
Lost city in Darfur - Noelkd
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/bdiscoe/diary/20539
======
state
I don't think of myself as a luddite in any way, but one can't help but get
the feeling that the image of the world brought to us by huge tech companies
has gigantic holes in it.

When you spend all of your time inside of that image of the world it's
difficult to see the gaps. I love this. It's as if he walked in to a void.

~~~
cpayne
Couldn't agree more. Its like a Doctor Who episode.

\- It shouldn't be there?

\- Try telling that to the local population...

~~~
vacri
The context is "unknown to online mapping projects", not "unknown to humans".
He's saying "This thing is missing from the catalog".

~~~
cpayne
Yes, but did you know it was missing?

My comment was to agree with the concept that its easy for me to blindly
believe in what the big tech companies publish. Mapping or otherwise.

I love Doctor Who episodes where on the surface everything looks normal, but
on closer inspection things are very different (eg Weeping Angels or The
Silence).

------
dmayle
I'm a Google employee, but don't work on maps. I also don't speak for the
company... and so on and so forth.

If you zoom in on Google Maps, you can see that the city is marked as Gereida,
so it's not the lost city he's claiming it is. Now, I'm happy to listen to
people who think it should surface at higher zoom levels, since there's
nothing around it, though I suppose that's a feature request for the maps
people.

Cheers, Doug

~~~
ricardobeat
There is a road going through it, but the city is unmarked. The conclusion in
the forum is that this city is Gereida, but a search for it doesn't return
anything in GM.

[https://www.google.com.br/maps/preview#!q=11%C2%B016%E2%80%B...](https://www.google.com.br/maps/preview#!q=11%C2%B016%E2%80%B236%E2%80%B3N+25%C2%B08%E2%80%B230%E2%80%B3E&data=!1m4!1m3!1d15882!2d25.1431574!3d11.2748763!2m1!1e3!4m14!2m13!1m12!3m8!1m3!1d2130!2d58.4394026!3d40.2508549!3m2!1i1147!2i679!4f35!4m2!3d11.2766667!4d25.1416667&fid=7)

~~~
maxerickson
[https://maps.google.com/maps?q=11.28+25.14&ll=11.275808,25.1...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=11.28+25.14&ll=11.275808,25.14101&spn=0.006092,0.008765&t=m&z=17)

(It is not visible at lower zooms)

~~~
epoxyhockey
It is named on the map view (non-satellite) for the 3 highest zoom levels. I
also doubted dmayle's allegation, but did find the label after a minute of
searching. I agree with the suggestion that the label should show up on lower
zoom levels.

------
ajtaylor
This made me look up my local area on OSM. The streets are there, but most of
the residential streets are not named. Time to do some editing tonight!

------
cgore
It is clearly visible in the satellite views on Google Maps, but the map view
only shows the main road going through it. I wonder how many other such places
could be found just by browsing the web? This seems to be what this guy is
doing. If you look at older posts of his, he is working on automatic road
following in satellite imagery.

~~~
felixthehat
My friend Dr Bayliss did just that - 'discovered' an African rainforest, Mt
Mabu on google earth, interesting read/chap
[http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2013/nov/08...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2013/nov/08/mount-
mabu-google-earth-maps-video)

~~~
cgore
That's pretty cool actually.

------
aresant
In the last thread comment he's created a Wiki article for the place including
a couple of interesting links:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gereida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gereida)

------
jbattle
I'm not sure unmapped (on google/OSM) cities are rare at all. My daughter was
born in a town in Ethiopia and it's not on any map that I've been able to find
while it is listed (without lat/lng sadly) in wikipedia.

~~~
corin_
If there was only one unmapped city it would be considered rare yet there
would still be thousands and thousands of people who could share your
anecdote. Adding yours to this thread (albeit without any information about
it) brings the number to 2 - for all I know there could be hundreds of them,
but there could also only be those 2.

~~~
7952
For much of the world no-one has ever done large scale mapping. The Soviet
Union and USA produced military mapping and gazetteers for targeting, but it
often lacks good on-the-ground knowledge. In rural areas it can be difficult
to even get a consistent place name from people who navigate from memory.

------
wilhil
I'm possibly going to sound dumb here, but, he said he was mapping the area
and found it... How was he doing this?

Looking at aerial data/pictures and couldn't find it in a matching map or
something else?

~~~
roel_v
Yeah, from the way it was written it seemed to me that he was actually there,
taking gps measurements. So I was thinking 'why doesn't he just ask somebody
there' until I was a few paragraphs in.

------
myf
the airstrip was built by my friend martijn
([https://github.com/MartijnR](https://github.com/MartijnR)) when he worked as
a construction expert with the Red Cross in Darfur. He had to "hire somebody
to chase away goats before plane landing".

------
bane
relevant: In case anybody is interested. The NGA keeps a list of placenames. I
don't know if this place is on here, but it's a good resource.

[http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm](http://earth-
info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm)

~~~
mxfh
the place has also been in geonames for a while.

