How does your city grow?

When was the last time you drove down a road or through a part of town that you hadn't visited for awhile?  All of a sudden you notice something new.  “When did that pop up?” you wonder.  Cities like Calgary are like that.  Things, buildings, stores, houses are forever popping up, seemingly overnight.

Popville by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud (307.76 BoP 2010 PIC BK), is a 3- dimensional exploration of how a landscape grows from a single building down a single road in the countryside.  Then come two roads and a few more buildings and a few less trees.  Each flip of the page shows increasing growth, more roads and buildings, growing outward into a rural area.  The last page is a fully developed urban landscape showing a network of roads and railroad tracks for cars and trains, various buildings (skyscrapers, industrial, residential, and a church), green spaces, and even a series of telephone poles with string ‘wires’.  The implication, of course, is that there are more people as well.

The really delightful part is the pop up aspect of the book.  The original building is in the centre of the book on the spine crease. The clever die cast design allows for everything else to grow up around it, ‘popping’ up through cut squares beside it, also along the spine of the book.  Mostly, we look down on to this changing landscape giving us a different, aerial perspective.  When we look closely, at eyelevel we see the fronts of the buildings but these are without much detail. The illustrations are fairly stylized with primary colours.

At the back of the book are questions that asks the reader to consider what is involved when a city grows, such as more people requiring more services and infrastructure.

An interesting book that will work well with elementary grades and up into the middle grades.

Today is Nonfiction Monday and hosted at Books Together.  Lots of great children's literature to discover today.