I am writing a character who is mapping an abandoned city, but I am having a hard time researching how cities are mapped. My idea was that the character travels through the city to map it, but I am not sure if that’s how that works. If someone could supply some resources that would be great!

Sources and how it's made:

- Colour: NASA Blue Marble imagery, blurred and stylized per zoom level so it reads like a game map rather than a photo

- Elevation: ETOPO global relief, with mountains merged into rounded massifs and flat valley floors

- Coastlines: OpenStreetMap land polygons (© OpenStreetMap contributors)

- Lakes: detected from the Blue Marble colour, each given a flat water level from its shoreline, since the coastline data counts lakes as land

- Trees: one tree type per climate band (palms, acacia, cypress and stone pine, jungle, broadleaf, conifer)

- Towns: buildings in each region's own style, from a culture map of the world

- Landmarks: 582,000 GeoNames landmarks, ranked by Wikipedia page views

- Traffic: shipping lanes between real ports (GeoNames) and airliner routes as great circles between major cities

It's the world browser for our RTS, Doctrine Strike: you pick any 100–1,000 km frame and it becomes a playable map. Happy to answer anything about the data or the rendering.

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Is there a website or library archive where I can see most of modern-time world maps?

I need help designing maps for this?