[photo: Graphic Fixations]

If you hadn't heard, Toronto has been converted into a police state—Torontonomo Bay—as it prepares for the G20 summit (which begins on Saturday). There have already been scores of reports of civil rights violations and ugly bigotry by the police and even ardent conservatives are questioning the unbelievable $1.1 billion expenditure for several days of security. The point of this post is not so much to comment on the fortification of downtown Toronto (geographer Deborah Cowen called that perfectly on a CBC radio appearance earlier this week) but to point at a few interesting graphics and endeavours related to the summit.

First up is the above detail of a giant graphic published in the National Post last week. Once you crop out the jet fighters and security staff icons this is a fairly capable delineation of the various security zones and notable landmarks. This large graphic could have probably been reduced to a small map and list of key bullet points – does anyone reading this map care that the Royal Alexandra Theatre is going to be closed? Come to think of it, catching Rock of Ages at $150 a ticket and then protesting global economic inequality seems kind of appealing to me.

A noble venture has been launched by the new Surveillance Club collective to map the location of CCTV cameras in the downtown core. Anyone can add geotagged photographs of security cameras to the related public flickr group and this collaborative reference map can be used to audit which cameras are removed after the summit. Many academics and civil rights activists have expressed concern that the surveillance and security technology assets purchased for the summit will have a permanent detrimental effect on the tone of policing here in Toronto. Hopefully this project will spark a public conversation about surveillance once the city reverts to normalcy.

If this mapping project is of interest to you be sure to check out the classic iSee application (2005) by the Institute for Applied Autonomy.

The last initiative to be passed along is not a map or diagram but an indymedia-style aggregator for monitoring the summit. The G20 Alternative Media Centre is running a simple news aggregator that collects Toronto Media Co-op blog posts, links, #g20report tweets, YouTube videos, flickr photographs and a geotagged map of news items. The page is essentially a DIY version of the functionality being developed by startups like Daylife and as a real-time resource for summit/city coverage, it puts everything the local news outlets are doing to shame.