sitedia draws twelve panels for a New York site. They are ordered so that each one explains the next: the ground, then movement, then fabric, then what the fabric adds up to. This is what each panel contains, where the data comes from, and — the part that matters when you put it in a report — where it is thin.
USDA NAIP imagery, public domain, clipped to your frame. Its job is not decoration: it is the control. Put it beside the drawn panels and check that they agree with the world. If a building is drawn where the photo shows a parking lot, you have found a vintage mismatch before your reviewer did.
Every footprint in the radius, solid, no categories. Source is Overture Maps. This is the figure-ground, and read alone it tells you the density and grain of the fabric faster than any statistic. Look at the white, not the black — the shape of the void is the shape of the public realm.
Footprints colored by land use, from NYC MapPLUTO joined to each footprint by tax lot. Residential, retail, office, commercial, lodging, cultural, education/welfare, industrial, other.
Known gap: the join is lot-based, and a lot with several buildings matches one of them. Footprints with no matching lot — including everything on the New Jersey side of the frame — stay Unknown. In practice about 70–90% of footprints get a use inside NYC, less near the edges.
Same footprints, colored by decade of construction (MapPLUTO year built). This is the most underused panel in the set. Age reads development history directly: a block of 1920s fabric next to a 1960s superblock next to 2010s towers is three different planning regimes, visible at a glance.
Known gap: year built is present for roughly two-thirds of footprints citywide. The rest are drawn in light gray as Unknown — do not read them as “old”.
Buildings at or above a height threshold you set, highlighted against the rest. Height comes from Overture and is present for about 98% of footprints.
Set the threshold deliberately. In Midtown, 150 ft is noise; in a low-rise Brooklyn neighborhood, 75 ft is the story. The default is a starting point, not an answer.
The inverse read — everything at or below a threshold. Worth drawing as its own panel because low-rise fabric is where change pressure shows up. A field of two-story buildings inside a half-mile transit shed is a development story whether you like it or not.
Parks, other green, and water, from Overture. Water gets its own treatment because in New York it structures everything — the waterfront edge is the single strongest organizing element in most Manhattan and Brooklyn sites.
Note: this shows mapped open space, which is not the same as accessible open space. A green polygon may be a private courtyard, a cemetery, or a highway median. Check it against the aerial.
Street centerlines weighted by hierarchy — arterials heavier, local streets lighter. Source is Overture.
Read it for the armature. Where does through-traffic go, where does the grid break, which edge of your site is a front and which is a back? The weighting is what makes that legible; an unweighted street map is just a net.
Rail and bus stops from OpenStreetMap, as points. Combined with the radius, this is your transit accessibility read — and it is why the ½ mile frame exists.
Note: stop locations are well mapped in New York, but OSM does not carry service frequency. Two stops are not equal if one is a 4/5/6 express station and the other a local bus with 30-minute headways. The panel shows access, not service.
Block polygons — the shapes enclosed by the street network. This is grain made explicit, and it is the panel that most often carries an argument on its own. Fine blocks mean more corners, more frontage, more route choice; superblocks mean the opposite.
Comparing block sizes across a seam in the fabric is usually a stronger statement than any density number.
A heat field derived from the buildings, by total floor area or by building count — your choice. It is an interpretation, not a measurement, which is why it comes after the fabric panels rather than before.
Read it for pattern and gradient, not for absolute values. “Density falls off sharply west of the avenue” is a defensible reading; “this block is at 8.2 FAR” is not something this panel can tell you.
Contours and elevation bands from USGS 3DEP bare-earth data, with water flattened to its own surface so the harbor does not sprout hills. Contour intervals are chosen in feet — 10, 20, 50 — so the lines land on round elevations the way a survey drawing does.
Note: New York is mostly flat, and on a flat site this panel says “flat”, which is real information. Where it earns its place is upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, where relief genuinely shapes the street pattern.
The Korean edition has three more panels — zoning districts, cadastral lots and district plans. Those are missing in the US version deliberately. Zoning is jurisdiction-specific, legally consequential, and getting a boundary subtly wrong is worse than not drawing it. When there is a source that can be relied on per-city, it will be added per-city.
The panels are built to be composed. The Sheet tab lays your selection onto one board — A4 through A1 or 16:9 — with titles, legend, scale bar and border, at print resolution. The Layer stack tab lays them out in axonometric, stacked, which is a good report cover and a good way to show that the analysis is systematic rather than assembled.
And every panel carries its source note in the exported file. Leave it in.
Next: Finishing the SVG in Illustrator →
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