A Short History Continued....page 4

An overview of  a few major projects 

The Company initially accepted assignments for research, design and production from federal and provincial governments and from universities.  In the second phase of development, the Company researched, designed, produced and published its own maps, sometime with sponsorship by clients.  The following paragraphs will describe samples from the first category, which will then be followed by scientific map samples from the second category. 

1970-71  The first major project by the Company’s Principal undertaken in 1970-71 at the School of Community and Regional Planning, UBC, for the Department of Fisheries and Forestry, Ottawa, was what became known as  the Isodemographic Map of Canada.  This project was a cartographic research assignment to document the advanced nature of urbanization in Canada, and to create a more appropriate map of Canada, and the major Canadian cities, on which the social and economic characteristics, directly relating to people, could be better analyzed and presented to the reader.

To create the map, it was necessary to transform census geographical units into their demographic equivalents.  Since such transformations were not adequately covered by the theory of map projections, the transformation was achieved mechanically by means of a physical analogue model consisting of 1/8” diameter steel ball bearings in which each ball represented 140 people.  The method also provided an opportunity to analyze individual steps in the transformation enabling  the formulation of some general principles to guide further work of this kind.

On traditional maps, which represent the earth surface, and so the territory that people occupy, the population is represented by discreet, non-continuous distribution in that physical geographic space.  In the Isodemographic Map of Canada, the mapping units, consisting of census divisions and census tracts, have been assigned areas in proportion to their population and agglomerated in a way so that they represented the people of Canada as a uniform, continuous distribution - an equal population density map.  In the transformation of the physical geographic space into the map demographic space, the outline of Canada became distorted with little resemblance to its physical geographic shape.  One of the reporters at the news conference in Ottawa, at which the project was made public, wrote that “Canada looks like a T-bone steak”.

Further details about this project can be accessed from Isodemographic Map of Canada and A Mechanical Method of Constructing Equal Population Density Maps referenced in www.canmap.com/publications.htm.

1973  The isodemographic  map project was followed by federal government assignments that produced the Generalized Land Use in the Georgia Basin, the Foreshore and Waterfront Land Use in the Canadian part of the inland sea, and the Water Use, Strait of Georgia – Puget Sound Basin.  The last map was the first in a series of maps referred to as a one page atlas.

The Water Use one page atlas, a large wall map, was designed to present many themes related to the principal topic in a layout in which this principal topic was presented on a dominant main map while the surrounding periphery maps and insets elaborated on related topics.

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