The typical world map that hangs on the walls of classrooms is essentially obsolete, says the author of a new book.

A growing body of economic literature suggests that efforts in America aimed at things like “maintaining neighborhood character” contribute to segregation and lead to stagnation.

Made with data available from the U.S. Geological Service and the EPA.

Watch the city evolve from 150 A.D. to 2010.

Here today...​

Light pollution in urban centers creates a sky glow that can blot out the stars. The brighter the area in this zoomable map, the harder it is to see stars and constellations in the night sky. In the United States, national parks are often a refuge for darkness; national parks are shown in purple in the map below. Check out the globe version of the atlas, too (not compatible with Chrome).

A bold challenge, to be sure, but in this week's Maphead, Ken Jennings seeks out the mountaintops with the longest lines of sight.

The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization.

The Mercator projection, the world map we all know, is missing parts of the world because it is cropped at both ends. If you uncrop the bottom, here is the part you don't normally see.

Mapbox's Eric Fischer has been working on the "Geotaggers' World Atlas" for five years, using locations of photos uploaded on Flickr over a decade. In his city maps, which now span the world, he connects the dots between subsequent photos taken by a photographer—representing their path in sketchy lines that criss-cross across the city.

Could the end be near for one of the West’s biggest dams?

The U.S. National Park Service publishes tons of great free maps; I’ve collected them all for you here. On this site you can download 1,053 free PDF and high-resolution image files of U.S. national park maps.

A city in São Paulo State that Americans fled to after the Civil War still celebrates Dixie culture, unencumbered by the debate raging in the U.S. over whether Confederate symbols promote racism.

We’re now moving toward a new era where insular, political boundaries are no longer as relevant. More and more people are identifying as “global citizens,” and that’s because we’re all more connected than we’ve ever been before. As a result, a “systems change” is taking place in the world today in which cities—not nations—are the key global players, argues Parag Khanna in his new book, Connectography: Mapping the Future of the Global Civilization.

When I first encountered this doyenne of urban activism, she offered one of the sharpest critiques I’d ever heard. Jane Jacobs was relentless, and stood up to anyone in her quest to understand what really makes a city.

For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself — by geography and by education as well as by income. This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system.

Within the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is a geographer’s treasure trove: over a million artifacts from the American Geographical Society, one of the most incredible collections of maps, atlases and globes to be found anywhere in America.

An ongoing project from MIT uses an algorithm to predict the safety of streets, helping researchers and urban planners better understand cities.

Greenland has the world's highest suicide rate. And teen boys are at the highest risk.

Ordnance Survey celebrates 80 years of the trig pillars that helped map Great Britain.