From raw data
to a finished map

Maps have been with me far longer than I realised at the time. I drew my first one as a kid, around fourth or fifth grade, spent school summers on archaeological digs, and later worked as a junior research fellow in our regional museum, drawing maps and graphics as much as anything else.

I went on to study architecture and urban design at the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, where geodesy and surveying gave that early instinct a foundation — six years that ended with a diploma project mapping and planning the future of a whole city agglomeration at 1:25,000.

For a long time it was all there without a name. The turning point came through research: since 2005 I've been studying ruined and lost parks, reading the terrain to recover the logic their designers built into them. That work is exactly what put GIS tools in my hands — and the search for missing data led me to OpenStreetMap, where I've been an active contributor ever since.

I'm Fedir Gontsa (Федір Гонца · FEH-dir GON-tsa), a cartographic designer and GIS specialist in Cherkasy. Mapping has been my main profession for close to a decade, and across seven seasons of the #30DayMapChallenge every map I've made has been about Ukraine — its landscapes, its heritage, the work of turning open data into maps people genuinely want to look at. For nearly twenty-five years I've also taught design and spatial thinking to art students, work that ranges from reconstructing lost monuments to building new forms with AR and animation.

Architecture itself has shifted from a profession into a field I study and help reconstruct. Around all of it I draw, model and photograph — it's the same instinct throughout: making sense of space, and giving it a form other people can read.