New York City-based art collective ArtCodeData has created a subway map that links 214 cities across five continents — a meandering maze of 791 metro lines and 11,924 stations all on one poster.
It's an intricate collage that imagines a world where all of the major cities intertwine.
"With the map, we're asking, 'What if all the cities were interconnected and united?'" the World Metro Map's designer Gerardo Cid tells Tech Insider. ArtCodeData is working with the nonprofit Open Accessibility to bring the vision to life.
To create the map, Cid copied the subways systems from the 214 cities and connected them line by line in Adobe Illustrator. To make it a uniform style, he changed the lines' width, colors, and typefaces. The entire poster is about 3 by 2 1/2 feet.
The map is more conceptual than realistic. There are plenty of fictional intersections: NYC's L-train to Williamsburg connects to another line directly to Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The World Metro Map was inspired by Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys' "New Babylon" series from 1956 to 1974. His illustrations imagined a nomadic future where people, without the normal responsibility of work, wander a borderless Earth.
Like Nieuwenhuys', Cid's map imagines a utopian world where all cities are connected and everyone can travel freely. But in the real world, the majority of the World Metro Map's subway stations aren't accessible to everyone.
"Our cities' infrastructures are not friendly to people with disabilities," Cid says. "The map is a way of showing what it could be like — this is how everyone could move around the world. But this isn't a reality for everyone." To that end, the World Metro Map is raising funds for Open Accessibility's database of city accessibility information. The nonprofit will tag locations that follow Americans with Disabilities Act regulations, like restaurants that have ramps for people in wheelchairs and subways with braille signs for the blind.
"It will be a database with reliable information, so that they can plan their routes without any surprises," he says.
Originally, the team thought that it would only have enough money to do this in NYC and Los Angeles, but Cid says it will be able to gather data in other cities because the World Metro Map's Kickstarter raised much more than expected. Open Accessibility expects to launch the first version of the database by this June.
