Agata CIOŁKOSZ-STYK

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Ciołkosz-Styk, A.: Influence of the city maps’ content on their legibility. Kartografické listy, 2009, 17, 5 figs., 10 refs.

Abstract: City maps are certainly among the group of commonly used and automatically widely published cartographic products. Last several years have brought an important changes to the wealth, variety, level of graphic form and detail of the city maps’ content. This has been noticed especially in the Central and Eastern European countries. This is a consequence of the political and economic transformation, resulting in the abolition of censorship and introduction of the free market. These changes may be considered as a cartographic breakthrough in the rep-resentation of cities. Due to those transformations city maps could have been shown in defined scales, with no distortions and with detailed presentation of built up areas and their functions. Transformations also brought significant changes to the city maps content. Earlier forbidden features could finally have been represented on the city maps. The paper shows influence of the censorship abolishment, competition in the publishing market and broad city maps users group on city maps content extension. Such extension causes that city maps are often illegible for a common user. The usefulness of such a overloaded city maps is being reviewed.

Keywords: city map, city map content, graphic form, feature density, cartographic symbols, map perception