Lost city in Darfur

I don&#x27;t think of myself as a luddite in any way, but one can&#x27;t help but get the feeling that the image of the world brought to us by huge tech companies has gigantic holes in it.<p>When you spend all of your time inside of that image of the world it&#x27;s difficult to see the gaps. I love this. It&#x27;s as if he walked in to a void.

I&#x27;m a Google employee, but don&#x27;t work on maps. I also don&#x27;t speak for the company... and so on and so forth.<p>If you zoom in on Google Maps, you can see that the city is marked as Gereida, so it&#x27;s not the lost city he&#x27;s claiming it is. Now, I&#x27;m happy to listen to people who think it should surface at higher zoom levels, since there&#x27;s nothing around it, though I suppose that&#x27;s a feature request for the maps people.<p>Cheers, Doug

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!

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.

In the last thread comment he&#x27;s created a Wiki article for the place including a couple of interesting links:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gereida" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gereida</a>

I&#x27;m not sure unmapped (on google&#x2F;OSM) cities are rare at all. My daughter was born in a town in Ethiopia and it&#x27;s not on any map that I&#x27;ve been able to find while it is listed (without lat&#x2F;lng sadly) in wikipedia.

I&#x27;m possibly going to sound dumb here, but, he said he was mapping the area and found it... How was he doing this?<p>Looking at aerial data&#x2F;pictures and couldn&#x27;t find it in a matching map or something else?

the airstrip was built by my friend martijn (<a href="https://github.com/MartijnR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;MartijnR</a>) when he worked as a construction expert with the Red Cross in Darfur. He had to &quot;hire somebody to chase away goats before plane landing&quot;.

relevant: In case anybody is interested. The NGA keeps a list of placenames. I don&#x27;t know if this place is on here, but it&#x27;s a good resource.<p><a href="http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;earth-info.nga.mil&#x2F;gns&#x2F;html&#x2F;namefiles.htm</a>

Look it up in Google Earth with the USHMM layers on. Lots of &quot;destroyed villages&quot; are marked in the surrounding area. Interesting how this city survived while so many others nearby didn&#x27;t.<p>Also, the imagery shown is from 2006. Something more recent would be helpful.

Last year &quot;Rostov na donu&quot;, a piffling little village with the Mil (helicopter) factory and several million people living in it had only two roads, according to google.<p>OSM had it, though.

I&#x27;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&#x27;t already do that. Although I could see this area of the world not being very high priority.

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

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

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

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

Here&#x27;s a cool lat&#x2F;lng pair: 40.2526, 58.4394. Check it out on a satellite view.

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 &#x27;Anyone care to name it?&#x27; sounds really patronizing.As if the people currently residing there could not possibly have a name for where they live.