It’s tempting to take seriously Neil Freeman’s reimagining of the United States.

Philadelphia, Allegheny, Great Smoky, Lincoln, High Plains, Great Basin, Los Angeles…

Click to enlarge. Credit: Neil Freeman

Freeman, an artist and urban planner, reorganized the states into 50 bodies of equal population and presented this new political landscape on his website, FakeIsTheNewReal.org. He preserved major metropolitan areas and used dominant physical features — rivers, mostly — to name the new geographic units.

The resulting map is logical, thoughtful, and pretty damned faithful to the physical and cultural geography of our nation.

“It’s not serious,” says Freeman, “but people took it seriously.” (As in, you’ll split up Texas over my dead body.) Geographer Stentor Danielson, who blogs about environmental and social issues (with a spatial bent) at Debitage.net, suggests that the lumping together of South Jersey and Philadelphia rings true culturally but would be an environmental disaster. If it weren’t for the state border along the Delaware River, Philadelphia might have sucked the Pine Barrens dry.

“Really, this map is meant to be an ironic look at Electoral College reform,” says Freeman.

Freeman’s map caught a wave of attention when he first posted it to his website after the 2004 presidential election. Earlier this year it was picked up again by several political bloggers, including James Fallows and Matthew Yglesias. (Fallows invites his readers to imagine a decennial redistricting of the states to reflect changes in population: “In a reapportioned Senate each of of these units would have two votes.”)

Freeman followed a few simple rules:
1. Keep populations equal (Freeman’s states range from 5.4 to 5.6 million people, according to 2000 U.S. Census data. Actual state populations range from ~500 thousand to ~33 million)
2. Place major cities and close-in suburbs in a single state
3. When possible, follow existing state and county boundaries
4. Keep river valleys intact

“I used rivers as a guide for picking names,” he says. Turns out, this strategy makes a lot of sense. Freeman recently read ‘Names on the Land,’ an historical account of place-naming by George Stewart. “I think I was unconsciously following the names he gives in the book.”

Check out some of the Freeman’s other projects over at FakeIsTheNewReal, including my favorites:
Brooklyn Typology — linking photographs and data “to form a portrait of the urban fabric of Brooklyn”
Subways at Scale — aspatial maps of urban subways
Chicago Mile by Mile — photographing Chicago’s street grid