Parcels How Property Shapes Geography A Power of Where Book Jerry Paffendorf Nancy von Meyer ADVANCE PREVIEW UNCORRECTED PROOF NOT FOR RESALE
Publishing Fall 2026 Available at bookstores everywhere, including: Explore the Power of Where Collection at www.powerofwhere.com
Parcels How Property Shapes Geography Jerry Paffendorf Nancy von Meyer Esri Press Redlands, California
iv Parcels TABLE OF QUESTIONS Foreword vii About the Authors viii Preface x Parcels of Ten xii Acknowledgments Image Credits Introduction: The World of Land Parcels Parcels are a hidden geography. Even though we live on them and build family, community, and nations with them, their boundaries and even their presence often escape us. Parcels manifest our values across landscapes. 01 01 What Is the Geographic Approach? By integrating spatial methods such as geodata, geoanalysis, and geodesign, we transform invisible property boundaries into a framework for understanding and acting on how we live, build, protect, and govern within geography. 27 05 What Is Geoanalysis? Parcel geoanalysis asks questions about the realities and relationships within and among parcels. By combining parcel data with other spatial information and tracking changes over time, this analytic approach reveals patterns and generates new insights. 06 What Is Geocollaboration? By blending spatial technology with the spirit of human cooperation, parcel geocollaboration helps communities work together, find common goals, and solve big problems. It helps residents and governments use shared parcel data to make collective decisions about our neighborhood and landscapes.
v Table of Questions 02 What Is Geodata? Data is the basis of the geographic approach, which allows us to map, analyze, and design. Parcel geodata transforms the descriptions of boundaries into shapes we can combine with other datasets and information, providing the physics that explain how property interacts with geography. 03 What Is Geovisualization? Because land parcels are invisible to the naked eye, we rely on geovisualization to make them tangible. By translating dry legal records into a clear visual map, parcel geovisualization reveals the hidden patterns and relationships that form the structure of our lives and activities on land. 04 What Is Geocommunication? Parcel geocommunication combines geovisualization with narratives and infographics to convey specific messages about the land. Focusing on the characteristics of property boundaries allows us to tell stories that inform, entertain, and move people to action. 07 What Is Geoaccounting? Parcel geoaccounting is the process of observing, recording, and reporting quantitative information tied to specific parcel boundaries. By tracking measurable characteristics, geoaccounting transforms raw data into actionable map-based reports. 08 What Is Geodesign? Geodesign is the action step in the geographic approach, combining technology, art, and planning so we can design and execute everything we build in the real world. Parcels act as containers, with specific rules that provide the boundaries and structural foundation. 09 What Is GeoAI? Fused with geospatial parcel data, science, and technology, GeoAI uses large language models, computer vision, agents, and other types of AI to analyze data, generate design variations, build maps, perform predictive analysis, and forecast outcomes based on simple queries and directions.
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vii Foreword FOREWORD BY JACK DANGERMOND FACING PAGE Parceled to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the Cape Blanco Lighthouse in Oregon stands on 32 acres of coastline owned by the US Coast Guard. The lighthouse is the most westerly and highest focal plane above the sea in Oregon and is the state’s oldest continually operating lighthouse. Land information, often referred to as parcel mapping and cadastral information, plays a major role in geographic information systems (GIS)—so much so that we rely on parcel mapping to create and sustain all levels of our society. This book outlines the theory and practical applications of land information in our government, business, and nonprofit sectors. In the United States, local government agencies—often tax assessors’ offices—embraced GIS starting in the 1980s to meet the need for digital technology to manage what had been a paper-based recordkeeping system. More recently, we’ve seen land information evolve from a focused domain to a central component of GIS around the world. A GIS acting as a system of record serves as the authoritative, trusted source for managing and storing geospatial data, ensuring a single source of truth for organizational assets and spatial information. It enables, manages, and governs data, providing reliable, structured information for analysis and decision-making My 2024 book, The Power of Where, presented the concept of addressing the world’s challenges through the geographic approach, a way of thinking and solving problems that uses spatial location—where things are—to represent, organize, and understand information. Understanding data and measurements through the geographic approach allows us to view the world in ways that were previously hidden, using interactive maps, 3D visualizations, simulations, digital twins, predictive models, and other representations. Like The Power of Where, this book explores land information through spatial methodologies, or geomethods, that overlap and interact with each other. Whereas my book explored seven geomethods, Jerry and Nancy’s book adds an eighth—geoAI—to reflect the exponential computational power and integration of AI with spatial data, science, and geospatial technology. The authors approach their work with passion and diligence to help GIS professionals and a wider audience understand and apply land information. They open with an expansive survey of the broad field and then introduce the geographic approach for parcels in chapter 2. The eight core geomethods are described in chapters 3 through 9. The coauthors bring their expertise in the field to this book. Jerry pioneered the practice of bringing publicly available parcel information to GIS users as an information product. Jerry and his company, Regrid, were the first to weave together and compile parcel data from every US county and are now expanding their efforts throughout North America and across the world. Nancy has been at the forefront of thinking about land information from a data capture and GIS perspective for decades. Her Esri Press book, GIS and Land Records: The Parcel Data Model, was an important contribution when many government agencies struggled to automate their records and establish national standards. The authors have dedicated their entire careers to understanding land information and how it’s applied, specifically in a GIS environment. We all have roles to play in addressing and solving problems ranging from global to local scales. In Parcels, the authors present a geographic approach that offers practical lessons in integrating and using land information as the basis for creating a better world.
