AllTop Viral!

Love this kind of stuff. From Wired:

When Justin Palmer stumbled across a dataset that included the year nearly every building in the Portland metro area was built, he was curious how old the buildings on his block are. Instead of just searching the data for his neighbors’ addresses, he made the beautiful map above.

He posted the map on his website, and it soon caught the eye of other mapmakers. Just a few days later, Thomas Rhiel published a similar map of Brooklyn, spurred by New York City’s release of a huge dataset known as PLUTO. Pretty soon, more maps began popping up. Soon there was a map of all of New York City, one of Reykjavik, Iceland, and one of Ljubljana, Slovenia, each with its own amazing colors, patterns and stories.

These maps make more than just pretty pictures. Palmer learned from his map that Portland’s oldest building identifiable by name was built in 1851. Only 942 structures are left from the 1890s while 75,434 built in the 1990s are still standing. Palmer graphed the steep and steady decline of new buildings since 2005.

See the maps, and learn more here: Wired.

More stories about geography.

Photo credit: Tryfonov – Fotolia.com