The 'mind maps' of the world's cities challenging GPS

The series of city maps are based on personal experiences, not GPS

A man concerned that GPS is destroying society’s mental grasp of its surroundings has designed a series of city maps based on his personal experiences.

Archie Archambault, a designer and inventor, began drawing the circular maps after moving to Portland, Oregon, failing to find his bearings, and realising that Google Maps gave him no sense of perspective as to his whereabouts.

Portland, where it all began Credit: Archie's Press

Portland became his first subject after he drew a circle, divided it into four quarters, and began to explore the streets to get a feel for the different neighbourhoods.

“I was super absorbed in the GPS,” he told Slate. “But Google Maps has a scientific feel. I wanted to communicate the idea of a city on paper.

Paris, as imagined by Archie Archambault Credit: Archie's Press


The series of maps now includes Brooklyn, San Francisco and Boston, as well as Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin.

Amsterdam in circles Credit: Archie's Press

When mapping a city, Archambault tries to poll the broadest range of people, including his favourite insider source, estate agents. “They are the ones who end up naming emerging neighbourhoods,” he said.

He visits each city he maps “to experience it as a local does”, his website explains.

New York needed to be mapped in portrait Credit: Archie's Press

“For instance, in Amsterdam, he rode a bike and in Los Angeles he drove a car.”

He uses circles as it is “our universe’s softest shape” and the “clearest graphic to convey size and connection”.

Berlin, ringed by the autobahn Credit: Archie's Press

The designer says that though his work is artistic it is designed to be used as a navigational tool, and he is now looking for collaborators in different cities to create new maps, including for London. 

“Most maps take about 15 hours if you’re super familiar with the city,” he said.

The human heart is one of the more unorthodox maps Credit: Archie's Press

Though the majority of the cities completed are in the US, there are a number of European capitals, and several in Japan, including Kyoto and Tokyo.

Archambault has also created maps in a similar style of the Milky Way, the moon and the human heart.

The maps are printed on a 19th-century letterpress machine and sold to the public. See the maps in more detail here