Mapmaker Stephen Von Worley tracks how people move within cities and regions. And, as it turns out, while people in many areas -- including southeast Michigan -- are fleeing to the suburbs – one town sprung a tiny crop of growth: Detroit, reports Angela Watercutter in wired.com. (This story was reported first locally by Curbed Detroit.)
For Von Worlkey's “Growth Rings” project, the data visualization artist used U.S. Census data to map where America’s population had moved to between 2000 and 2010. When the results came in there were obvious answers: “New track developments appear to be sucking the life out of the older neighborhoods,” he wrote in a blog post accompanying his maps. Then he noticed a tiny spot of hope in, of all places, Detroit. Among all the red showing the neighborhoods people had left was a patch of blue showing population growth right smack in the middle of downtown, even though the city had lost a quarter of its population in that span of time.
The influx of people to downtown and Midtown has grown since 2010, so the splotch would be a darker shade of blue today.
Von Worley, an artist and computer scientist based in Santa Cruz, told Wired in an email that the name “Growth Rings” is a reference to this outflux of citizens, particularly “Hurricane Katrina’s depopulation of New Orleans, and the urban sprawl of Austin and Las Vegas.” And for his map of Detroit, the results are pretty much the same (minus that one patch) and, he notes, you can almost see the city’s disenfranchised neighborhoods even though they’re unmarked – particularly the city’s racial and economic dividing line, Eight Mile. (It largely runs through the swaths of red on the map.)
The map has inspired a local singer, Watercutter writes. Singer-songwriter Vienna Teng, who recently moved to Ann Arbor to get a graduate degree from the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan, told Wired that while she “can read a familiar tragedy in all that red” there’s more to it. In fact, she liked the image so much, she made it the cover of her new album, "Aims," above. (She performs Thursday and Friday at The Ark, where both shows are sold out.)
