We’re only a week away from the premier of “The Dark Knight Rises”, and the movie industry is assiduously pilling on the hype. That means we’re bombarded with adverts in all of the usual (and unusual) places and digital platforms, with urban billboard and cell phone screen alike emblazoned with images of Batman and Bane facing off. Film tie-ins don’t generally work–they usually offer little to no new content that better contextualizes or expands the film’s narrative, and maybe worse, they’re nearly always a pain to navigate or access, instantly nullifying whatever cachet they may have initially proffered. These new maps of Gotham City from Nokia, however, are cool enough to justify the campaign–that is, if you can get past the Facebook log-in barrier.

Do that and you’ll be given access to an expansive 3D map of Batman’s city of birth, where you’ll find landmarks such as Wayne Tower and City Hall rising out from the admittedly low-res skyline, made up mostly of generic high-rises whose light reflect in the metropolis’s black waterways. Granted, you could do all that and a whole lot more in last year’s Arkham City. As Gizmodo points out, probably the best thing about the site are the top-down cartographic maps of the city, which expose Gotham’s dense grid, infrastructural nodes and networks, and intricate interlocking geography.  For more on superhero urbanism, see the “architecture of the comic book city“.

Map of Gotham City

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged 3D maps, Arkham City, Batman, city, Gotham City, grid, maps, Nokia, urbanism

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