Kigali 1994 City Map

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I found this beautifully simple 1994 map of Kigali at the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection of the University of Texas Library and decided to use it as an overlay in an interactive map with current satellite imagery. The map was originally provided by the US Defense Mapping Agency and was intended for military and humanitarian use only. Given the date of its production, one can assume that it was meant to facilitate orientation in Kigali in the event of a (military and/or humanitarian) intervention. It is now declassified and in the public domain.

Its beauty lies in its simplicity and clarity, focussing on a very limited amount of object types and thus leaving a lot of whitespace, with little distraction from roads, buildings and important landmarks. Today, when combined with current satellite imagery, it is an interesting document of the changes the city went through in the last 26 years.

As the original map includes a grid in both UTM and Gauß-Krüger coordinates, it was rather easy to georeference it with QGIS. I uploaded the georeferenced scan of the map to Mapbox and included the tile layer in a Leaflet map. I found LizardTech’s Leaflet opacity controls very helpful, as they allow the viewer to easily adjust the transparency for better comparison between the vintage city map and the basemap layer. You may find the webmap’s source code on Github.