Mapping a Connected World  

Mapping the world and the stuff that moves around it is one of the levers for building an energy efficient future, and I've always been a fan of maps, so I liked this roundup of various maps of our interconnected world that Ethan Zuckermann has posted at WorldChanging - Mapping a Connected World.

I’m fascinated by container ships. They’re my favorite metaphor for a connected world. When I visit port cities, I often try to drag friends with me to watch cranes load and unload stacks of interchangeable red, blue and grey boxes. For some reason, they’re often less enthusiastic than I am about sitting in a parked car in a bad part of town, watching the mundane aspects of global trade take place through a chain-link fence, one metal box at a time. (Then again, there are people who don’t find watching the blinking lights in a large datacenter fascinating either. I guess it takes all kinds.)

So, needless to say, I’m looking forward to the BBC’s new project, “The Box“. The folks at the Beeb have started a project with shipping line NYK designed to allow readers to track the movements of a single container over the course of a year. The container has been painted with a BBC URL and fitted with a GPS transponder, but otherwise will function as an ordinary container, carrying loads from one port to another. Its voyage will be visualized on a web map, giving viewers a sense for the vagaries of international trade. (Depending on whether BBC stacks the deck or not, this could also be a stunningly boring voyage, if the container simply cycles between Southhampton and Bruges.)

BBC says that the project was inspired by Marc Levinson’s excellent book, The Box. (My review of the book is here.) It could just have easily been inspired by William Gibson’s newest novel, Spook Country, which centers on the movements of a specific Maersk shipping container around the world. (Not his strongest recent book, but includes some excellent port scenes, so worthwhile for containerphiles.) Or by Brian Cudahy’s “Box Boats“, a useful complement to Levinson’s epic, focusing more on the evolution of ships and shipping lines and less on the containers themselves.

One of the goals of the BBC project is likely to help viewers visualize the complex networks that characterize our global world. It’s not hard to find examples of objects that seem to defy logic, but make perfect sense in a globalized world - Fiji water, for instance. But it’s harder to find good visualizations of the networks that underpin the connections between our different nations and economies. If we could map the travels of every container for a year, we’d likely learn a great deal about what countries are tightly connected to one another, about who exports to whom, when and how often. I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to find maps that show me where containers are going, either because construction of such a map would require cooperation of dozens of firms and hundreds of port authorities, or perhaps because such network maps would reveal vulnerabilities in global shipping networks. (If your goal is to get materials for a dirty bomb into the US, it would be useful to know what ports that regularly ship to Long Beach, CA are insecure. Fortunately, ABC already did this work for you - reporter Brian Ross packed 15 pounds of depleted uranium - very difficult to distinguish in terms of density and chemical properties than more dangerous forms of uranium - into a shipping container in Jakarta and sent it to Los Angeles. No problems with port security until ABC ran the story…)

I’m surprised at how few maps of networks I’ve been able to find, both in a daylong internet crawl, and in a pleasant though frustrating morning at the local university library....

One of my favourite maps sites, Strange Maps, only posts blog entries occasionally but its worth checking up on from time to time to see what the author's latest explorations have discovered. One recent entry is this map of Holland, showing how Dutch cities have warmed over the past decade by comparing them to French cities with the same average temperature - Holland Warms To France.