City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet is an amazing collection of 100 annotated images by Karen C. Seto and Meredith Reba.
Is it a collection of artistic images, you ask, or is it a collection of maps? Art or cartography?
The answer is clearly “yes”: every satellite image in this beautiful book of 100 cities is both art and cartography. The perspective seen from a satellite and the colors chosen to represent each city combine to let us see the cities in a completely new way. If you’re interested in the technical details about the photography and the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum, be sure not to fall into the temptation of skipping Section 1, Views from Space, in your haste to get to the meat of the book in the other three sections: Earth’s Terrains, Urban Imprints, and Transforming the Planet. At least examine these five images of Berlin and the authors’ sentence about wavelengths (no physics required):
The authors comment:
Notice how various combinations emphasize particular aspects of the city. For example, some wavelength combinations highlight differences between barren land and covered land, between urban areas and forested ones, and even between different types of vegetation.
Finally, as I am sitting here in Boston on a cold winter’s day, I suppose that the fair use provision will allow me to quote the page about Boston and its seasonality:
Boston is shown in each of the four seasons using the same channels of light (near infrared, red, green). Here, we can see that seasonal changes are also captured in satellite imagery. We also notice that the reflectivity of the city itself changes when covered by snow in the winter image. These changes are important to remember when comparing the same region over time.
Before writing this review, I had planned to be satisfied with a library copy (ordered through the Commonwealth Catalog, a.k.a. CommCat). But it turns out to be surprisingly inexpensive, especially for a used copy in good shape, so I’ve decided to buy a copy for myself for only $7.74 (including tax and shipping) from Glen the Bookseller.
Learning Strategies 