viii Parcels ABOUT THE AUTHORS Guiding you through this exploration of parcels are authors Jerry Paffendorf, CEO and cofounder of Regrid, and Nancy von Meyer, an acknowledged expert in parcel systems and land records. Jerry and Nancy first met at a conference of the Geospatial Professionals Association (then the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, URISA) in 2017. Jerry and his team were working on community parcel challenges in Detroit, while also assembling a national parcel dataset however they could piece it together. Nancy was deep into her career working with government officials and state and national networks advocating for the dataset but from a different direction. Nancy and Jerry were focused on the same goal from different approaches but with similar passions. They went on to develop the kind of relationship that comes from demonstrating commitment to a purpose and respecting others with the same commitment. The authors took distinct paths into the world of parcels and both arrived at similar conclusions to their primacy—passionate about every dimension of parcels, including their history and how they might inform the future. Jerry brings the pioneering vision of a global data service for land parcels, an effort born from the human and extreme challenges in Detroit, Michigan, which motivated Regrid to become the first to aggregate and map 100% of the United States’ parcel fabric. Nancy provides the deep institutional and historical knowledge of how cadastral systems are built, governed, and maintained. Her work has left a lasting legacy, evident in stories of how states use parcel data to respond to human-caused crises, such as the US mortgage foreclosure crisis in 2008, and natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Together, and with contributions from the Regrid team and many friends, the authors present an expansive and complementary view of parcels—from the operational realities of government and the importance of parcels as a public data source to how that data source can be enriched and delivered to all audiences. Parcels: How Geography Shapes Property builds on the work of Esri cofounder Jack Dangermond and his 2024 book, The Power of Where: A Geographic Approach to the World’s Greatest Challenges. Jerry Paffendorf. Nancy von Meyer.
ix About the Authors About Key Contributors Many contributors have directly and indirectly contributed to this book. Most significant are team members at Regrid, who gave countless hours of project management experience and offered drafts, maps, and visualizations to the final product. Alex Alsup is the chief strategy officer at Regrid, where he has spent more than a decade working with parcel data. Based in Detroit, he is interested in how parcels impose legibility on the world—from the boundaries of a single lot to the national systems built from millions of them. Nick Downer is vice president of software at Regrid, where he feels fortunate to be able to indulge his interests in beautiful maps and data professionally. A researcher at heart, he believes that communicating complex meaning through compelling graphics is a form of magic. Matthew Klovski is the director of global acquisitions at Regrid and has a longstanding interest in how land tenure works globally, which the authors found delightful to explore for this book. Jason McVay is the GIS product manager at Regrid. A data scientist turned data storyteller, Jason is a biogeographer by training whose work maps the Venn diagram of art, science, and parcels. Lisa Schamess is a writer and editor whose work engages with human activity and social justice in the context of cities and transitioning economies, sustainable transportation, and the built environment. She is director of communications at the American Association of Geographers.
x Parcels PREFACE “Without you, every field would be disputed.” Written more than 2,000 years ago, these words by the Roman poet Ovid honor Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries and property markers. They encapsulate an ancient truth: Society requires orderly geographic subdivision from the national level down to individual land parcels. Looking back, we might wonder why ancient Rome would dedicate a whole deity to property markers. But if we want to understand just how sacred these lines remain, try moving a neighbor’s fence line back three inches today and see what happens. Good parcels make good neighbors. Satellites, aircraft, and drones capture breathtaking, high-resolution imagery of our world from above, but eyesight and imagery alone can’t tell us why we build and position things the way we do. Nor do they tell us what we can do in physical space in the future. To understand the logic and potential of the landscape, we must look beyond natural geography and human-made construction to see the invisible web of property boundaries, possession, and permission threaded through it all. We must look at parcels. A Grand Tour of Parcels as Both Property and Geography Parcels: How Property Shapes Geography is a highly visual, guided exploration of parcels in their fullness as creatures of property and geography brought to life by the tools of the geographic approach. This book also encourages readers to go hands-on with the Regrid app to locate their own home parcels and explore parcel data resources at this book’s companion website: powerofwhere.com/parcels. Our journey will begin at the scale of a single home and zoom out, scale by scale, all the way to the moon, to contemplate how parcels permeate the planet—and how they may follow us into space. We’ll tour a variety of places across the United States and around the world and step back in time to appreciate how long humans have lived with parcels, and how their role as an information system has changed. We will also peer forward into the future. You’ll meet famous cartographers and hear from researchers who have dedicated themselves to parcel efforts as varied as understanding how America is owned; how to plan for housing, transportation, and land use in a dynamic urban environment; how sea level rise will impact the economics of coastal parcels; and how artificial intelligence may intersect with our ability to plan for parcels (and everything else). You’ll also meet Detroit, Michigan, as a main character in the book, returning to this pioneering city that put the world on wheels and was once America’s fourth largest city, and how it has navigated losing twothirds of its population without losing a single parcel. Before we lift off, let’s review the multifaceted role of parcels in our lives. A depiction of a bust of Terminus as a boundary marker. The Latin inscription of concedo nulli means “I yield to no one.”
