The kilometer zero is the point from which distances are measured. Usually situated in the hearts of nations’ capitals they quite often coincide with the most central and important squares or city landmarks: the famous Point Zero is located in Notre-Dame Square in Paris; Syntagma Square in Athens is where Greek roads start from; Capitol Hill in Rome, Nihon Bridge in Tokyo.

Using these points as reference and placing city maps in scale on the top of each other can reveal may information and provide some fun.

An example we found absolutely irresistible to imagine our home address in other cities. This is what we do: Using screenshots from Google Images and opening them in Photoshop we center the various cities using Kilometer Zero points. Then we point to our address and check where that exact point happens to be on other cities’ maps.

We thus discover a wealth of information about so many cities that would have probably went unnoticed without this quick see-and-compare tool: Pisa’s airport is so close to the city center that were it in Paris, it would be within the perimeter of the old city walls, (note to self, next time in Pisa, no need for taxi). More and more data and pattern can emerge as one continue to superimpose towns: is there a pattern in the location of industrial areas in capitals in continental Europe? Do the direction and orientation of rivers influenced city planning?

This kind of reflections are to be found on several websites where city maps are overlaid, but I am not aware of any online resource when kilometer zero reference points are used to center cities and thus allow comparison. A plug-in in Google Images would be way more immediate and easy to use than Photoshop manipulation; and it would be also more fun and informative: thanks to the extreme precision allowed by GPS technology we discovered that the New York address of the house of one of us in Paris is in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, conveniently in front of a nice Italian restaurant with excellent reviews.