New Geography

Tag: geography

  • Top Secret Edge Cities

    Here’s three items from the Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series:

    The Series: We’ve long known that high-security businesses warp the statistics describing Edge Cities. No matter how sophisticated the data source you go to, you find anomalies in which the numbers just wildly do not match the office buildings, retail locations and expensive homes you can plainly see. You know you’re in this territory when the GPS in your car starts giving you screwy results — because it’s being jammed. Now my former Washington Post colleagues Dana Priest and William H. Arkin and a platoon of their associates have done an astounding job of lifting the veil. In their two-year investigation, “Top Secret America” — sure to win a Pulitzer — they’ve put together an authoritative data base of government and private job locations where 854,000 people with high-level clearances work. (That’s one and a half times the population of the District of Columbia.) They call it “an alternative geography” of the United States, and they’re right. Here’s the home page for the sprawling report.

    Some Numbers: Howard County, Md., has the largest secret Edge City in the United States and the numbers are eye-popping. The headquarters of the National Security Agency — the communications intercept spooks — is 6.3 million square feet – about the size of the Pentagon – and is surrounded by 112 acres of parking. It’s on its way to 14 million square feet. (Downtown Memphis is 5 million square feet.) And that doesn’t count the miles and miles of super-secure commercial office buildings housing the corporations in the NSA orbit. Finally we get more than rumors about why this is one of the richest counties in the U.S. We’re talking a $20 billion payroll much of which doesn’t show up in other data. In fact, most of the wealthiest counties in America turn out to have Top Secret Edge Cities.

    The Map: Check out the interactive U.S. map of where the Top Secret Edge Cities are. Zoom around. These are the Edge Cities where “the extrovert is the one looking at somebody else’s shoes.”

  • World Small Area Map of GHG Emissions

    The European Commission has just made a Google Earth overlay available showing annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 10 square kilometer quadrants. The overlay can be manipulated to show estimates from every year beginning in 1970. One of the most fascinating features is the GHG emissions on the oceans, from shipping lanes. All are green (fewer GHG tons), but one route stands out as by far the busiest, from Hong Kong and Japan through the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal to northern Europe.

    The application is useful for broad reviews of GHG emissions by same-sized areas, though the zoom feature does not provide high resolution enough photography to discern differences at the smallest area level.

  • The new political donor class

    Do you know who is funding your local candidate? Most of them are probably not from your district, as Lee Drutman at Miller-McCune points out after looking at the results of new report by two University of Maryland professors. Lee writes:

    Increasingly, they’re not bothering to ask the folks whom they are actually paid to represent for campaign cash. Instead, they are flocking to a handful of super-wealthy ZIP codes in places like Hollywood; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Greenwich, Conn.; and suburban Washington, D.C. – the “political ATM’s” of the campaign trial.

    Moreover, as of 2004, only 1 in 5 congressional districts provided the majority of contributions for the candidates seeking to represent that district. And in 18 percent of congressional districts, more than 90 percent of money now comes from out of district.

    The professors write in their analysis that the new donor class is “disproportionately wealthy, urban, highly educated, and employed in elite occupations.”

    If you’re interested in where the small donors are coming from in the presidential race, check out the interactive map at Huffington Post’s Fundrace. It’s a great tool to use as a proxy to visualize which way your state or metro area might lean, or maybe you just want to spy on your neighbors.

    For instance, it’s pretty easy to see instantly which parts of the Los Angeles may be pockets of Republican influence, or to see Obama’s fund raising success in the Chicago region.

    Perhaps the Republicans should move this week’s convention out to the western Minneapolis suburbs for a warmer reception?

    Miller-McCune link via NewsAlert.