“Dominant Forms: Areas” is a figure-ground representation of all the buildings in New York City. On hover, the figure-ground is filtered to show only buildings that have a similar footprint area. This categorization asks: which neighborhoods have same-sized buildings and which have a variety of footprints? Where are the largest footprints and where are the smallest? How are these distributions different from one borough to another?
These patterns are typically obscured by the visual density of aerial photography or multi-layered drawings. By isolating a category, such as footprints, differences within the category can be found. Compare to “Points & Polygons (004)“, where difference is identified between categories.
The map purposely restricts zooming to prevent an all-encompassing view of the city and to individuate building footprints. Thus, when the buildings are isolated by size, the particular shapes are more apparent than if zoomed out, and adjacencies are more apparent than if zoomed in.
Building areas were separated into eight buckets:
- under 500 sq ft
- between 500 and 2,000 sq ft
- between 2,000 and 5,000 sq ft
- between 5,000 and 10,000 sq ft
- between 10,000 and 25,000 sq ft
- between 25,000 and 50,000 sq ft
- between 50,000 and 100,000 sq ft
- over 100,000 sq ft
These buckets were determined by trial-and-error, however, cluster analysis will be used to develop more nuanced categorizations.
Next Steps:
- Use cluster analysis, such as k-means, to better identify building size groupings
- Upload all footprints to Mapbox studio to improve performance
- Add debounce feature on hover
Compare to: