The world map project

This is meta-democracy.org's attempt to draw the whole world the way its original Europe-only map drew Europe: not by the administrative borders a census bureau happens to use, but by where people, economies, and dialects actually cluster. A region here is a bet that some cultural-economic unit — Baden, the Yucatán/Maya highlands, the Nakhchivan exclave — is a more honest unit of self-governance than the state that currently contains it, whether or not that state's borders ever move.

As of this build, that bet spans … regions across … geopolitical blocs — Europe, Latin America, North America, the Chinese sphere, the Desi/South Asian subcontinent, ASEAN, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Muslim world, Central Asia, the Russian sphere, and a residual "Other" bucket for everything that doesn't fit the other ten. The bloc scheme itself is copied verbatim from this project's sibling site, unfold-news, so both projects speak the same geopolitical vocabulary.

Two of those blocs — Europe and Latin America — additionally carry a self-sufficiency (autarky) score per region: water, food, shelter, energy, transportation, hygiene/healthcare, and clothing, each rated on how much of that need the region could plausibly meet from its own base, with a rationale attached. The other nine blocs render on the map today in neutral gray — "not assessed," never a fabricated low score — because nobody has done that research pass over them yet. That distinction is this project's one rule that never bends: an unscored region must never look like a badly-scored one.

Geometry coverage is also uneven and stated honestly rather than smoothed over: … of … regions currently render as a shape on the map; the rest are real, named, sourced records with no boundary polygon yet, usually because the open data available is at the wrong administrative tier (mainland Chinese prefectures are the starkest case — the only open source is one tier too fine, county-level, so most of that bloc's regions are documented but not drawn). See the map itself for which blocs currently have geometry, and the methodology page for how each bloc was built.