September 24, 2013 --

Here in the U.S. we move a lot. But while most of us consider a "move" as going from one town or city to another, mapmaker Stephen Von Worley is more interested in how we move within cities themselves. And, as it turns out, while folks in many cities are fleeing to the suburbs - one town sprung a tiny crop of growth: Detroit.

For his "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.

It was a small sign of hope in what otherwise was a pretty predictable pattern of Americans moving out of cities (see a few of the other cities above), for many reasons. 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.)

"I intentionally did not include a base map so that the patterns within the data could speak for themselves," Von Worley said. "Although Detroit's municipal boundaries aren't explicitly drawn, you can trace them out, down to the block, where reds of inner city decline meets the grays and blues of the surrounding suburbs."

Courtesy of Vienna Teng.
The beauty of Motown in Von Worley's map is truly in the eye of the beholder. 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, released today (listen below).

"This map looks a lot like the landscape of other issues we're grappling with: political extremism and statesmanship; ecological degradation and conservation; surveillance and privacy," she said. "It's easy to glance at something and fit it into a cynical narrative - 'look at all that dysfunction, it's hopeless' - but that's not the only storyline the data give us."

Von Worley has been posting maps and other infographics online since 2008, when he launched a site called Weather Sealed (now called Data Pointed). He uses largely publicly-available data like U.S. Census information and Wikipedia, and occasionally pay services like AggData. "Off-the-shelf charting tools aren't powerful or flexible enough" to do most of the number-crunching he needs, so he writes software to analyze data and spit out his visualizations. He's done maps of fast food chain dominance, Twitter concentration, locations dangerously close to sea level, and even the places in America that are almost entirely uninhibited. But he's also done non-geographic charts, like one that focuses the chronology of crayons and another on color name preference by gender.

Ultimately, Von Worley just creates his data visualizations - and the site they go on - to quell his own curiosity.

"[It's] a place where I can lasso the questions bouncing around my head," he said. "Answer them, make people grin, and hopefully dish out some learnin' along the way."