Hello fellow mappers, how are you all doing? I'd like to show you something really interesting I've found online, if thats ok with the admins. To start: So I'm myself from the ,Ruhr Area' in western germany, which is a huge urban area that used to be germanys central steel and coal producer,with about 8 million people and a population density of about 2000/km, almost 8000/km if you only count the central urban part.The area used to be dominated by heavy industry until the 1980s and has managed to move more towards other businesses. Theres a agency that takes care of special projects like museums and also, here it gets interesting, Aerial Footage taken all the way from the 1930s until today. Some time ago these were published on a website called ,, https://www.luftbilder.geoportal.ruhr/''. Why am I telling you? Because if offers the opportunity to view the development of an european urban agglomeration in the past 90 years with footage from 1926,1934, 1952,1963,1969,1990, 1998, 2006, 2009 and 2015. I believe this is unique in that we have aerial ,google maps' style footage of such an large and important area and that it might be helpful to be able to take it as help to see how cities have developed, with fields being transformed into endless suburbs or large industrial sites being used for modern warehouses or parks. You can zoom all the way in and even see how much space was given to cars during the 60s-90s and how cities started to re-arange urban spaces, large through roads becoming pedestrian zones etc. or zoom out and look how all these autobahnen that used to be under construction in the 1969 view are not only finished but covering the whole area, and where in the 1990 view one can obviously see the space where they wanted to continue but didnt.
If you want you can take a look, I'm sure others would find that interesting to look at aswell. Happy Mapping -kingfries (Oh and admins excuse me for this ,non-ogf-world' post)