xi Preface Parcels as Stability, Adaptability, and Economics First, let’s consider the sheer economic weight of the parcel framework. The value of global real estate—residential, commercial, and agricultural land combined—was estimated at nearly $400 trillion in 2026, making it the single largest asset class on Earth. To put that in perspective, the value of all the gold ever mined in human history equates to just over 5 percent of real estate’s total worth. Parcels structure property taxes that provide revenue for local and state governments, giving us roads, schools, and other public services. Owning a home parcel represents the largest financial investment and store of wealth for most people. Although parcels structure global and individual wealth, their more subtle value lies in other dimensions: They simultaneously grant us stability in time through persistent rights of use and access and act as flexible containers through which we adapt and manage changing spaces. How We Live, Build, Protect, and Govern with Parcels We depend on parcel data every hour of the day, and not just for owning property. The navigation apps on our phones tell us where to reach specific addresses. Infrastructure, such as roads, water mains, fiber-optic lines, and electrical grids, bend and conform to property boundaries. Businesses analyze parcel shapes, locations, features, and zoning to find the best place to build, while conservationists assemble parcels to protect wilderness and fragile ecosystems. Every civic effort—from conducting a census and assessing taxes to planning a community farm—rests on geographic knowledge that only becomes actionable at the property line. Yet, we rarely contemplate the parcel matrix as its own distinct phenomenon. We’ll step inside the parcel matrix to see it with a new perspective, moving past the limited concept of parcels as simple real estate lots with price tags. We’ll view parcels as architecture of human geography, where our impulses, needs, and designs play out as contradictions and complements to each other. Parcels as Creative Acts and Emotional Vessels of Our Stories The relationship between humans, land, and lines is deeply creative and emotional. Parcels accumulate histories and beg questions. Although parcels may be inevitable, how they are drawn, owned, governed, and permissioned is not. In Athens, Georgia, stands a living monument known as The Tree That Owns Itself. According to local legend, in the early 19th century, a landowner deeded ownership of his favorite oak tree to itself along with a circle of land around it. This poetic gesture was honored by his community, and when the tree died, another was planted from its seed and is known as The Son of The Tree That Owns Itself. The story speaks to the profound sentiment and creativity we attach to property and geography. Parcels may feel legally intimidating and hard to change, but they are also creative and can be changed to meet our needs and desires, whether it’s protecting nature, building 10 million new houses, transmitting energy to and from data centers in a publicly beneficial way, navigating an emerging space economy to benefit everyone, or honoring a family or cultural history rooted in the land. We will bring these perspectives with us throughout the book. They reflect the joy and depth that the authors find in parcels—as gateways to the big world of how we make our flourishing, buzzing, and never-quite-good-enough home within geography—also known as reality. According to legend and recounted in a local newspaper story, The Tree That Owns Itself was deeded to self-possession. The picture postcard (top) memorializes the original tree, and a plaque (bottom) at the site depicts the landowner’s deed of the tree to itself.
xii Parcels PARCELS OF TEN Parcels of Ten is a nod to the Charles and Ray Eames pair of documentary films about the Powers of Ten (1968, 1977), which showed how meaning changes with scale. We apply that lens to the foundational unit of human geography—the parcel. We begin at a single home in Charlotte, North Carolina, and step outward by orders of magnitude from the parcel to the neighborhood, city, county, state, country, planet, and the moon. At each scale, new actors enter—surveyors and assessors, planners and registrars, utilities and school districts, state cadastres, national aggregators, and sovereign powers— each translating human decisions into lines we can administer, finance, protect, and repair. We build neighborhoods, cities, and nations from parcels. When parcels change, places change. The aim here is to make the usually invisible parcel structure visible and to show how parcels connect with programs and policies at other scales—how the simple boundary around a home or building is the scaffold for public and private life that spans land on the earth in one form or another. Wherever people go, parcels follow. Parcels: The Home Our story begins at a house on a leafy street in Charlotte, North Carolina. One roof, one yard, one rectangle on the map. To the homeowner, this parcel is where everyday questions live: Is that fallen tree limb my responsibility or my neighbor’s? Why did my tax bill change? Where can I build my fence? “Eventually everything connects. Charles Eames American designer “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. Maya Angelou American author and activist Residential street with individual parcels drawn with a single parcel highlighted. FACING PAGE Stills from the Charles and Ray Eames documentaries about the Powers of Ten, exploring scale from a couple on a picnic to the depths of outer space and then at the level of microbes and electrons.
xiii Parcels of Ten © 2026 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.
