Breaking down cities

NPR's Robert Krulwich had a really cool post up the other day, featuring the work of French artist Armelle Caron. Caron's project was to take overhead maps of cities (and their blocks), then to rearrange and categorize the chunks of land that were carved out by the roads and avenues in that city.

New York, then, starts like this:

And ends up like this:

Pretty boring, really, but that's not at all surprising to anyone who's been to New York and is familiar with its cookie-cutter grid system.

There are some more interesting ones over in Europe, in cities that have been around longer and therefore are a little less centrally-planned.

This here is Paris (also surprisingly boring):

And this is Berlin:

And this little jigsaw puzzle of insanity is Istanbul:

As Krulwich pointed out, I can't imagine what it's like to walk around that city. What would your hometown look like?

[NPR]

Growth of the U.S.A.

I've posted a time-lapse historical map of Europe here before, but I've never seen a similar map of the United States. With the Olympics ongoing, now seems like a reasonable time to take a look back at some of our nation's history.

Like with the map of Europe, I think it's both interesting to see the changes as they took place and also somewhat unsettling to see how long we've now gone without a significant change. Not that I'm predicting anything, but I do wonder whether we're overdue for a little shakeup of one sort or another. Time will tell.

If that gif moves a little too quickly for you to take it all in (it's definitely too fast to fully appreciate), you can check out a slowed-down YouTube version of it here.

Geography and the economy

It's probably not exactly Earth-shattering to suggest that geography goes a long way toward determining economic prosperity--in fact, the "geography is destiny" theory is a leading candidate to explain why the United States enjoyed such an extended era of economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries (well, there's also those who point to the contributions of slave labor, but that's a conversation for a different day).

Nevertheless, it's interesting to see the concept displayed so clearly on a map, as was done by a trio of economists who pioneered the concept of "GDP Density"--simply put, a measure of the intensity of economic activity in a given spot (h/t Econbrowser).

Landlocked and tropical nations seem to be at a very clear disadvantage as far as economic production is concerned (the same also goes for particularly cold regions--sorry Canada), with any number of suggested explanations (ease of transportation and prevalence of disease are the leading candidates). As is pointed out over at Econbrowser, this map bears striking similarities to satellite pictures of the Earth at night (clearly, there's some correlation between lights and economic activity--I know, it's shocking).

I think these sorts of maps are interesting, and that they cast doubt on the importance that we all like to place on systems and institutions. Is America great because of its democracy, its capitalism, its banking infrastructure (ha!), its education systems, or its innate work ethic? Or was America just lucky, its success due to a fluky accident of geographic history?

It's certainly a question worth wondering when you consider just how much of our economic prosperity (and, of course, or foreign policy) today is determined by the one product that we just don't have enough of here at home--oil. Geography may not completely determine our destiny, but it certainly plays a starring role.

[Econbrowser]

Clip of the Week

Well, the original video I had picked out for Clip of the Week, "10 Centuries in 5 Minutes", got pulled down before I could post it. Typical. To be honest, I'm surprised it took this long for it to happen to one of my clips.

So, to get the general idea of what was an awesome video, I'm posting two separate clips, which together show the incredible border changes that have occurred in Europe over the past two millennia.





A couple of things are striking to me about the videos, which despite not being quite as professional as "10 Centuries in 5 Minutes" are nevertheless mesmerizing. First of all, we tend to take stability (whether economic, political, geographic, or otherwise) for granted in the United States. Our borders here at home have remained essentially unchanged for generations, and the last 20 years (post-USSR) have been relatively stable in Europe and the rest of the world as well (the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia marking exceptions). But things can and always do change; stability can be wrenched from us nearly without warning, with incredible implications.

But besides that, while watching the original video, I couldn't keep my eyes off of Germany (or the area that became Germany). For centuries, the northern portion of the former Holy Roman Empire essentially consisted of large swaths of unincorporated territory, with a few semi-organized kingdoms popping up here and there. Then Otto von Bismarck (one of the most fascinating and important statesmen in history, in my opinion) came along, and the rest is history. If you want the "short version" of the German story, just watch the second video clip by itself. It's pretty shocking to see how powerful a previous non-entity became in a very short time. The 20th century global story was largely dominated by Germany, which by any account of European history was the new kid on the block. Crazy.