Day 7 of the #30DayMapChallenge 2026.
10 minute map — You have no more than 10 minutes to complete this map.
The theme asks for one map in 10 minutes. With MapAI, one map in 10 minutes isn’t much of a challenge; my other maps this month took between 3 and 27 minutes, and those were the hard ones.
So I changed the rules: how many maps can I make in 10 minutes?
The answer was 23.
The setup
Before the timer started, I wrote a list of short prompts: one map per prompt, nothing complex. Each one picks a dataset, a place and a style, for example:
Map all railway, metro and light rail stations in Greater Sydney as small coloured dots on a dark basemap, coloured by mode.
Map median weekly rent by SA2 in Greater Sydney (2021 Census). Tell me the 5 most expensive.
Then I started the clock and pasted them into MapAI one after another.
The prompts deliberately spread across everything the platform has:
- Boundaries and classifications: travel zones, remoteness, SA2s and LGAs.
- Census: age, rent, income and birthplace across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
- Property and development: parcel land values, development applications, auctions, and housing need.
- Planning and hazards: bushfire-prone land, Queensland priority development areas, and enterprise and industrial areas.
- Projections and rents: NSW population growth to 2041 and Queensland rents.
- Overture: hospitals, lighthouses, ferry wharves and building footprints.
- Terrain: elevation points in the Blue Mountains.
That’s four states, a dozen datasets, and every scale from a few streets in Hobart to the whole of Australia.
What 10 minutes bought
Every map came with a short summary, and a few of them are worth pulling out:
- 241 stations in Greater Sydney: 188 railway, 11 metro and 42 light rail.
- 320,900 dwellings of projected unmet housing demand across NSW by 2041, led by Canterbury-Bankstown at 23,600.
- Camden is projected to grow 97.53% between 2021 and 2041, the most of any NSW LGA, while Bourke is projected to shrink by 9.27%.
- England is still the most common overseas birthplace in 138 of Greater Sydney’s SA2s, ahead of China in 98 and India in 45.
- 35.70% of Greater Melbourne was born overseas at the 2021 Census.
- 869 development applications were lodged in the City of Sydney in six months.
- Waverley’s median land value is $10,333 per square metre, across 40,071 parcels.
All 23 maps are in the slideshow at the end of this post.
About 20x faster
This is the part I find most interesting.
None of these 23 maps is hard. Any GIS analyst could make every one of them. But each one, done the usual way, means finding the data, downloading it, matching it to the right boundaries, joining, classifying, styling and exporting. Even at a quick 10 minutes a map, 23 of them is close to four hours of work.
MapAI did it in 10 minutes. That’s roughly 20 times faster.
And this is exactly the kind of mapping that fills most GIS weeks: the quick “can you just map this for me” requests, the context map for a report, the first look at a new dataset. It’s necessary work, but it’s not where a GIS professional adds the most value.
The real work is everything around it: asking the right question, picking the right data, knowing when a result is wrong, and turning a map into a decision. That’s what Days 2 to 6 of this challenge were about, and those maps took far longer, because the thinking took longer.
Save the time on routine maps, and spend it on the real GIS work.
What didn’t go perfectly
Speed isn’t everything, and 10 minutes of maps comes with caveats:
- One map didn’t work. I asked for Sydney auction listings from the last 3 months, and MapAI told me it couldn’t: the auction data ends on 9 November 2024. That’s the right answer. A wrong-but-confident map would have been worse.
- Some styling requests were ignored. Several prompts asked for a dark basemap or satellite imagery, and all the maps came back on a light basemap. The hospitals were red dots, not red crosses. The Blue Mountains “hillshade” is really a heatmap of 349 points.
- The data has quirks. The Census reports a median age of 0 for Centennial Park and a median household income of $0 for four Brisbane SA2s, including Greenbank Military Camp. These are areas with almost no residents, and MapAI reported them as they are.
- Fast maps still need checking. “Hospitals” from Overture returned 673 records, spread from Newcastle to Wollongong. That looks like more than just Greater Sydney’s hospitals, and probably includes clinics and medical centres. Fine for a quick look, but not for a report.
That last point is the real lesson. The time you save on making maps is time you can spend checking them.
The 23 maps
Swipe or scroll sideways to see them all.
Day 7 done. Tomorrow: utopia.
#30DayMapChallenge #mapai #madewithmapai