the polemics of mcdonaldization.

McDonald's continues to infiltrate the globe with a phenomenal pace. Rather than discussing McDonald's in terms of how much weight one person can gain through the consumption of McDonald's products, this mapping project becomes an attempt at discussing McDonald's with regard to realizable forces which surround and guide a McDonald's operation,.

The major forces that become apparent within the realm of McDonalds are: purchasing power (as discussed by the Big Mac index), meat production, and refugee origin (with reference to Thomas Friedman's Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention). The following series of maps indicate a re-shaping of the modern world in terms of the aforementioned forces. The first image illustrates the McWorld as it is today, and the second image forms the McContinent and the McContinot, with the McDonald's countries merging on a time-based datum. The supercontinents formed through the apparent forces that guide McDonald's merge through the relevance of that force within a specific country. Therefore, the centroid of the supercontinent becomes the point where that specific force displays its dominance, or conversely, its passivity. As Thomas Friedman discusses in his theory, the presence of a McDonald's within a country indicates a certain level of stability, and a country's "active" participation in the global market economy.

The confluence of these specific forces with the idea of McDonaldization offers important insight into the future of the world which faces aggressive franchise development on a global scale (with McDonald's as the dominant image of "americanization" of the globe). In order to avoid economic hegemony, the study of McDonald's becomes extremely relevant. Since McDonald's does allow for some local inflection, as seen through the variance in menus dependent upon location, perhaps a hegemonic social or economical world does not become the primary factor for investigating McDonald's; instead, how does local culture fight for survival within a world in which landscapes are growing increasingly similar?

The next five images map existing data on the McContinent/McContinot morphed globe. While most of the mappings tend to reveal information that can be expected, such as higher concentrations of developed areas (satellite imagery), higher energy consumption rates or most of the world's lights in the "world at night" mapping within the McContinent, the cloud cover mapping reveals indirectly the effects of global warming, which becomes an interesting point of investigation perhaps for an architectural realization after this mapping stage.