Point and line to kiez: Berlin’s districts as compositions

I'll admit it, the name is borrowed. In 1926 the Bauhaus published Wassily Kandinsky's book Point and Line to Plane. In it he breaks pictures down into their basic elements: point, line, plane. At the Bauhaus he also paired basic shapes with basic colours: the yellow triangle, the red square, the blue circle.

That's the game I play here with Berlin data. Every district gets the same six shapes. A number from open data decides how big each shape gets. So every district turns into its own composition.

How to read the picture

Circle: green space, as an index from 0 to 100 based on the Umweltatlas categories. Bigger means more green nearby.
Square: share of homes built before 1949.
Triangle: noise as L_DEN, between 45 and 62 dB. Bigger means louder.
Bar: residents per km². It grows logarithmically, otherwise Mitte would flatten everything else.
Lines: share of residents with a transit stop within 400 m. One line from 80 percent, six at 100 percent.
Donut: clubs. It grows with the square root of the number of clubs, up to 50. No clubs, no donut.

I didn't keep Kandinsky's colours entirely. The circle is green because it shows green space. The donut is blue. Readability beats art history.

Where a shape sits means nothing. Each district has a fixed seed, so Pankow always looks the same. If a value is missing, its shape is missing too, and the legend says "no data". Pick a district above; you can also reach every shape with the keyboard.

Ready to print

Below the large picture you can download your district as a PDF. It's a vector file, so you can have it printed at any size. Everything is MIT licensed, and the sources are on the poster. Below the selection you will also find an overview poster with all 12 districts in a grid and one shared legend.