Maps test the 'donut theory'

"Radical cartographer" Bill Rankin has been creating informative mapping projects long before Google Maps was born. And his work makes clear that a map can be abundantly educational and strikingly presented without being a mashup or even interactive.

In this example, titled "City Income Donuts," he illustrates the distribution of income levels in the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan regions. The goal, as Rankin states, is to "test the 'donut' hypothesis--the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the 'revitalized' downtown, and the poor stuck in between."

Not bad for a project that uses Web 1.0 technology.