Urban Studies

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection focuses on 18th and 19th century North and South American cartographic materials and includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of separate maps including pocket, wall, and manuscript maps.

Envisioning Seneca Village is a project depicting what this significant nineteenth-century village might have looked like in the summer of 1855, about two years before it was destroyed by the City of New York to build Central Park. It features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model (A Tour through Seneca Village), and supplementary materials. The project is anchored in extensive scholarship and aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience. The project is also a work in progress with updates, additions, and new features planned soon.

The Lehman Social Sciences Library Map Collection at Columbia University has various types of maps, including topographic, aeronautical, thematic, nautical, and geological maps.

This is one of the world's premier map collections in terms of size, scope, unique holdings, diversity and intensity of use. Established in 1898, holdings include more than 433,000 sheet maps and 20,000 books and atlases published between the 15th and 21st centuries. The collections range from the global to the local scale and support the learning and research needs of a wide variety of users.

Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on 1850, 1880, and 1910 census data, it shows how migration, residential, and occupational patterns shaped the city. The Digital Atlas breaks new ground by locating each person counted in the Census at their home address, sometimes before the street grid was even established. This is a living project that will expand to include all five boroughs up to the 1940 census.

Mapping Inequality introduces viewer to the records of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation on a scale that is unprecedented. Here you can browse more than 150 interactive maps and thousands of "area descriptions." These materials afford an extraordinary view of the contours of wealth and racial inequality in Depression-era American cities and insights into discriminatory policies and practices that so profoundly shaped cities that we feel their legacy to this day.

This tool digitally overlays historical maps from the NYPL's collections to match today's precise maps. You can browse already rectified maps.

Download country level data for any country in the world: administrative boundaries, roads, railroads, altitude, land cover, population density.

GADM is a spatial database of the location of the world's administrative areas (or adminstrative boundaries) for use in GIS and similar software. Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfectures, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the "spatial features"), and for each area it provides some attributes, such as the name and variant names.

This is from a guide by GIS/Metadata Librarian Eric Glass that highlights resources available from the Columbia University Libraries as well as from other sources. "The effort here is to identify resources that are already in an acceptable format for use in a GIS application."

This great guide from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries helps locate data for use with GIS for areas outside the U.S. You can browse data sets by country and region.

This is from a guide by GIS/Metadata Librarian Eric Glass that highlights resources available from the Columbia University Libraries as well as from other sources. "The effort here is to identify resources that are already in an acceptable format for use in a GIS application."

Boundary files, maps, component lists, and relationship files for geographic areas identified in IPUMS-USA samples.

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides population, housing, agricultural, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for geographic units in the United States from 1790 to the present.

As one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Geospatial Program, The National Map is a collaborative effort among the USGS and other Federal, State, and local partners to improve and deliver topographic information for the Nation. It has many uses ranging from recreation to scientific analysis to emergency response. The National Map is easily accessible for display on the Web, as products and services, and as downloadable data. The geographic information available from The National Map includes orthoimagery (aerial photographs), elevation, geographic names, hydrography, boundaries, transportation, structures, and land cover. Other types of geographic information can be added within the viewer or brought in with The National Map data into a Geographic Information System to create specific types of maps or map views.