Personal Art Map with R | R-bloggers

Map art makes beautiful posters. You can find them all over the internet and buy them even framed for your favorite city, area or country. The beauty of those posters relies in the intricate and beautiful pattern of roads, buildings, parks, rivers, etc., which in turn shape our cities and our mobility. In my research I constantly use those maps as the hardware fabric in which humans interact, move or encounter in urban settings. We found, however, that each of us have a distinct mobility pattern around cities so even people living in the same neighborhood experience the city in a totally different way. So for my map art I wanted to create something more personal: a combination of those beautiful street maps with personal mobility. That is, the city and how we navigate it. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create those street maps for your city and for your mobility. We will use data from Open Street Maps (OSM) and, of course, R. We will also use personal mobility data which you can input manually, but we will learn too how to get it from Foursquare or Google Maps Timeline (if you have location activated). Part of the material here is based on the tutorial by Christian Burkhart. Creating the streetmap The first thing will be to get a beautiful map of the streets and boundaries of a given city. In this case, Boston, because is the place were I live. To download the streets we use the osmdata package to query OSM. First we define our bounding box, i.e. the area where we are going to query OSM: library(osmdata) bbx