Interactive Map: MEGA REGIONS /An Economic Geography of The United States

What if we drew the map of the United States based on how people actually live?
An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions
http://discovery.dartmouth.edu/megaregions/

Instead of dividing the country up into the familiar outlines of states, this map shows what the U.S. might look like if we based our regions on the pattern which commuters weave every day between cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

More than 4 million lines on this map show the direction and volume of commuter flows. The white borders show a new geography of megaregions based on an algorithmic detection of related communities.

Zoom in and out to explore the map.

Click on the regions to learn their new names.

Use the layer control in the upper right corner to turn on City Labels if you need help orienting yourself.

Right click on a spot to see the commutes coming and going from that place.

Can you find where you live in this new geography of the U.S.?

This visualization was designed by Garrett Dash Nelson (Dartmouth College) and Alasdair Rae (University of Sheffield) based on research published in the journal PLoS One as “From Commutes to Megaregions: A New Economic Geography of the US.”

 

 

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166083.g005

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Garrett Dash Nelson Contributed equally to this work with: Garrett Dash Nelson, Alasdair Rae  

Affiliation Department of Geography and Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America  

Alasdair Rae

Contributed equally to this work with: Garrett Dash Nelson, Alasdair Rae

* E-mail: a.j.rae@sheffield.ac.uk

Affiliation Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0136-7659