Walking Maps

You are hooked. You want to get a sense of the range of layouts and feature diversity that defined Russian towns. But you would rather look at a handful of plans, rather than hundreds. And you want to study them in English. And you want to move around these strange places at your own speed. Without being told where to look next.

We have you covered. These are not necessarily the largest or most significant towns - not in a political or economic sense anyway. But they are plans that tell important stories. They present a range of possibilities in terms of the shapes and sizes and layouts and levels of spatial complexity. Together, they are a decent sketch of the contents of the collection. Here they are:

Mountain Town (Kem, Arkhangelsk Province)

Tidy Town (Maloiaroslavets, Kaluga Province)

The Octogon (Serpeisk, Kaluga Province)

Charm Town (Chernigov, Chernigov Province)

Grand Promenade (Yekaterinoslav, Yekaterinoslav Province)

Fluid City (Mariupol, Yekaterinoslav Province)

Vineyard Haven (Kizliar, Caucasus)

Go at your own pace. And remember:

Sequence doesn't matter, though we have arranged them north-to-south.
Each page contains notes to help orient you to the plan. We try to point out interesting features of the built and unbuilt environments, but don't let us spoil the view: you should feel empowered to make your own observations!
Each page contains an annotated plan. When you are ready to "walk" (in other words, to pan and zoom and click), we recommend clicking the "expand" button in the upper right of the display.
Each page comes equipped with a link to access the full plan page, complete with citation information, timestamp, orientation, etc.

For the annotations, we use a consistent color scheme across the collection:

dark blue for "planned" features
orange for "existing" features
green for... eh hem... the green spaces (gardens and parks, etc.)
light blue for water features (rivers, lakes, and seas)
light orange for features marked on the plan but not named in the legend