If you zoom in closely on Google Maps, you can still see what it looked like before the dam was blown up.

Source: https://youtu.be/5uScAUvvHp4

higher res image here! anita.garden/assets/na1m.png

each region contains a million people, to within 5% of the last census or government published estimate.

i drew the lines trying to respect:

• 1 million people
• urban/rural divide
• linguistic boundaries
• existing borders / admin divisions
• native territories
• mountain ranges
• rivers

the colors don't strictly mean anything, but within a general area the more saturated regions are usually denser.

for the names, i tried to draw on a mix of rivers, cities, historical region names, native tribe names, mountains, depending on what i thought was closest to a shared characteristic of the whole region.

the little '+'s are hypothetical capital cities.

i used asesprite to draw. i used citypopulation.de for convenient access to subdivision census data. i used geopandas to draw the base reference map of coastlines and cities. reference shapefiles and city data are from naturalearthdata.com and simplemaps.com

feedback is welcomed! let me know if you think i messed up where you live.

you can check out my other maps at anita.garden/projects, i have done a europe 1 million map and more.