TypeMap - Bikelane Toronto

​Bikelane Toronto is the first installment of TypeMap, a series of interactive maps built entirely out of words. Bikelane Toronto focuses on downtown Toronto's biking infrastructure. Every street in the city appears as its own name, color coded by its bike lane coverage. The texts are typeset to form the shape of the city.

​The project documents how cycling infrastructure has grown, stalled, and occasionally taken away across Toronto since 2001. Streets with no bike lane quietly appear in grey; ones with shared routes, painted lanes, or fully protected tracks each carry a different color. Visitors can trace the development through time—streets changing colors, or fade back to grey over the years. Two decades of urban planning and politics encapsulated in a landscape of changing colors and morphing texts.

​The project is inspired by Paula Scher, the American graphic designer whose typographic maps of cities like New York and London replaced every river, park, and borough boundary with densely packed words. Her maps revealed that geography could be made entirely of language, and that text arranged with enough intention becomes a place. We borrow that logic and fill it with civic data.

​In the gallery, the map is projected on a single wall in a dark room. At that scale, street names become the size of actual street signage, and legible from a distance. Visitors would be able to interact with the map through a trackpad on a pedestal.

​Presented as part of IA Gateway. More detail on the event page