Animating San Francisco's Turbulent Decade

Ariel Schwartz looks at the successful collaboration that created the San Francisco Urban Revitalization Map, "a visualization of the city's explosive growth, and how it has affected different neighborhoods." Created using open data that captures the past 12 years of San Francisco's growth, the animated map shows the city's transformation in vivid colors.

"The map doesn't venture outside San Francisco," says Schwartz, "but there's no reason why other cities with open data policies can't do similar projects. For Esri, this is just the beginning--the company is considering doing a mapathon or maphacking event where data scientists and cartographers get together to see what they can do with open data. 'We want to show that web mapping is growing up,' explains [Esri's Jim] Young."