What is the ultimate purpose of CommonCensus?
Its purpose is simply to educate people about what geographic groups Americans ‘feel’ they belong to, as opposed to where politicians and post offices say they belong to. This matters because every day people categorize Americans into geographical shapes that are not representative. Nobody has ever before created a detailed map of the ‘sphere of influence’ of every city on local, regional and national levels.CommonCensus does not espouse any particular political viewpoint, but imagines that the kind of data it creates should be invaluable to the debate on Congressional redistricting, to anyone involved in urban planning or studying markets, and to anyone with an interest in geography or demographics. It is also the first systematic way to exactly determine the limits of a metropolitan area without relying on guesswork or one person’s opinion, which could contribute to consistent measurement of metropolitan area populations across the world.
Its purpose is simply to educate people about what geographic groups Americans ‘feel’ they belong to, as opposed to where politicians and post offices say they belong to. This matters because every day people categorize Americans into geographical shapes that are not representative. Nobody has ever before created a detailed map of the ‘sphere of influence’ of every city on local, regional and national levels. CommonCensus does not espouse any particular political viewpoint, but imagines that the kind of data it creates should be invaluable to the debate on Congressional redistricting, to anyone involved in urban planning or studying markets, and to anyone with an interest in geography or demographics. It is also the first systematic way to exactly determine the limits of a metropolitan area without relying on guesswork or one person’s opinion, which could contribute to consistent measurement of metropolitan area populations across the world.