xiv Parcels These questions have answers because the parcel is also the worksite for people who keep our property system running. Surveyors set corners that determine whose tree it is and where a fence can run. Assessors translate sales, permits, and market signals into an assessed value—the reason a tax bill increases or decreases. GIS technicians keep the digital boundary aligned with the physical one, so what’s on the screen matches what’s in the yard. Small acts within the space of our properties—our parcels—have long shadows. A new deck is also a permit, a building footprint update, a value adjustment, and potentially a change in a municipal budget. These local records establish the cornerstone upon which broader governance systems are built. At this intimate scale, parcel management directly impacts individual lives, dictating permissible land use, ownership rights, tax liabilities, and community interactions—where one home ends and the next begins. The same boundary that guides a fence is also the fundamental cell of civic finance, regulation, and rights. Thus, the parcel is the basic, actionable unit of human geography. The Neighborhood Zoom out one level and hundreds of parcels tessellate into a patchwork of driveways, yards, and cul-de-sacs. A neighborhood is a neighborhood because it is a pattern of parcel-level decisions. When neighborhoods change, it’s because parcels within them change as much as when people change. Those changes are legible. Permits and sales signal reinvestment—or disinvestment. Ownership types can shift from homeowner to absentee landlord. Code cases accumulate “Around the world and throughout history, neighborhoods have succeeded in a million different ways. It all depends on how the earth is owned. Andro Linklater Author, Owning the Earth Intricately gridded neighborhood parcels drawn over a satellite image.
xv Parcels of Ten on a struggling block while streetscape improvements and home owner association covenants materialize on another. These are the sum of choices made by owners, lenders, builders, and public agencies—all of which we can see if we know what to look for in the parcel fabric. At this scale, various actors coordinate across parcel boundaries: Utilities trace easements, school districts forecast enrollment, and transit planners align bus or rail stops where parcel uses cluster. Parcel data becomes a neighborhood diagnostic: Are new housing units appearing? Are vacancies decreasing? Is property tax revenue concentrated in a handful of parcels or shared relatively equally? Neighborhood character is the visible imprint of many small decisions, each of which can be seen in the parcel fabric. “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. Jane Jacobs Author, The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Town or City Another scale larger in the view reveals the municipal organism. Parcels aggregate into fiscal cells that feed the municipal lifeblood of property taxes to streets, schools, and storm drains. City planners translate plan colors into zoning codes and then enforce them one parcel at a time. The health of the municipal organism could be said to be the sum of the health of its individual parcels. Economic shifts—a new residential tower or a shuttered factory—register as pulses in the parcel fabric and are tracked by assessors. The municipal level is also the first scale where data standardization becomes a policy tool: Uniform schemas let housing departments target vacancies, public works crews schedule maintenance, and developers identify property for new housing and commercial districts. At the city scale, parcel data becomes an operating system. Capital budgets are mapped to collections of parcels, not abstractions. Brownfields, which the federal government describes as underused properties thought to be contaminated by hazardous substances, are prioritized because Satellite image of Charlotte, North Carolina with the city limits drawn in turquoise and selected zoning boundaries in red. Individual parcel boundaries become indistinct as higher-level boundaries that govern them—and are funded by them—are revealed.
xvi Parcels contamination, ownership, and lien status are part of the parcel record. Tax increment financing districts, overlay zones, stormwater fees, tree-canopy goals—each is configured against parcels. When planners talk about “missing middle” housing, such as low-rise apartments, townhomes, and apartments, they are talking about housing that “provides diverse housing options along the spectrum of affordability,” such as low-rise apartments, townhomes, and duplexes, according to the National League of Cities. These types of housing are prevented in some areas by restrictive zoning and building rules. Building footprints, lot widths, and setbacks found in the parcel data show where the housing is missing and what rules prevent it. Assessing taxes at this level requires a tax roll made up of property: To permit, a lot. To cite, an address. To subsidize, a parcel ID. To protect, a boundary. In practice, city decisions resolve to parcels. The County Mecklenburg County stitches Charlotte and its satellite communities into one quilt of parcels and recorded in a public record known as the cadastre, which serves as the basis of taxation. The register of deeds records every transfer, the assessor equalizes value across 400,000-plus parcels, and the GIS office publishes authoritative boundaries. Counties are America’s cadastral workhorses—more than 3,000 unique data publishers, each with its own schema nuances, update cycles, and budget realities. Here, parcel attributes start to diverge in earnest: Rural land-use codes coexist with dense urban condominiums, and agricultural exemptions share tables with industrial tax incentives. County-level maintenance is the keystone that lets all higher data aggregations exist. “Almost every state created counties in a process that had a large dose of local influence. The most insistent voices were usually property owners within towns that sought to obtain the county courthouse. William A. Fischel Dartmouth College, Department of Economics Standardization of data matters here, but only in service of the parcel’s legal power, so that a boundary is enforceable, a lien collectable, a right defendable, and a rule knowable—regardless of municipality. Counties make quite different local practices work together. Despite individual differences, all counties fulfill the task of maintaining authoritative, accurate parcel information. Such consistency supports efficient governance, informed policy decisions, and the development of communities. The result is regional coherence: Different places, but one framework. County boundaries superimposed over a satellite image.
