What's Your Region?

This is cool and worth a few minutes of your time: the CommonCensus Map Project. It's an attempt at "redrawing the map of the United States based on your voting, to show how the country is organized culturally, as opposed to traditional political boundaries. It shows how the country is divided into 'spheres of influence' between different cities at the national, regional, and local levels." Here's the current map. Look at the swathes dominated by Denver or Salt Lake City to get a sense of what they're trying to do: to find the real capitals of regions. (No-brainerally, Minneapolis is the capital of my zone.)

I've thought about these sorts of cultural and economic zones since growing up in the hinterland's hinterland, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I wondered about why we Yoopers were so strangely oriented in so many directions at once. I rooted for the Green Bay Packers, not the Detroit Lions, but I also rooted for Detroit Tigers and Pistons and Red Wings. When we had to go school shopping, we went to Minneapolis. My grandfather and uncle, both truckers, were constantly heading to Green Bay. (Now, my dad, also a trucker, drives to Minneapolis and Chicago.) Though the three cities in which I grew up were only about two hours apart, at various times I watched Duluth, Green Bay, and Detroit television stations. All of this regionalism was brought home in college when I read William Cronon's amazing Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which shows how Chicago used timber, grain, and meat to establish dominance over the upper Midwest in the last third of the nineteenth century - a status it still arguably holds. Chicago didn't have any political sway over, say, Dakota grainfields or St. Paul railroads, but it nonetheless controlled them. The CommonCensus Map Project looks to be a looser way of arrriving at some of the same conclusions for the contemporary US. Does your city land in a surprising zone?