Happy New Year to you All

Happy Travels in 2007

Flight Relations

Distance becomes, less and less important when traveling these days. Not distance but time is the measurement of a long or a short journey. In the case of air connections even time is not so important any more but the existence of the link in the first place. You do not go to from Amsterdam to Barcelona instead of Chatrapur (city in India) because it is closer but because there is a link between the two embedded between them. This makes it most cases much more relevant and therefor much more efficient to travel between Amsterdam and Barcelona.
In the maps shown here, the direct flight relations between Tokyo, Paris and New York to the world are shown. The more airline companies flying on a certain connection the bigger the spot. In the end all four maps are placed on top of each other. This reveals the best connected spots in the world seen from, Tokyo, Paris and New York. Of course all the geographical close by relations of these three cities profit. But for instance Istanbul, Helsinki, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul and Bangkok are lightened spots on this map. A map of something that can be called the Global City starts to pop out. Of course the rest of the world is reachable within 24 hours just like the spots on this map. But there is a predestined relation between certain places on the globe that is not there for others just because of the fact that there are airline connection between them.

Maps: "The UNseen World"

The former post is the first one in a series of four. A series in which I want to show some predestined links in the world not as visible as any other physical relation. The four are again structured in the themes:

1) Time (timezones)
2) Distance (flight connections)
3) Material (Multinationals)
4) Place

Afterwards I will analyze these 5 themes again on a smaller scale focusing on Europe and eventually on Amsterdam in search for the perfect location for the architectural project. When reaching the scale of Amsterdam some other themes will enter the arena.

Timezone Relations

although we are heading fast forward to a 24-hr economy, we still have to face the fact that at some part of the day we have to sleep. Preferably we do this at night so the 9-5 rhythm is always present. Looking at the 4 most important cities of the Global City as reported by the GaWC (Paris, London, Tokyo and New York) We can distinguish 3 different zones. The red zones represent the area that is always outside the 9-5 work schedule of the centered global city. Outside the red lines an area is entered where less than half of the workday is overlapping. Because of these predestined connections some relations will have more potential than others.