiatives, including the now-approved map proposal. Earlier this year, the group discovered that changes to the current map were, in their words, “overdue.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you explain why people voted?
Today in New York City we have a very archaic system where the official city map is distributed across five separate municipal offices. On paper, we believe there are about 8,000 paper maps in the five boroughs. This is really an artifact of an earlier era: not just digitalization but also district consolidation. The five boroughs became a single city in 1898, but the borough presidents maintained jurisdiction over things like street maintenance until the mid-20th century.
The city was simply never updated to consolidate its official city map into a unified map. Certainly, as digitalization and the Internet have become more widespread in recent decades, the city has also not taken steps to modernize. This measure would do both.
Growing up here, I was familiar with all kinds of maps of New York City. There are lot number maps, there are Con Edison maps, and there are school zone maps. Will all those types of functions that the city provides and that are spatially mapped end up on this map? Will it show everything related to municipal activity?
When we talk about the official city map, we are referring to a fairly specific function, which is the map of things like street boundaries, street widths, property boundaries, and in some cases, coastal boundaries, which have to do with construction and infrastructure.
There are other maps like the ones you mentioned. There are future school district maps and city council district maps and community district maps that are obviously important and frequently interact with the city’s official map, but which are their own distinct maps and would not be affected by this proposal.
Can you talk a little about the digital aspect? What will that be like? When people hear “digital map,” they may think of Google Maps.
In fact, we already have the vast majority of what a digital city map would look like online, but it has no binding authority because it is not the official city map set out in the city charter. (Editor’s Note: This unofficial map is available here.)
In terms of what it would mean for New Yorkers today, if they want to build housing infrastructure, or any number of things, a lot of those features require confirmation on the city map or updating the city map. These are things like property lines or the width of a street or the grade of a street that have an impact on what can be built.
Those functions can take months or years because they require going to each individual district’s map office, finding the right paper map, confirming what it looks like, and changing it. That is a long process. There are often long lines at municipal offices to do that sort of thing. This adds, once again, months or years to the construction process of important infrastructure and housing.
Not all of those functions would be instantaneous with the digital map, but they would be significantly faster than the current process of finding the individual paper fragment of a map and updating or confirming the information it contains.
How long will it take to switch to a unified map system?
Taking so many paper maps. . . unifying them, confirming the information, will also take time from five municipal offices to a central office. Granting it official city map status will essentially require a zoning action. That’s another benchmark in the timeline that will move forward over the next few years.
What are some of the design considerations or, I don’t want to say aesthetic, but things that you’re thinking about in terms of what this map should look like? There are so many different types of maps and so many different ways of representing things.
The important thing here is that street and property boundaries are clear, that street widths are clear, and that changes over time are visible. In today’s preview map, we have overlays of where there have been changes to the city map over time so that interested New Yorkers can see where streets have been reassigned or removed over time.
Can you talk a little bit about what you think will be the biggest challenge going forward?
Is a lot of paper maps to unify them and give them meaning. They are amazing historical documents and we will certainly want to take good care of them and preserve them, even if they are no longer the official binding government document. It will be relatively important to balance the care of physical maps with the efficiency of unifying and digitizing them. It will take a dedicated effort from city staff.
What should I have asked you that I didn’t about the upcoming digital map of New York?
This is quite complicated, but may be interesting for people interested in maps: New York City actually has a series of what are called paper streets, which are streets that exist on the city map today but are not real streets in real life.
Several of the construction or zoning actions that would be expedited with the unified, digitized map relate to (whether) you want to get rid of a paper street to do construction there or if you want to change the street in another way.
The other thing that’s perhaps a little more applicable is how map modernization intersects with the climate crisis.
New York City has 520 miles of coastline, along the bay and then along the rivers. Especially as the climate has changed, coastal borders have also changed. . . . This proposal could make a big difference. . . whether in development or resilience efforts, where paper maps when they were created do not really reflect where the actual coastal border is today.
This post originally appeared on fastcompany.com
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