Design
Untangling Paris's Chaotic Metro Map
The latest redesign comes from a Moscow-based artist, and recasts the subway’s lines into a circular pattern.
Paris has one of the busiest metros in the world, with roughly 300 stations scattered throughout nearly 40 square miles. The city’s metro was recently ranked the world’s second most complex subway system by theoretical physicists and mathematicians, after New York’s. It follows, then, that the metro system’s map is a bit chaotic.
When the Moscow-based graphic designer Constantine Konovalov visited the city, he found himself struggling to use the metro’s labyrinthine official map. “The main problem was that it is hard to find the station [you’re at], and it is very easy to lose sight of it,” he tells CityLab in an email. “There are no memorable graphic forms to make it easier to navigate.”