xvii Parcels of Ten The State North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Montana are among the states that stitch every county’s parcel data feed into a single standardized, cadastral layer. To consider the entire state, you need access collectively to all the pieces. With a statewide parcel fabric, programs gain a far greater level of precision than they could have without one. Broadband grants can tie dollars to unserved parcels instead of census tract averages. Disaster declarations allow governments to deploy resources door to door. Departments of transportation (DOTs) can plan corridors by negotiating parcel constraints (title, easements, setbacks) before a single survey stake is driven. “The small landowners are the most precious part of a state. Thomas Jefferson Third US president and designer of the Jefferson Grid, the US Public Land Survey System. State boundaries and counties of North Carolina superimposed over satellite image with Mecklenburg County highlighted. At this level, parcel data is a form of infrastructure. Standardization at the state level doesn’t erase local reality—it translates it. The state cadastre in North Carolina turns 100 county parcel dialects into one legal dictionary of land. Across many states in the country, however, that fabric is missing or incomplete, which creates information gaps (blind spots). Money flows by proxy, mitigation lags, and statewide goals can’t resolve to enforceable lines. With a statewide parcel fabric, the state can see the whole and still act parcel by parcel—the bridge between local detail and statewide intent.
xviii Parcels The Country From coast to coast, nearly 160 million parcels form a legal mosaic of ownership, value, and regulation in the United States. This is the level at which the Detroit-based company Regrid cultivates a parcel garden of some 3,200 counties in the United States—refreshing, standardizing, enriching, and redistributing nation-spanning parcel data that people, companies, and government departments can use. What does a coherent national parcel layer make possible? Site selection for development, infrastructure, conservation, and more, at a continental scale, rather than county by county. Insurance, lending, and housing programs that target risk and need at the parcel—not just by zip code. Wildfire and flood models that allocate responses, resources, and risk to specific lots instead of averages. Nationwide stories and phenomena can emerge, but the unit of action can remain the parcel. Not every piece of data that touches land is born as parcel data. Soil composition, terrain roughness, proximity to features or infrastructure, business names—none of these are inherently parcel data. But parcels are the ideal unit to join everything that touches the land. The next big step is to expand parcel data to include phenomena that shape use, value, vulnerability, and more. The continental United States with North Carolina counties in gray and Mecklenburg County highlighted.
xix Parcels of Ten The Planet Shift to orbital height and parcels fade beneath clouds and coastlines, but they still govern much of Earth’s land. The parcel is still the basic unit of human geography—tiny, legal, and, when woven together, shaping a planetary story. Across borders, a parcel takes many forms: Leaseholds and concessions, communal and customary tenure, Indigenous territories, informal settlements, places with detailed cadastres and places with none at all. Global decisions still apply to somewhere specific—on a plot, a title, a boundary, a spot people recognize. We will look into many countries in this book to see the diversity of parcel systems, as you’ll see on the next page. Map of the earth with the individual US state boundaries outlined. “When we see our planet from the perspective of space, certain things become undeniably clear. We keep trying to deal with issues, such as global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss, as stand-alone issues, when in reality, they’re just symptoms of the underlying root problem. And the problem is that we don’t see ourselves as planetary. Ron Garan NASA astronaut who spent 178 days in space.
Parcels Around the World Parcels It’s no small feat to understand the property contexts of the nearly 200 countries on the earth, as differences in law, language, custom, and data abound. About 30 percent of the world has a documented relationship of person to parcel. Barring special cases, such as Antarctica, parcels and land registration appear on every continent. Recordkeeping varies worldwide, but wherever people go, they devise boundaries and rules for land. Some countries still do not have consistent records of land ownership, regardless of whether that land has been subdivided into individual plats or not. In many nations, land use has built up in layers over centuries and even millennia, with gaps and challenging inconsistencies in the records. Throughout the world, communal and ancestral claims to land are known as customary rights and are recognized by the United Nations and other international bodies in the Continuum of Land Rights. These rights make communication and standardization of existing parcel or customary rights information among the most vital work undertaken within the global system of land tenure and land rights. A full accounting of land ownership systems is beyond the scope of this book, but stories about parcels from around the globe will appear in later sections as a way to highlight insights into the world of parcel data. 1 3 2 4 6 5 7 9 8 10 12 11 FACING PAGE 1. Canada 2. Mexico and Central America 3. South America 4. Brazil 5. Europe and the European Union 6. The United Kingdom 7. China 8. India 9. The Arab Region 10. Australia 11. Antarctica 12. Nigeria xx
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xxii Parcels Off-World Once we reach an orbital height of 10,000 kilometers, or about 6,213 miles above Earth’s surface, the concept of spatial control remains essential. Even beyond Earth, parcels govern the land. Today, property ownership on the moon and other celestial bodies is complex. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prevents nations from claiming sovereignty over space, meaning that no government can legally issue a deed for a lunar parcel. However, as private companies and countries accelerate plans for lunar mining, colonization, and building permanent bases, the question of spatial control and permissioning is quickly becoming an issue of now, not just the future. We’ll also see movements to conserve the purity of the moon, which we observe to be the only land that everyone on Earth sees. The need to protect a base’s perimeter; cordon off a mining claim; navigate a robot, drone, or vehicle; or delineate a safe landing zone creates a non-parcel parcel—a claimed area that must be recognized to facilitate the core forces of to build and to govern in space. The eventual system of off-world resource accounting and spatial management will require surveyors and regulators to extend the ancient practice of parcelization to a new frontier. View of Earth and the moon from the 2026 Artemis ll mission. “To all of you down there, on Earth and around Earth, we love you from the moon. Victor Glover NASA astronaut on the 2026 Artemis II mission, speaking from the Orion spacecraft. FACING PAGE The moon overlaid with a hypothetical, hexagonal grid using remote sensing analysis.
