Habitus is a place-intelligence engine — one intake, many lenses, one map layer. This is the 90-day, built-in-public road to showing it at BUILD with Mapbox. Every product here is the same engine seen a different way, and every one is rendered, routed, and searched with Mapbox.
pk. token into the fallback in this file to preview it locally — the itinerary below is live either way.The first collection on the engine is Americana Century — a hundred years of Route 66 and its neon, for the 2026 Centennial. Three products, one tileset underneath. The differences are a lens and a style, not a codebase.
The living Route 66 trip planner — diners, motor courts, roadside giants, and neon, routed into a real itinerary instead of a paper list.
Every neon sign across the century — still lit, relit, relocated, or lost — mapped through time. The archive becomes a status layer you can scrub.
The Route 66 neon night-drive, time-boxed to the Centennial — where the archive's subject meets the planner's structure on one corridor.
The talk walks one repeatable pipeline on the Mapbox stack. The fuller engine — the temporal graph, Observe at scale — is marked as what comes next, not promised here.
Messy, multi-source roadside data standardized and resolved to a canonical place id.
★ Search Box · Uploads API →Fix attributes, add the signs no basemap has, QA in the map, publish a tileset.
★ Data Workbench →One tileset, styled three ways — day, neon-night, archive — instead of three codebases.
★ Studio · GL JS →A natural-language search over the data, and an AI-assisted build — both on the Mapbox MCP servers.
★ MCP Server · DevKitA frozen demo, a planner that only pretended to route, a naming fog. Every dead end maps to a fix now in the architecture — and the rethink is what made the real thing possible.