[http://www.geonames.org/8504621/gereida.html#tab-c](http://www.geonames.org/8504621/gereida.html#tab-c)

[Addition]

A list of this type is traditionally called a _Gazetteer_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer)

 _The Gazetteer of Sudan: Names Approved by the United States Board on
Geographic Names_

as well as the file linked under the parent of this post lists this place as
_Qureida /Quraydah_ as a well, with _Sa‘dūn_ as the name of the nearest
populated place

[http://books.google.de/books?ei=PkzPUsKSE8LOtQbc5IGYCw&id=DK...](http://books.google.de/books?ei=PkzPUsKSE8LOtQbc5IGYCw&id=DKU7AQAAMAAJ&dq=gazetteer+sudan&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Qureida)

------
ctdonath
Look it up in Google Earth with the USHMM layers on. Lots of "destroyed
villages" are marked in the surrounding area. Interesting how this city
survived while so many others nearby didn't.

Also, the imagery shown is from 2006. Something more recent would be helpful.

~~~
maxerickson
Bing reports November 2012.

(The capture date is reported in an http header)

------
madaxe_again
Last year "Rostov na donu", a piffling little village with the Mil
(helicopter) factory and several million people living in it had only two
roads, according to google.

OSM had it, though.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Not a problem for locals who probably still use 2GIS or Yandex maps.

~~~
Grue3
Still? 2GIS is so much superior to Google Maps, it's not even funny.

~~~
guard-of-terra
That's why they still use it! :)

------
Nicholas_C
I'm surprised there are towns this large not on maps. It seems like it would
be trivial for a large company like Google or Microsoft to write software that
scans satellite imagery and cross checks it with current maps to see if
anything large is missing. In fact, I would be surprised if they don't already
do that. Although I could see this area of the world not being very high
priority.

~~~
205guy
After reading the helpful wikipedia article posted elsewhere in this thread,
it seems like the "city" is (or became) a refugee camp. So on old maps (the
paper kind digitized by UT--and probably known to Google) it was just a
wayside or a small market with a few houses. Geopolitical events led 10's of
thousands of people to amass and settle there in a short time. Few places
change that fast, but it's not unknown: mining booms and subsequent ghost
towns (in a ghost town, the satellite image makes it look larger than its
population really is).

This is further reminder that maps are not ever complete, nor intemporal. The
human world (roads, buildings) change quite rapidly in both growth and
decline.

------
dcsommer
Seems like you could apply some image classification techniques to
automatically identify uncharted cities given access to all the satellite
data.

~~~
midas007
Something like "here's a list of changes (sub cat: possible settlements)"

------
btbuildem
Weird. Expected a spider web, not a grid..

~~~
eCa
The satelite view is a bit less organized:

[http://maps.google.com/maps?q=11.28+25.14&um=1](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=11.28+25.14&um=1)

~~~
corny
For more perspective here's a photo of the village - which appears to be more
of a camp:

[http://explore.org/photos/1725/gereida-sudan-
village](http://explore.org/photos/1725/gereida-sudan-village)

In the satellite image I think it's safe to assume each white block is a tent
and each dark outline is a fence. There are many dark outlines with no tents
showing where the old population has moved out.

The wikipedia article explains the sudden changes in population of the
settlement. It would probably explain the grid layout too.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gereida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gereida)

~~~
dkersten
It looks like the north-west part is the actual town and to the east and south
is where it expanded as a camp. Of course, now there is more town than (what I
assume was the original) town.

------
brianbreslin
Is the guy writing this thread physically in Sudan mapping this place or is he
doing it from GIS imagery?

~~~
GigabyteCoin
From the little I know about the OSM project, you have to physically be in a
place to map it out.

Especially a place like this, where most of the aerial photos/maps of the area
are decades old.

~~~
maxerickson
It's clearly visible in Bing imagery:

[http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?lon=25.13989&lat=11.28205&zoom...](http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?lon=25.13989&lat=11.28205&zoom=16&num=2&mt0=mapnik&mt1=bing-
satellite)

------
Nicholas_C
GPS coordinates for anyone who wants to take a look: 11.2811075, 25.1414136

------
jfb
Here's a cool lat/lng pair: 40.2526, 58.4394. Check it out on a satellite
view.

~~~
205guy
Let me google that for you:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell)

------
ekm2
Why would Gereida, a city with a population of 120,000 be considered a lost
city just because it is not on an electronic map?The question 'Anyone care to
name it?' sounds really patronizing.As if the people currently residing there
could not possibly have a name for where they live.

~~~
ForHackernews
He didn't ask people to make up a name for it, he wrote, "anyone care to find
a name for the city?"

As in, can somebody do the research to find out what the city is called--by
the people who live there.

~~~
ekm2
Oh,sorry.I did not read that correctly

