Rectification continued!

To my great relief, I'm beginning to get the hang of the warp tool, so warping old maps onto worldmap is taking less time than it did last week.  It's also more exciting now that I can see the four historic maps of Nairobi together on the worldmap base.

In both of the two newly rectified maps, the streets and railways line up quite well, but the river does not match between the images.  It would be interesting to find out whether the river is simply marked incorrectly on the historic map or whether the path of the river really changed that substantially over the last 55 years.

Above, we can see the four rectified maps of Nairobi so far, beginning to get an idea for what the larger original historic map might look like!

To mix it up a bit, I also rectified one map of Taourirt, Morocco.  It was a somewhat confusing assignment, as I was supposed to rectify a map of Melilla, Morocco, but the map was titled, "Taourirt (Melilla)," and the historic map did not actually encompass Melilla at all!  Below, the historic map is overlayed onto the Worldmap base using the cities of Taourirt and El Aioun, along with the railway line that has run between them at least since the older map was produced, as control points.  The Moulaya river lines up nicely between the old and new map.

 This next image below highlights where Melilla is in comparison to the rectified map - close, but not the same!

While rectifying old maps of Nairobi and Melilla, it makes sense to think about them in comparison to each other and to Durban.  Durban (on the right) and Melilla (below) are strikingly alike from a distance.  Obviously both seaports, they even share similarly shaped harbours with narrow inlets around which the city centres were built.  Both cities feature areas that are structured on an organized grid but the discontinuity between those small areas suggest organic rather than entirely planned growth on a city-wide scale.  Melilla differs substantially from Durban in the fact that it is a constrained city, an area surrounded by a fence demarcating the Spanish territory from the rest of Morocco.      

 As we can see below, Melilla lacks the extensive beaches of which Durban can boast, so its city buildings lie more immediately on the coast.  

In contrast to both Durban and Melilla, Nairobi is a sprawling, landlocked city.  With rivers rather than a central port, the location of Nairobi's city centre appears more arbitrary than in the other two cities.  It is difficult to easily distinguish the borders of the city, as the downtown area blends into more surburban and slum neighbourhoods. In the image below, for example, one doesn't get a sense that the entire city is contained in the photo's dimensions, yet zooming out further makes it hard to see that one is looking at a city at all!  While Nairobi's outskirts are far more extensive than Durban's, they both feature a mix of middle-class suburban neighbourhoods and slum sections.

Below, we can see that, like Durban and Melilla, Nairobi's downtown area features sections of grids, rather than one constant structure.