My hypothesis is that travel time reveals global connectivity. That is, in a world based on time, cities that are the most economically, politically, and culturally related will be seen as spatially near one another.
The following maps show travel time from London, Tokyo, and New York. Cities are sampled from each continent proportional to the continent's land area. The cities are plotted in time space, represented by the concentric circles, where each circle represents one hour of flight time. A gray geographic map is underlaid for reference.
3D representation of the London time map.
Visualization of London time map with x, y, and z time coordinates.
The following series of collages shows residual from a population density map that has been cut away by the associated morphed map from above. This reveals the areas where the land has been stretched or pulled away in the redrawing based on time coordinates.
The map below shows all three time maps overlaid. I extracted the common areas between the three maps and integrated them into a political map collage.
The extracted areas + political map.
It seems that London, New York and Tokyo are increasingly becoming individually indistinct as economic, political, and cultural centers. The new world I envision from this information would visualize this centralization so that the most related cities of the globe politically, economically, and culturally become one global city and all other areas are located according to their connections to this global city. In our age where time is everything and technology is increasingly being built to solve the problem of time, technology would be the catalyst to bridge this gap between the world as it is and the Time World.
I would appreciate your questions, interpretations, thoughts, and critiques.
1 comments:
These maps are awesome, this post in particular. Having traveled to remote places, I've often wondered about how to represent that info graphically. And now you've done it.
One small critique: the Tokyo map should have the Americas to the right to avoid overlap.
Finally, you should mention that these maps suffer from what I will dub the "blue state" effect (named after the red/blue/purple maps of US states and counties after the 2004 presidential election). The effect is that a whole region is processed with data based on poplation centers, not land area.
For example, the location of Madagascar is based on flights to Antananarivo, I assume. Because it is not further distorted, I assume internal flight to other cities were not taken into account. And then, places not reachable by air were not taken into account, so each country (or area served by an international hub) should have its own travel time map.
I know that's a level of detail you don't have space for, but it is the mixed modes of transport (usually bus, then boat, then camel, then foot) that I find interesting.
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