A city's road network makes striking minimalist wall art
City Roads by anvaka renders every road in a city from OpenStreetMap and exports it as SVG or PNG, ready to print as wall art.
Draw every road in a city and nothing else (no labels, buildings or terrain), and the street network turns into a fingerprint of the place. Planned grids, old organic tangles, rivers and coastlines show up as gaps, and the result looks good printed and framed on a wall.
The tool
City Roads by Andrei Kashcha (anvaka) does this in the browser:
- Enter a city name.
- It pulls the city’s roads from OpenStreetMap and draws all of them.
- Export as SVG (vector, scales to any print size) or PNG.
SVG is the better choice for printing. It stays sharp at poster sizes and can be recoloured or cropped in a vector editor before sending it to a print shop.
Why I noted it
I remember Hiran having this kind of city-roads art at his home. He made it some other way, but this tool gets the same result in a few clicks. It’s a nice idea for a personal piece: the city you grew up in, live in, or met someone in.
Related Concepts
- [[Google Maps]]: the everyday map, crowded with labels and traffic; this is the opposite end, roads alone
- [[Cardinal-Direction Languages Anchor Cognition to Landscape]]: a different way of carrying a sense of place
- [[Pretty Good House]]: ideas for the home this would hang in