San Francisco's Mission District in 22 Maps

Maps can help us find where we're going, but they can also help us understand where we are. Beyond providing simple directional information, maps can be filtered to let us know, for instance, that there's a good sandwich shop down the street, or that a fire once burned down an entire neighborhood.

A newly released set of maps takes this idea down to the neighborhood level – one specific neighborhood. In "Mission Possible," undergrad students in the Cartography and GIS Education Lab in UC Berkeley's Geography Department have created 22 maps exploring the Mission District in San Francisco. The maps offer a detailed look at geographical elements of the neighborhood, from the locations of cupcakes and gang territory to low-income housing, to the contaminated underground sites of former gas station storage tanks. The maps are now available as a printed atlas.