New Littles - WNYC

The Brian Lehrer Show and Andrew Beveridge of Social Explorer asked designers to create maps of New York’s diverse communities - areas of ethnic concentration you may not know about or are changing quickly. Our map attempts to represent the ethnic diversity throughout the five boroughs through architectural icons. We mapped the locations of twenty four ethnic groups in the city from the database provided by WNYC. The drawing uses the extrusion of each ethnic boundary to form a collection of building prototypes and monuments associated with each group. We depicted each ethnic neighborhood with its respective vernacular or contemporary architecture found in the home country. The buildings are color-coded and labeled with flags that can be read and identified in the key at the top of the map. In the process of drawing the map, the densities of groups begin to inform clusters of small ethnic structures. Entwining conditions pop up in and around the city as the Great Wall runs through the Greek Islands and around a bit of German modernism. With the explosion of groups at disparate parts of the city, paths connect structure to structure to identify a common ethnicity within the complex network that is New York. Below is the last segment of the multi-part show with an interview with John Hartmann:

A 24x18in copy of the map can be purchased for $20 at ZAZZLE, a Print-On-Demand service.