The Monday Map: An Abstract Map of Beijing’s Hutongs

Anyone who’s been to Beijing will understand how impressive this artistic undertaking is. Game designer Eric Zimmerman and architect Nathalie Pozzi teamed up and created this abstract and incredibly intricate stencil map of Beijing’s hutongs. The project is titled BlinkingCity.

For those of you who have not been to Beijing, the city’s map is complicated by a grid of more than 4,000 small alleys known as hutongs. One wrong turn and you very well could be lost among them for hours, I know because it happened to me. Beijing’s hutongs are diminishing with the city’s rapid growth and development, which makes BlinkingCity an even more interesting project.

Zimmerman and Pozzi created their stencil based on several pre-existing maps of Beijing’s hutongs, but the ever-changing nature of the alleys means that the map was virtually obsolete before it was even finished.

BlinkingCity is located on the wall of a courtyard house in the city’s Xianyukou district.