Milan designer Emanuele Pizzolorusso has created a series of maps for Italian brand Palomar that are designed to survive being screwed up and stuffed into a pocket or bag. Update: this project is included in Dezeen Book of Ideas, which is on sale now for £12.

Called Crumpled City, the products are made of a soft waterproof material to avoid dammage when put away without folding carefully along the original creases.

The range includes London, New York, Paris, Rome and Berlin.

Here's a bit more information about the product:

Palomar presents Crumpled City soft city maps for urban jungles

For centuries, MAPS have been irreplaceable learning tools. They have to do with travelling, discovery, adventure. The Crumpled City Map reinterprets an object which, historically, has been synonymous with exacting precision and manual skills. Actually, maps must be opened, folded to find what we are interested in and then folded away, preferably along the original folds of the paper.

But, how often are such operations difficult and frustrating? Especially when we are lost and have to pull out of our pockets or our bag a map that often, through use and the difficulty of folding it, has turned into a mass of wet, swollen paper, which forces us to engage in impossible exercises in the art of “origami” to consult it and finally get our bearings!

These are the reflections around which the Crumpled City Maps have been designed: maps that are soft, extremely light but very strong, perfectly waterproof, designed to be quickly put away in their bag, without having to be folded but just scrunched up, rolled up into a ball. Crumpled City, indeed.

At the core of the design is this ‘playing’ with gestures: this allowing people to do something that is usually “forbidden”, that is to simply scrunch up a document. It is a liberating, fun act, especially if you do it with something that you are not going to throw away, but which is actually made to be kept and reused.

The Crumpled City range includes the most interesting cities in the world. Along with the usual ‘SightSeeings’, each map also provides a unique, unusual list of ‘SoulSights’, places of the soul, places selected to thrill you. Weighing only 20 grams, it is super resistant and 100% waterproof.

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Here! Sod T-Shirt Packaging by Prompt Design	The Regional Blanket by Vík Prjónsdóttir	Fabriano by Emanuele Pizzolorusso