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| Yea, that was me in v517. |
But as I perused Roseland for a second time, I read about Green Maps, which are environmentally themed maps that promote sustainable areas within a city (like recycling centers, green businesses, community gardens, etc.), and voila! I decided to blog about it, taking the chance that you guys know as little about it as I initially did.
The general purpose of Green Maps is to serve as an all-encompassing sustainable guide for both city dwellers and tourists. Not only does it encourage eco-tourism, but Green Maps also fosters economic development within the community by highlighting businesses and places that are sustainable. By having a unique set of Green Icons, the Green Map system makes each map easy to explore while getting rid of language barriers, as well as provides an easy visual of green development (while highlighting resource inequalities).
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| These are a few examples of the 170 icons Green Maps currently uses. |
As Roseland stated, Green Maps began in New York City in 1992, but since then has expanded at an incredible rate. Now, Green Map hubs exist in many different countries around the world, including China, most of Europe, Japan, and Latin America, and there are also regional hubs within the United States.
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| Each leaf represents a city that has a Green Map... And this program is less than 20 years old! |
I would be curious how many people actually use green maps and know it exists? The idea makes sense, but it would be even more interesting to take the idea one step farther into the GIS analysis realm to determine correlations between income, ordinances, policy, etc. to see where the hotspots are located and why they are located where they are.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was reading Roseland I actually thought that a green map could be a cool addition to the Bloomington Sustainable Business Program at some point in the future. A map really visualizes it for people and I think does a good job of getting people into more than one place. As in, oh I want to go to this store, and hey there is a green business on the same street, I will check it out. Plus, I am just a really big fan of maps.
ReplyDeleteGreen maps sound awesome!! It's amazing what can be done with maps these days. Speaking of cool map applications, there is this great map application that plots excel sheets into google maps. It's called Multiplottr and it's pretty sweet too (like the green maps).
ReplyDeleteps. love the depressed economy picture :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with Laura that using these green maps to look at other factors would be extremely interesting!
ReplyDeleteThese maps sound like a great resource. They would probably come in really handy if someone was traveling or in an unfamiliar place. Like Laura, I would be interested to see more demographics. Also, it would be interesting to see what parameters they use for their definition of "green."
ReplyDeleteGreen Map is interesting, but if I've learned anything from our group project it's to question the method by which various green labels get applied. There are plenty of programs that make it pretty easy for a business to get assigned any particular green label. I wonder what sort of rigor the criteria for listing on Green Map has.
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