Earlier this month, and with the great help of Chris Holdgraf and Filipe Fernandes, we pushed a new release of contextily, the Python library to pull web tiles from the internet that can be used as contextual maps.
Besides a few bug fixes, the main addition in this release is the Places API that Chris included. This is a super handy way to quickly pull down a tile for an area. Let's see a quick example!
Say you are working with a spatial dataset around the Berkley campus and you would like to add some context to your data points. All you need to do is:
import contextily as ctx bkl = ctx.Place("UC Berkeley")