Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Imagining a World of Equals


The World of Equals is much like our own world. Look at a map of the World of Equals and you could almost mistake it for our own world. The World of Equals, however, has a lot more countries. In fact it has 3 times as many countries.

The World of Equals is a speculative map of the Earth, which imagines the world divided up into 665 countries, each consisting of an equal population of around 10-11 million people. The resulting map is a great illustration of the distribution of the world's population.

For example, in the World of Equals Australia becomes two countries whereas India now seems to consist of over one hundred countries. Or, looking at Australia on its own, we can see how half the country lives just on the eastern seaboard.


I've seen speculative maps of the United States before that have attempted to redraw the number of states based on equal populations but this is the first attempt I've seen to redraw the whole world. This Fifty States of America Map is a good example of an attempt to map a United States of 50 states of equal population.

The purpose of the map is to readdress the political imbalance in state influence caused by the unequal populations of states and the number of electoral votes awarded to each state. Currently the largest state is 66 times as populous as the smallest state and has 18 times as many electoral votes.

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