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1 Introduction: The World of Land Parcels INTRODUCTION THE WORLD OF LAND PARCELS Once a quiet farming community named Farmwell, Ashburn, Virginia is now a growing community nearing 50,000 people.
2 Parcels PARCELS ARE PLACES: AN EXPLORATION Parcels, the lines that carve up landscapes into distinct, legally defined units, are more than administrative boundaries. Parcels are also places. This section unveils parcel lines by presenting a series of side-by-side satellite images, each overlaid with parcel boundaries. These visual juxtapositions are an invitation to read the landscape through a lens of ownership boundaries, natural processes, and the people that call these places home. Sometimes we see how property shapes geography, and sometimes we see how geography shapes property. Each visual pair incorporates a theme, from the order of agricultural fields to dense urban blocks, revealing how the geometry of parcels directly shapes the ecology, economy, and lived experience of the terrain it overlays. Although these photos offer an immediate visual contrast, the entries include detailed annotations for additional depth. We invite you to explore this collection scene by scene. 1. Flowing Encircles: Tuttle Creek, Kansas and Loch Leven, Mississippi 2. Urban Planning Is for Shadow Lovers: Washington DC and Houston, Texas 3. Scales of Extraction: Butte, Montana and Cimarron River, Oklahoma 4. Accessibility = Necessity: St. Charles Parish, Louisiana and Ohkay Owingeh, New Mexico 5. Circles and Squares: Mud Lake, Idaho and El Centro, California 6. A Tale of Two Coastlines: Point Reyes, California and Mount Desert Island, Maine 7. Arizona Is Impactful: Grand Canyon, Arizona and Meteor Crater, Arizona 8. Circular Distribution Networks: Black Rock, Nevada and Sun City, Arizona 9. Home Is Where We Park It: Franklin Lock, Florida and San Bruno, California 10. Greetings from Windy Places: Rainy Butte, North Dakota and Mahaska, Iowa 11. Other Side of the Tracks: Beaumont, Texas and Chicago, Illinois 12. Rapid Change in the Wildland-Urban Interface: Charlotte, North Carolina and La Grange, California 13. Track and Field: San Luis, Arizona and Greensburg, Kansas 14. Thoreau and Leopold: Concord, Massachusetts and Baraboo, Wisconsin 15. On the Water: Seattle, Washington and Wisteria Island, Florida 16. Project Towns: Page, Arizona and Oak Ridge, Tennessee FACING PAGE Map of the United States showing this section’s story locations.
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5 Introduction: The World of Land Parcels 1 4 3 2 PARCEL STORIES Flowing Encircles When Tuttle Creek Reservoir in Manhattan, Kansas, was constructed as a flood control mechanism in the 1950s, it didn’t just change the course of the meandering Big Blue River. It also forced the relocation or abandonment of several small farming towns that were settled in the valley. Among those is Old Randolph, which lies buried in the silt near the confluence with Fancy Creek in the upper left of the left image. Loch Leven formed in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, in 1776 when the Mississippi River changed course, creating the oxbow. Today Loch Leven is one of the largest floodplain restoration projects in the United States, made possible when a private landholder enrolled over 4,500 acres into the Wetland Reserve Program and reached out to The Nature Conservancy for assistance in managing it. Urban Planning Is for Shadow Lovers Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French-born architect and engineer, was commissioned by George Washington to design the capital city of Washington, DC. Diagonal avenues and circles purposefully overlay the square grid of streets to create open views and connect the Capitol with the White House. Center-pinning it all is the Washington Monument on the National Mall. Downtown Houston, Texas, and its skyscraper skyline cast shadows on the square parcel grid of city blocks. The grid was originally laid out to accommodate the Buffalo Bayou for maximum commercial wharfage opportunities. A vast freeway system encircles downtown Houston and frames the grid, contributing to Houston’s reputation as a car-centric city. FACING PAGE 1. Tuttle Creek Reservoir, Kansas 2. Loch Leven, Mississippi 3. Washington, DC 4. Houston, Texas
6 Parcels Scales of Extraction Situated on the edge of the Continental Divide and headwaters of the Columbia River watershed is the city of Butte, Montana. The surrounding mountains are patterned with rectangular mining claims on a slice of what was once known as the Richest Hill on Earth. In the center is the Berkeley Pit, a former open-pit copper mine once operated by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and part of the largest Superfund complex in the United States. Groundwater rises into the pit and must be continually pumped and treated to prevent overflowing into nearby Silver Bow Creek. Cargill operates the large-scale solar salt production facility on the naturally salty Cimarron River, near Freedom, Oklahoma. As the river flows through Permian Age geological formations rich in halite, groundwater dissolves ancient salt, producing brine. The Oklahoma sun and wind evaporate the water, leaving behind salt crystals. Thomas Jefferson knew of these salt deposits, and their potential extraction figured prominently in the Louisiana Purchase. Long before that, vast herds of bison, deer, and elk were attracted to the area as a natural salt lick. Native American tribes, including the Osage, Kiowa, and Wichita, gathered to collect salt from the salt plains of the Cimarron River. Accessibility = Necessity The lower Mississippi River is the defining feature of St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Known