A MIT graduate student has put together new maps of American population density by plotting each person on a map:

Brandon Martin-Anderson, a graduate student at MIT’s Changing Places lab, was tired of seeing maps of U.S. population density cluttered by roads, bridges, county borders and other impediments.

Fortunately for us, he has the technological expertise to transform block data from the 2010 Census into points on a map. One point per person, and nothing else. (Martin-Anderson explains the process in more depth here.)

At times, the result is clean and beautiful to the point of abstraction, but when you know what you’re looking at, it’s a remarkably legible map. And while it resembles, broadly, Chris Howard’s political map of density that appeared after the presidential election, Martin-Anderon’s map can be magnified at any point. Users can watch each of the country’s metro areas dissolve from black to white. Even stripped of the features (roads, rivers) that shape human settlement, density has its own logic.

The maps show some different spatial patterns. For example, look at the different between some of the Northeast Corridor and the Midwest:

I don’t know that it is right to see density has its own logic; there are underlying factors behind these patterns. Topography is one factor but we could also look into how cities and suburbs expand (and there are a variety of sociological explanations about this including profit-seeking, competition for land, and global forces) and might also think about this in terms of social networks (the Northeast is denser, the Midwest more spread out).

Additionally, what about the flip side of these maps: there is still a decent amount of less dense space in these maps. We tend to focus on the largest population centers, several of which are represented on these maps, but the really dense areas are still limited. I suppose this is a matter of perspective: just how much less dense space do we need or should we have around and between metropolitan areas? Some of this would be affected by land that cannot be used profitably and well or land that is used for farming.

One caveat I have about how these maps were presented: shouldn’t they be at the same scale to really make comparisons?