Interesting article Via OpenCulture
When he first spent time in Japanese cities, urban design and history professor Barrie Shelton “was baffled, irritated, and even intimidated by what I saw. Yet at the same time I found myself energized, animated, and indeed inspired by them. The effect was liberating and my intuition was quick to suggest that further exploration of their chaotic vitality might be extremely rewarding.” That exploration involved visits to “alleys, shrine and temple precincts, highways, railway stations (and their ‘magnetic’ fields), roof-tops, observation decks, arcades, underground streets, bars, gardens,” and so on, and no less essentially included “almost compulsive poring over city maps (old and new).”
It all culminated in Shelton’s book Learning from the Japanese City, a study that can help any Westerner better understand the likes of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, or indeed Nagomuru City. You won’t find that last, however, on any map of Japan, nor will you find it in the country itself. It exists in the land of Naira, which itself exists in the mind of Japanese graphic designer and cartographer Imaizumi Takayuki. Imaizumi’s painstaking, ongoing work has produced maps of Nagomuru City that look at it in different ways in different eras, which you can browse on Let’s Go to the Imaginary Cities! On this page you can explore scrollable maps of the city by first selecting one of its thirty regions; just below that, you can also download a large PDF map of the entire metropolis.
Imaizumi’s urban cartographic vision is so richly realized that it has produced art exhibitions, a book, and even a variety of physical artifacts.
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