as one of the River Parishes upriver from New Orleans, access from either the east or the west bank is required in a river-based economy. The alluvial soil is highly productive agricultural land, and oil refineries and petrochemical plants line the riverbanks for easy transportation access. German pioneers primarily settled the area in the 1720s, but parcels here are characteristic of the long, narrow strips called ribbon-farms or long lots, a land division system used in French North American colonies, such as Louisiana and Detroit, that ensured farmers had access to water for transportation and productive soil. The confluence of the Rio Chama and Rio Grande Rivers in northern New Mexico is home to the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (Place of Strong People), which has been continually inhabited since the 13th century, making it one of the oldest communities in the United States. FACING PAGE 1. Butte, Montana 2. Cimarron River, Oklahoma 3. St. Charles Parish, Louisiana 4. Okhay Owingeh, New Mexico 1 4 3 2
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9 Introduction: The World of Land Parcels 1 4 3 2 Circles and Squares Mud Lake in Jefferson County, Idaho, is not a typical lake. As a sink area where Camas Creek spreads and naturally percolates into the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer, its existence depends on seasonal pulses. The presence of the aquifer has resulted in a bloom of agriculture that rings Mud Lake Wildlife Management Area, an 11,000-acre refuge for migratory waterfowl and shorebirds on the Pacific Flyway. The circular pattern of center pivot fields dots the landscape green in an otherwise dry and sagebrush expanse. The widespread use of these center-pivot irrigation systems has put pressure on the underlying aquifer, contributing to a long-term decline in the local water table. Just south of the Salton Sea lies one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world— the Imperial Valley—where the majority of California’s allotment of Colorado River water spreads over 460,000 acres. With plentiful sunshine, flat lands, and proximity to major transmission lines, the area is quickly becoming a solar energy production center. The conversion of farmland from food production to energy is challenging the valley’s longstanding agricultural identity. A Tale of Two Coastlines The coastal edges of the North American continent are hardly lines, but rather shifting zones influenced by natural forces. In addition to the Pacific Ocean, Point Reyes is split by the San Andreas Fault, which runs directly under Tomales Bay (and is also divided by a parcel line). This well-known tectonic boundary distinguishes the Pacific plate from the North American plate. In 1906, an earthquake here displaced the landscape 16 feet and changed the lay of the land. The consequences can be experienced directly by walking the Earthquake Trail at Point Reyes National Seashore, in Northern California. Three thousand miles to the east, the granite bones of Mount Desert Island in Maine on the same North American plate. Here, the rocky coast is broken up by glacial scars, such as the deep inlet of Somes Sound that nearly slices the island in two. The island is home to a blend of public land such as Acadia National Park and small towns such as Bar Harbor and Southwest Harbor. The land here may end at the jagged rock that defines Maine’s coastlines, but the economic reach extends into the Atlantic, where lobster traps create their own underwater grid of territory. FACING PAGE 1. Mud Lake, Idaho 2. Imperial Valley, California 3. Point Reyes, California 4. Mount Desert Island, Maine
10 Parcels Arizona Is Impactful If one way to view parcels is through a lens of extraction, another would be through impact. Here, two deep holes in the earth remind us that human-imposed grids coexist with extraordinary natural forces. Look closely and you’ll see the Colorado River knifing through the turquoise waterfalls and familiar homeland of the Havasupai People, deep in the Grand Canyon, Arizona. And to the north, the penciled outline of the 1.6 million-acre Kaibab National Forest marks another public land boundary. Not far from here lies another impactful site—a cataclysmic relic, the ancient outline of a meteor strike from at least 50,000 years ago. A mile wide and over 500 feet deep, Meteor Crater in Coconino County, Arizona, was the first site officially identified as an impact crater. Currently privately owned, its visitor center and gift shop are tourist destinations in their own right and each a reminder that Arizona is deeply impactful. Circular Distribution Networks In the vast and arid west, the circle serves as a recurring architecture of community and survival. Black Rock City emerges from the Nevada playa as a perennial host of the Burning Man festival, which operates on a special use permit granted by the federal Bureau of Land Management. In late summer, an ephemeral city is meticulously constructed and subdivided into a radial pattern and then erased when festival ends. The festival adheres to Leave No Trace principles to ensure this part of these public land parcels is conserved and accessible for future generations. In cosmic irony, the organic circle of Burning Man crosses three large square parcels, unnoticed by revelers. Further south in the Phoenix metropolitan area lies Sun City, Arizona. A master-planned retirement community built in the 1960s, Sun City was designed as a permanent golf- centric oasis. The circular layout was intended to create social connection and slow the pace of life in this Sonoran Desert enclave. FACING PAGE 1. Grand Canyon, Arizona 2. Meteor Crater, Arizona 3. Black Rock, Nevada 4. Sun City, Arizona 1 4 3 2
