Getting a Bird’s Eye View of the World’s Subway Systems

A photo shows a London Underground sign.
Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Getting a Bird’s Eye View of the World’s Subway Systems

  1. DAVID MONTGOMERY
 JUL 10, 2018
Online artists are tracing transit lines onto aerial photos, offering a new way to visualize an often hidden mode of transit.
Subway maps are often iconic representations of their cities, even if they don’t show you what’s really happening on the ground. So what would it look like if, high above the skyline, you could actually see where trains were shuttling people around?
A group of digital artists is revealing just that, using photos taken from airplane windows to highlight the real footprint of metro systems in cities around the world. Starting with the aerial photos, like the ones your friends might post to Instagram after takeoff, the artists trace out the paths of transit lines in bold, bright colors—highlighting oft-underground networks from a vantage point where trains can be easy to ignore. The results are striking images that help us envision cities differently.
The trend first caught the internet’s attention with a 2013 view of New York’s subway by a Serbian artist going by the username “Arnorrian.”
Last month, a French student calling himself “Dadapp94” had the idea of recreating Arnorrian’s image using a picture of Paris they’d taken while flying out of Charles de Gaulle Airport. “What struck me was its simplicity,” Dadapp94 said in an email. “From the sky, [New York] just seems like a bunch of constructions stacked together. Highlighting the subway lines shows the reality of the city, what major routes people take.”

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