Where We Live: The U.S. and Canadian Populations as Dots on a Map

By Bob Petz, January 16, 2013

Brandon Martin-Anderson, a cartographer involved with computational urban planning at MIT’s Media Lab, was curious.

What sort of human settlement patterns would emerge if every person counted in the most recent U.S. and Canadian census was plotted as a dot on a map, without geographic features or political borders?

The result, a zoomable Census Dotmap composed of 341,817,095 person-dots, turns out to be quite fascinating, particularly in how well population densities reflect geological features such as lakes, rivers, mountains and coastlines.

On the macro scale, dense urban centers are connected web-like with settlements strung along highways, rivers and mountain passes. Zoom in and things get more interesting as ever more granular details emerge. And if you get lost amid the dots, there’s a labels layer that can be turned on and off.

People living in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers converge to form the Ohio River. (Click to enlarge)

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  • Kathleene Parker

    I recently flew from New Mexico to Baltimore, looking down every inch of the way on a landscape almost every inch of which–even out here in the West–devoted to some human use in one way or another. Really? This as the politicians and the ever-growth-advocating corporate media deny us a discussion of a U.S. population growing by a whopping 3 million a year from a birth rate that, no, despite media depictions is not really dropping significantly and immigration, despite over 20 million unemployed, at the highest rates in our nation’s history.