Documenting Urban Sites: Topography, Cartography, GIS, and Site Analysis

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering site topography, grading principles, cartographic projections, critical cartography, GIS data structures, demographic mapping, and urban morphology documentation.

Topography

The configuration of a surface including its relief and the position of its natural and man-made features, as well as the art or practice of graphic delineation in detail on maps or charts to show relative positions and elevations.

Contour Line

An imaginary line connecting points of equal elevation on the land surface above or below a reference datum, formed conceptually by the intersection of a level horizontal plane with the ground surface.

Contour Interval

The vertical distance between successive contour lines on a topographic map.

Vertical Datum

A reference surface that defines a zero elevation to which the heights and elevations of various points on the earth are referenced (such as NAVD 88 or NGVD 29).

Mean Sea Level (MSL)

The average level of the surface of one or more of Earth's bodies of water from which heights, such as elevation, are measured.

Swale

A constructed or natural drainage channel with a vegetated surface, graphically characterized on topographic maps by contour lines that point in the uphill direction.

Cut and Fill

The earthwork process of reshaping ground: 'cut' is the excavation of existing soil where proposed contours extend across existing contours in the uphill direction; 'fill' is the addition of soil where proposed contours extend downhill across existing contours.

Balancing Cut and Fill

An earthwork strategy in which the volume of cut excavated on a site equals the volume of fill required, eliminating the need to import or export soil.

Slope Formula

The mathematical formula used to determine ground gradient: $G = \frac{H}{L}$, where $G$ is the slope gradient, $H$ is the vertical rise or fall in height, and $L$ is the horizontal distance; it is commonly expressed as a percentage or a horizontal-to-vertical ratio ($L : H$).

Terminal Moraine

A ridge of rubble deposited by an advancing glacier during the last ice age (such as the Laurentide ice sheet) that marks its furthest boundary and formed the bands of hills, parks, and cemeteries across New York City and Long Island.

Anthropocene Epoch

A proposed geologic epoch defined as the age in which human agency shapes land, soil, geological strata, the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans more powerfully than any other force.

Finished Grade

The final surface elevation of the ground after all site work, grading, and landscape development operations have been fully completed.

Subgrade

The prepared native or engineered soil stratum directly upon which overlying surface materials, topsoil, or pavement base layers are placed.

Finished Floor Elevation (FFE)

The established vertical elevation of the ground floor of an architectural structure.

Spot Elevation

A precise numerical elevation indicated at a single point on a grading plan to supplement contours, such as at high and low points, corners of buildings, tops and bottoms of walls or curbs, and utility rims or inverts.

Site Grading Linetype Standards

The standardized drafting conventions used on grading plans to differentiate site features: dashed lines represent existing contours, solid lines represent proposed contours, dash-dot lines represent the contract limit line (CLL), and long-dash two-short-dash lines represent the property line (PL).

Geomorphology

The scientific discipline that deals with the relief features of the Earth or other celestial bodies and seeks an interpretation based on their origins and historical development.

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)

An active remote sensing surveying technology that uses pulsed laser light to measure distances to Earth, implemented as airborne lidar systems (ALS) or terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) to produce dense 3D point cloud coordinate models.

Digital Elevation Model (DEM)

A raster-based digital representation of continuous bare-earth terrain surface elevations, frequently derived from LiDAR point cloud datasets.

Cartography

The science, art, and practice of making maps.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

A computerized spatial framework that creates, manages, analyzes, and maps all forms of geographic data by integrating spatial location (where things are) with descriptive attribute tables (what things are like there).

Mercator Projection

A conformal cylindrical map projection originally developed for maritime navigation that preserves line bearings and local angles, but severely exaggerates the size of landmasses as latitude increases away from the equator.

Dymaxion World Map

A planar map projection invented by R. Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s that projects the spherical globe onto an unfolded polyhedron (such as an icosahedron), presenting Earth's landmasses as an unbroken island in one continuous ocean with low distortion of relative size and shape.

América Invertida (Inverted America)

A famous 1943 ink drawing by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García that depicts South America oriented with the South Pole at the top of the sheet, subverting traditional cartographic conventions and the ideological dominance of the global North.

Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)

The geographical zone of transition where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels, covering approximately $10\%$ of the United States' land area and about $44\,\text{million}$ houses.

Agency of Mapping

A theoretical concept formulated by James Corner positing that mapping is not a passive or objective record of reality, but an operative, projective instrument whose selection and schematization actively produce new possibilities and spatial practices.

