Eric Fischer working to modernize hachures, an old way of cartographically depicting slope that can produce some mesmerizing results.

Samuel Arbesman, writing at the Atlantic Cities:

We know that [administrative] boundaries are on some level unnatural. Driving around Kansas City, where I live, makes this abundantly clear. Gas price differences aside, it can be difficult to tell which state you’re in, Missouri or Kansas, and the small street of State Line Road does nothing to make it clearer.

But are there more organic borders, brought to life by our own actions and activities? I recently set out, along with a team from MIT and AT&T, to see if I could find an answer?

Some of them match up remarkably well with previous efforts. Others not as much. The different sources of data—and the usage patterns behind them—are likely the reason.

Sarah Rich:

When John Wesley Powell proposed in the late 19th century that state borders be defined around watersheds to form citizen-managed “hydrologic commonwealths,” he was responding not just to what would make the most sense ecologically, but also to what land divisions would mean for social equity given the extremely uneven spread of natural resources across the U.S.

State borders probably aren’t going to change—though it’s fun to imagine they might. Still, this sort of conceptual thinking isn’t for naught, as Australia shows. Victoria and New South Wales both have Catchment Management Authorities that correspond to watersheds boundaries within their borders. The authorities work with land owners and dole out funds to protect soil and water quality, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services.

Amy Maxmen, writing for the Nature News Blog:

What better birthplace for an institute of urban science than a soot-stained edifice in downtown Brooklyn. New York City Mayor Bloomberg announced yesterday that the mainly vacant building will house a world class research institute, to be led by theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, former undersecretary for science at the US Department of Energy. 

At the upcoming Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), researchers will crunch data on aspects of the city in order to solve problems related to energy and healthcare among others. Koonin says urban science means “understanding and modeling the city as a totality — its system of systems, its infrastructure, its condition and its operation.”

Since 2006, type designer Ralf Hermann has driven thousands of miles in countries around the world, snapping photos of road signs in a quest to design what he thinks is the perfect signage typeface.

Will Oremus, writing for Slate’s Moneybox:

New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. The lowest-scoring major cities, by comparison, tilt conservative: Three of the bottom four—Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth—went for McCain. What explains the correlation? Don’t conservatives like to walk?

Via Amos Zeeberg.

David Barstow, reporting for the New York Times:

In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

It’s a lengthy, fascinating, and thoroughly-reported exposé on how Wal-Mart executives paid off local politicians and planning officials and then obstructed an internal investigation. The illegal bribes were effective: Today, one in five Wal-Mart stores are in Mexico.

Ellen Barry, reporting for the New York Times:

The headlong pace of new construction in Georgia has not allowed for public debate over the projects’ financing, environmental impact or merit. Despite queries raised on all of these scores, Lazika’s first building — a futuristic Public Service Hall for the new city — is already under construction, and due to open in September. Ten years from now, President Mikheil Saakashvili has said, Lazika will be Georgia’s second-largest city after Tbilisi, which has a population of about 1.5 million, and a leading Black Sea trading hub.

All that’s missing? Migration to the region, sustained double digit economic growth, the need for a 1.5 million person city in a country of 4.5 million. Sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

Stephen Von Worley takes his digital level to Hawaii to see if its roads best San Francisco’s.

Scandinavia.

Interactive maps, GPS, history, audio, video, and a deep sense of place. This is a blog I’ll be following closely.

Via Jon Christensen.

Sarah Rich:

More than a century after Powell challenged the government to design infrastructure and territorial boundaries in accordance with existing landscapes, the task for designers, architects, engineers and planners can no longer be only to follow some of Powell’s logic, but to find ways to undo much of the detrimental development that has occurred in the meantime.

The West faces a perilous future if it can’t find solutions to its water problem. Rich rightly steps through the basics of the West’s hydrologic history—without context, you can’t understand the current situation.

For those who haven’t lived in the West, water is probably a bigger deal than you might imagine. I know I was shocked at just how dry the Bay Area can be—and how reliant it is on water from the Sierra Nevadas. If you want a taste for how water has and continues to shape the West, read Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. A friend of mine loaned it to me just before I left Minnesota, saying, “It should be required reading for anyone moving out West.” I couldn’t agree more.

First there was numerical evidence of North America’s early spring this year, now there’s geographic proof. NASA’s MODIS sensor snapped this shot centered on the Appalachians showing what one expert called an “exceptionally early” greening.

And if that and the numbers weren’t enough, here’s further pictorial evidence of March’s anomalous temperatures.

Two of my favorite things, together in one place.

Mary Carol R. Hunter and Daniel G. Brown, reporting on their research in Landscape and Urban Planning:

Generally, the likelihood that a property would have an easement garden increased as the density of nearby easement gardens increased.

Even more evidence that creativity is reshaping urban ecosystems.

Lidar is an amazing technology. By pulsing a laser dozens to hundreds of thousands of times per second and recording the reflected light, Lidar sensors can construct striking 3D models of everything from buildings to river valleys to forest canopies. It also what makes self-driving cars possible.

The map above was created using Lidar from NASA’s ICESAT satellite and the Shuttle Radar Topography mission. It’s the second of it’s kind, the first of which was made by Michael Lefsky at Colorado State. I remember hearing Lefsky talk at a small Lidar conference in 2005 about the challenges of using space-based Lidar to map forest canopies worldwide. Despite the problems, he was sold on the technology. I can see why.

Jim Robbins, writing in today’s New York Times:

We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

But wait, there’s more…

The Caprivi Strip is a small finger of Namibia that reaches eastward to the Zambezi River. It’s a geographic oddity that came to being in the colonial era—in 1890, Germany and the United Kingdom swapped land claims, with Germany receiving access to the Zambezi. They had hopes of connecting Namibia with their colony to the east, now known as Tanzania. Unfortunately for the Germans, the Zambezi was unnavigable. Their plan to connecting the two colonies died, but the Caprivi Strip remains part of Namibia to this day.

The Strip’s other curiosity are the bands of vegetation seen above. They stretch for hundreds of kilometers and cover dunes that formed between 20,000 and 60,000 years ago. According to NASA, this area was a desert then and has undergone a sort of de-desertification.

Between the its convoluted geopolitical and climatological histories, the Caprivi Strip is a ghost of geography in many senses of the term.