Speaking of cities with medieval layouts, living in a pre-smartphone-Japan was a navigation nightmare. In a city like Tokyo, the lack of right angles, the language barrier, and an insane system of building numbering—they are numbered in the order in which they are built, not in a geographically linear sequence—meant that your average citizen had the cartographic skills of Magellan. People were constantly sketching little maps to offer directions, and any business relying on foot traffic offered pamphlets, business cards or flyers that always had minimaps as a prominent part of their design. I assumed every graphic designer there had a subset of their portfolio dedicated to demonstrating map-making competency.
New-York-based artist Nobutaka Aozaki, who originally hails from the Japanese city of Kagoshima, is presumably well aware of citizen cartography. And having earned his New Yorker stripes with nearly a decade of residency, he started his “From Here to There” project intending to create a hand-drawn map of Manhattan… without ever laying down a line himself. Instead, he came up with a clever way of generating the content:
[I pretended] to be a tourist by wearing a souvenir cap and carrying a shopping bag of Century 21, a major tourist shopping place, [and asked] various New York pedestrians to draw a map to direct me to another location. I connect and place these small maps based on actual geography in order to make them function as parts of a larger map.
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