Speculation- Time World

Drawing a conclusion from my mapping of travel-time has been challenging, but I think I am getting somehere. A couple of inferences I drew from the London-centric mapping were that nearness in "time space" was more a reflection of the frequency of travel between locations and flights with the fewest stops. I believe the duration of flights between locations is a function of the cities' global connectivity, or its economic, cultural, and political relatedness. Thus, in this new world based on time, the cities that are most related in the above areas are closest. For example, Saskia Sassen, in The Global City, discusses the emergence of London, New York, and Tokyo as centers of the global economy. This somewhat invisible centralization is also discussed in Wired, where Mark Leonard comments on the political centralization of Europe as "Euro Space."

I think this idea of centralization as a result of globalization can be carried into my concept of travel-time. Initially, noticing that the most extreme distortions of the time map seem to occur between London, Tokyo, and New York, I thought of a global corridor that would streamline these connections. Going back to my MegaBlog post on pipelines, I am now thinking of integrating the idea of a national network of tubes into my speculation. This new world would be an invisible world where global cities are clustered together to form one Global Mega City. Cities and rural land that not politically, economically, or culturally "unified", would be isolated from this island city. In real space, this conglomeration is achieved through a subterranean global subway, or network of extremely high-speed tubes that would allow instant access to megacities across the globe.

So, in this world, it would be not unlike any cities' subway system where you descend into the subway and exit from underground-- but with a stretch of your imagination, for all you know you could have just entered a time portal and exited out into a completely different city. This new world would be much like that, where futuristic high speed-tubes are able to expand the cities limits.

The world is propose is a dystopia. I hope to critique the homogenization of culture due to globalization. This would be a futuristic projection of what this would look like.

Here are some maps I am thinking about using for Friday's collages.




Map of Exports and Imports from US