Dérive (Drift)

A Situationist urban mapping and navigation technique formulated by Guy Debord involving unplanned, intuitive passage through varied urban ambiences without destination, creating a subjective record of emotional and psychogeographical reactions.

Urban Morphology

The systematic study of the settlement patterns, physical structure, and historical transformation of urban forms, focusing on the configuration of streets, blocks, lots, and buildings over time.

The Great Plan of Rome (1748)

An influential ichnographic map created by architect and surveyor Giambattista Nolli consisting of 12 engraved copper plates ($176\,\text{cm} \times 208\,\text{cm}$) documenting approximately $8\,\text{square miles}$ of Rome, representing both streets and public building interiors in unified ground plan form.

Figure-Ground Map

A formal analytical mapping technique that renders buildings and built masses as solid black 'figures' against white open voids ('ground') such as streets, plazas, and courtyards, clarifying urban density and block structure.

Collage City

An urban design theory published in 1978 by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter that revives formal urban typology analysis inspired by Nolli's Rome, arguing for an assemblage or 'collage' of diverse historic urban fabrics and spatial forms in contrast to totalizing modernist master planning.

Layer Cake Model

An environmental site suitability method introduced by Ian McHarg in Design with Nature (1969) that overlays transparent thematic maps of environmental layers (geology, hydrology, soils, vegetation, wildlife) to locate development opportunities, serving as the direct precursor to modern GIS.

Vector Data

A GIS data model that encodes geographic features using discrete coordinate geometries: points (e.g., trees, spot locations), lines (e.g., streets, centerlines), and polygons (e.g., parcels, building footprints).

Raster Data

A GIS data structure composed of an array of evenly spaced square pixels or grid cells, where each cell contains a specific value representing continuous phenomena such as elevation, aerial photography, or slope.

Demographics

The statistical characteristics of human populations—including age, gender, ethnicity, income, household size, and employment status—used to understand user needs, markets, and social dynamics in urban design.

Decennial Census

The nationwide demographic count conducted by the United States government every $10$ years since $1790$, serving as the foundational demographic baseline for public representation and spatial resource allocation.

Rectifying Verticals

The image-editing procedure in architectural photography (using Photoshop's Transform Distort or Camera Raw Geometry/Upright controls) that corrects keystone distortion to ensure vertical lines of structures appear strictly parallel.

Million Dollar Blocks

A spatial data visualization initiative led by the Spatial Information Design Lab illustrating urban neighborhood blocks where state governments spend more than $1\,\text{million}$ dollars per year to incarcerate resident individuals, demonstrating the geographic concentration of criminal justice expenditures.

Making Room

A housing initiative that analyzes demographic shifts in household size and advocates for non-traditional housing types, including micro-units, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and legal shared housing for unrelated adults.

Chartjunk

A term coined by Edward Tufte to denote decorative, non-functional visual elements, excessive ink, and extraneous styling on graphs and charts that obscure or distort the underlying data.

Small Multiples

An information design method identified by Edward Tufte where a series of thumbnail charts or graphics share identical scale, variables, and framing to enable direct visual comparison across time or categories.

Serial Vision

An urban design analytical method formulated by Gordon Cullen in Townscape (1961) based on capturing the sequence of visual revelations, contrasts, and enclosure changes experienced by a pedestrian walking at a uniform pace along a designated path.

Imageability

The quality in a physical object or cityscape that gives it a high probability of evoking a strong, coherent, and vivid mental image in any given observer, as defined by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City (1960).

Five Elements of City Imageability

The spatial classification developed by Kevin Lynch consisting of Paths (channels of movement), Edges (linear barriers or seams), Districts (identifiable thematic two-dimensional areas), Nodes (strategic foci or junctions that can be entered), and Landmarks (external reference points that cannot be entered).

Fake Estates

A conceptual artwork series (1973–1978) by Gordon Matta-Clark in which he acquired anomalous, gutter-sized slivers of land left over from city surveyor metes-and-bounds subdivisions at New York City auctions to examine unusable space and real estate ownership.

Splitting

A 1974 structural art intervention by Gordon Matta-Clark where he cut a vertical slice through an abandoned wood-frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, lowering the foundation to let light penetrate through the building's bisected volume.

Joiners (Photocollage)

Multi-perspectival photo assemblages created by David Hockney in the 1980s by combining multiple individual prints taken from shifting angles and distances, capturing the perception of time, motion, and composite visual experience.

Every Building on the Sunset Strip

An accordion-fold artist's publication by Ed Ruscha (1966) produced by mounting a motorized camera onto the back of a pickup truck to photograph continuous elevations of every building along a 2.5-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.