Kudos to Luke Juday for his latest graphics in “Mapping the Commonwealth.” As an intellectual exercise, he overlaid Google images of ten downtown areas around Virginia with overhead images of nearby Wal-Marts. There was no particular agenda to the images, he says — “I’m not a big Walmart hater or anything.” He just wanted to illustrate the difference in scale between places meant to be experienced on foot and places meant to be experienced by car.
Writes Juday: “Automobile-oriented places provide the same grid of connections and destinations at a dramatically expanded scale. The time distance is still the same – everything is accessible in five to ten minutes. But that means something different in terms of space – more like five miles than a half mile.”
— JAB