When speaking about global-scale geographical definitions, one of the most common indicators we use is urbanism, or the distinction between "rural" and "urban" areas. One of the other courses I was taking concurrently with this class, History and Theory of Urban Interventions with Professor Neil Brenner, urged us to question and reconsider these definitions: can we really define "urban" areas as separate from the network of resources that makes life in them possible? 

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This mapping project juxtaposes NASA's world night light map with a record of all the agricultural land in the world from year 2000. It made me rethink the idea of "megacities" from the usual definition as those that sprawl their hardscapes into each other's boundaries to those that are connected by the agricultural areas that support them and feed their inhabitants. The map, then, can be read in several ways: purple areas that connect the magenta major urban centers map large sprawls of human activity on the land - whether that is through cities or through agriculture. White areas represent the lower intensity agricultural areas that we also tend to define as "rural", yet they still map human activity on the land. The light gray areas represent lower intensity urban areas that do not have agricultural uses; they map areas where potential "food deserts" could arise or are already present. The dark gray gridded areas represent low human activity areas with a mix of urbanity and agriculture; it is likely that this was the widespread condition around the world before the Industrial Revolution. Finally, blank dark gray areas represent those with little human activity, showing the last pockets of the world's territory that remain untouched and that often represent accessibility barriers from the human-activity islands that surround them.