Mapimation- Travel Time

Globalization has changed the shape of our world. I have mapped travel-time with the intention of providing a visualization of this change--a new lens to view our world in a non-geographic sense.

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 geographic map is underlaid for reference.

Here are a couple of animations that I produced earlier in the process. They show morphing from a geographic map to a map based on travel time.


2D Animation

3D Animation

A-1
A-2
A-3

B-1
3D representation of the London time map.



B-2
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.


C-1

C-2


C-3

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.

D-1

D-2

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.

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

Mapimation Development

I have begun to develop the z-axis by plotting each city according to its time-distance in the z plane. Thus, each city has x, y, and z coordinates all related to travel-time. The isochrones in this plane are linear, where 1 "z isochrone" is equal to 2 "x-y isochrones" (the concentric circles).

After plotting the cities in this plane, I constructed a nurbz surface to bring cohesiveness to the scattered nodes. Click and drag in the window below to view this surface.



This image shows the surface with the extruded lines from the previous model.

I have begun mapping with Tokyo and NYC as hubs. As seen in the screenshot below, I am trying out a more abstract method of redrawing the map. I started it out of expediency, but it is interesting because it defines a new land area and boundaries for each continent, whereas with London as the hub, the continents mostly remained in tact as far as coast lines and land area. Also, the overlapping of the continents here presents a problem using the old method. With the method used on the London map, each city stretched the land area surrounding it along the line connecting the city to the hub. With Tokyo, becuase it is not centered in the map, this method causes the continents to overlap. To insure clarity, I may need to use a different method....



Red- Asia
Yellow- N. America
Green- Europe
Cyan- Africa
Blue- S. America
White- Australia

Still searching for a way this can contribute to an architectural proposition.

Extra Image

Lines extruded as surfaces.

Mapimation- Travel-Time

Mapimation Update

Preview image with s-lofting.

Mapimation Update-- 3D

Instead of introducing a new data set to create a third dimension to my mapimation, I have decided to develop the same morphing in the third dimension by extruding the geographic map up to the skewed travel-time map. I will also animate the lines emanating from the hub (in this case London), to show the transformation in a linear manner. In this way, both modes of the map can be seen at once on different planes.

The development of this plan up to this point is shown below.

Screenshots:

Keyframes:

Keyframe 0: Geographic (or actual) configuration with green continents beginning to emerge.

Keyframe 1: Continents begin to morph into the travel-time plane as they are extruded from the geographic map.

Keyframe 2: New shapes of landforms begin to take shape-- a new surface is defined.

Keyframe 3: End. Full extrusion and fully-morphed travel-time surface.

There is still much to be done. As I'm sure is obvious from the keyframes above, a good deal of clarity was lost in the extrusion. I hope to find a clearer way to render and animate this. The distinction between the two planes (true location and time location) needs to be emphasized in some way. Also, animating the emanating lines is yet to be done, as well as continuing the entire process with hubs at Tokyo and NYC. (I have chosen London, Tokyo, and NYC, because they are considered to be "global cities," also they are far enough apart (geographically) so that significant comparisons may be made.)

Animation: