Whenever I see a map, the first thing I think of is how i’d improve it. This idea on it’s own felt like such an obvious game, so naturally, I began by learning about the first cities.

The first high speed urban network predated paved roads, and it was used for thousands of year to move merchants and goods between major stops in the Golden Crescent across the Persian Gulf. This concept compelled me to deep dive into the very essence of city design, and I ended up summarizing everything I learned into a short video.

As part of production, I discovered a vast plethora of free online resources, like the endless number of high quality scans of artifacts on Sketchfab and OpenTopography.org, a tool for exploring sattelite imagery from agencies across the world.

While the idea was to turn this into a series which I could publish to every few months, the sheer amount of effort required to produce the first installment left me exhausted. That being said, I’d like to start part 2 eventually.