PLOS One recently published a paper and a set of maps that looks at commuter flows across the United States (over 4 million data points). The objective was to identify all of the country’s “megaregions.”
Here is one of those maps. I think it says a lot.
We often think of cities as having discrete boundaries and population counts, but the reality is that studies and maps such as these provide a much better sense of the overall economic geography of a place.
It’s worth noting that the commuter dataset used for this study is from 2006-2010. So things may look a bit different today. The full report can be found here.
Parag Khanna recently published an article in the New York Times calling for a new map for America.
Here’s why:
“The problem is that while the economic reality goes one way, the 50-state model means that federal and state resources are concentrated in a state capital — often a small, isolated city itself — and allocated with little sense of the larger whole. Not only does this keep back our largest cities, but smaller American cities are increasingly cut off from the national agenda, destined to become low-cost immigrant and retirement colonies, or simply to be abandoned.”
This is something that I’ve been writing about for awhile on this blog. As we continue to transition to an urban-based information economy, it strikes me that, here in North America, we’re going to need to refocus our governance structures around cities. We’re going to need to place our metropolitan regions at the fore if we want to continue competing with rising powers like China – which, by the way, seem to be adopting a megacity model.
Here’s another snippet from the article:
“While Detroit’s population has fallen below a million, the Detroit-Windsor region is the largest United States-Canada cross-border area, with nearly six million people (and one of the largest border populations in the world).
Detroit’s destiny seems almost obvious if we are brave enough to build it: a midpoint of the Chicago-Toronto corridor in an emerging North American Union.”
I’ve argued for this before and I continue to believe that it makes a lot of sense.
Image: New York Times