Jug Cerović, an architect from Paris and a map lover, has created a "comprehensive, readable and beautiful" map of Lisbon's public transport.
Understanding a city's public transportation offer is not always immediate, given the diversity of means, lines and routes that exist, and also the different visual languages that each city uses. Jug Cerović, an architect from Paris and a lover of maps, launched a book in 2017 that unified the metro networks of several cities in the World within the same color code and symbols; in the following years, he continued to update those maps and make them for other metropolises. In 2020, it was Lisbon's turn.
The Jug map of the Portuguese capital's public transportation can be downloaded in PDF format from INAThis personal project of urban maps, and results from a "work 100% manual"you tell us by e-mail. "Every line is hand-drawn, every street, every label. In this way, I better understand what I am actually doing and exploring, and I understand the network as I draw it. I get to know where the bottlenecks are, the more complex interfaces, the local idiosyncrasies, which parts of the network I have to map more carefully, which intersections should be handled more carefully..."
"I could have automated the whole project, but it would look like cheating. But now that I've finished the manual work, I can automate the process for future uses and updates, without losing merit and with the assurance that the map will still be beautiful because I would be in charge of the algorithms and not the other way around."says the architect. Jug Cerović has gathered information about the Lisbon Metro, the Carris buses and streetcars, the CP and Fertagus railway lines, and the TTSL boats. The metro and bus lines have their official colors, and in the case of road transport they are classified into three categories: high frequency, high frequency at peak hours, and low frequency. Jug mapped all the bus stops and bus station names, drew the streets, identified some monuments, and even placed some shadows to make the elevations of the terrain, which, according to Jug, "gives a strong flavor" to all graphic work.
The architect, originally from Belgrade and living between Paris and Madrid, explains that he made this map of Lisbon as part of "a personal research project". to "show that it is feasible to design a geographic network map that is both comprehensive, readable, and beautiful". Jug explains that the map is comprehensive because it includes "all modes of transportation, lines, street...". It is readable because "there is a balanced hierarchy of information, where the user is not bombarded with all the information at once, but rather sequentially as they dive deeper into the map. First comes the subway, then the streetcars, the buses, and lastly the urban framework.". And it's beautiful, since this was Jug's concern: for example, the north direction has been tilted slightly to allow the downtown to be vertical, while at the same time "the shape of the city is recognizable from afar".
The map was completed in November 2020 and can be downloaded for free from Jug's website, where he gathers other maps of other world cities. Lisbon is the first Portuguese city on which the architect has worked. "It is much more enjoyable to work a city that you like, that is inspiring and beautiful"he confesses.