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13 Introduction: The World of Land Parcels 1 4 3 2 Home Is Where We Park It When seen from above, some parcel shapes are instantly recognizable. Look out the window on a flight from South Florida to San Francisco, and you just might see what looks like a whale’s tail breaching the Caloosahatchee River. That’s Franklin Lock campground in Alva, Florida. Home is where the heart is, literally, for the 500 or so residents along Cupid’s Way in San Bruno, California. Developed in the early 20th century, it wasn’t until 2004 that San Bruno used the neighborhood as an opportunity to rebrand as The City with a Heart. Greetings from Windy Places In the 1930s, the Teich Company, a linen manufacturer, popularized the vintage postcards “Greetings from North Dakota.” Their designs celebrated the patterned beauty of the state, especially those bright-yellow canola fields. Look closely at the green fields in Mahaska County, Iowa: The small circular parcels mark the locations of independently owned and operated wind turbines, their shadows tracing the outlines of each tower. Surrounding many farmhouses are north- and west-angled rows of trees known as windbreaks, planted to shield homes from cold winter winds and drifting snow. FACING PAGE 1. Franklin Lock, Florida 2. San Bruno, California 3. Rainy Butte, North Dakota 4. Mahaska County, Iowa
14 Parcels Other Side of the Tracks Railroads function as the industrial circulatory system of the continent, moving raw materials and expanding economic reach, but the placement of their tracks often creates a dividing line within communities. With proximity to the Gulf Coast, the railroads of Beaumont, Texas, tell a story of economic reach meeting industrial confinement. Beaumont’s development was spurred by the Sunset Route, a transcontinental line that connected the local petrochemical industry to international markets while also carving the town into distinct and often segregated zones. In both cities, rail has provided an engine for growth while also becoming the walls of the community’s social and physical map. In Chicago, the rail hub of North America, the landscape is a patchwork of massive railyards that act as iron boundaries. These parcels, such as the sprawling Clearing Yard—the largest intermediate switching terminal in the United States—are so vast they isolate entire neighborhoods. Rapid Change in the Wildland-Urban Interface New housing is a necessity to support the growing population of the Charlotte metropolitan area of North Carolina, where we zoomed out from earlier in Parcels of Ten. Many of these developments extend into the wildland urban interface (WUI), the peripheral and primarily intact natural environment that surrounds urban centers. As housing pushes into the WUI, large, forested parcels are subdivided, and the landscape changes rapidly. Clearing forests for new homes increases the risk of flooding and soil erosion and disrupts the ecosystem for plants and animals, highlighting the environmental trade-offs of suburban expansion. In the dry, grassy foothills of La Grange in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, a burn scar illustrates how quickly changing conditions can place entire communities at risk of wildfire or other environmental disasters. All across the WUI, this pattern of parcel subdivision and development demonstrates the tension between human settlements and the natural systems that sustain them. FACING PAGE 1. Beaumont, Texas 2. Chicago, Illinois 3. Charlotte, North Carolina 4. La Grange, California 1 4 3 2
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17 Introduction: The World of Land Parcels 1 4 3 2 Track and Field In small farming communities across the interior of America, parcels cluster tightly together, forming neighborhoods surrounded by expansive agricultural fields. Water infrastructure is equally defining. In San Luis, Arizona, canals carrying Colorado River water shape the landscape. In Greensburg, Kansas, the world’s largest hand-dug well stands as a reminder of the effort required to secure water on the Great Plains. At the edge of each town lies another important field—the high school athletic grounds. On Friday nights, these tracks and fields become gathering places and sources of hometown pride. Thoreau and Leopold Henry David Thoreau, a land surveyor, was aware of the ways agriculture and the expanding railroad were transforming the landscape of his day. In his memoir, Walden, Thoreau reflects on the sounds and labors of this progress, including the ringing of pickaxes carried across the countryside. Rather than fleeing these changes, Thoreau lived deliberately near them at Walden Pond, where he built a small cabin near Concord, Massachusetts, and spent more than two years experimenting with intentional living and composing the chapters that became Walden. Today, the land immediately surrounding Walden Pond is protected in recognition of Thoreau’s influence on American transcendentalism and his call to pay attention to the natural world, the intrinsic value of place, and the many virtues of sauntering. More than a century later, Aldo Leopold, a forester, lifelong outdoorsman, and former US Forest Service ranger—once dedicated to predator eradication— experienced his own awakening to the interconnectedness of ecological systems. He retired to the Shack, now the Aldo Leopold Farm and Shack National Historic Landmark near Baraboo, Wisconsin, where he composed the essays that became A Sand County Almanac, a monumental work in American conservation literature. Both locations are open to the public for visitation and introspection. FACING PAGE 1. San Luis, Arizona 2. Greensburg, Kansas 3. Walden Pond, Massachusetts 4. Baraboo, Wisconsin
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