Musician Inspired by Population Map

Vienna Teng's new album Aims features this map on the cover. It shows population migration within the Detroit metropolitan area.

The map is from Stephen Von Worley's Data Pointed blog. I'm not sure why the colors look so washed out in Teng's cover. The original is much more "pretty"

The inspiration comes from digging beyond the typical narrative of population flight from the inner cities (red is population loss) to see that there hope in the small patch of blue located near downtown. This is not really a new story, people have been moving into downtown areas for several decades now. Still, it's a good reminder that our cities still have much to offer as places to live. There are lots of other striking images of various US metropolitan areas to see on Von Worley's blog post, most of them showing a similar pattern.