Two Sundays ago, the artist and urban planner Neil Freeman stood in front of a vacant lot in Bushwick, Brooklyn, beneath the elevated J train and across the street from an apartment blasting Colombian cumbia music. “This is the geographic center of New York,” he said to me and five others shivering in the pre-spring cold. “This spot is equidistant from every other spot in New York, or at least it was when I made the calculation in 2010.”

We were here because we had seen Freeman announce on Twitter that he would be leading one of his periodic art walks. Thirty-two and bushy-bearded, Freeman wore a black parka, jeans, loosely tied New Balances, and a button that said “I listen to NPR and I suck.” The train roared past, and a brisk wind blew a potato-chip bag toward his feet.

The walk, called “Centroids and Asphalt,” was about paying attention to “the different things that shape the city, different flows of matter and information,” Freeman said. He pulled two small Tupperware containers from a black shoulder bag and opened the lids. Inside were pieces of colored chalk. He handed out the pieces and asked us to look around, identify something that caught our eye, and draw it on the sidewalk. I drew a trash can overflowing with garbage. My fellow-walkers—men and women in their twenties and thirties with jobs in design, technology, and media—drew parts of the subway, patches of graffiti-tagged wall, sides of buildings. Freeman asked about the raw materials in the objects we’d drawn. Where does brick come from? Aluminum, asphalt? “Asphalt is kind of amazing,” he said. “Stone and oil. The stone’s from upstate New York. The oil is from Venezuela.”

Freeman works as a transportation planner in Manhattan, but most know him as the guy behind Fake is the New Real, a Web site where he posts art work inspired by his long obsession with cities. He created the site back in 2003, as a math and visual-arts student at Oberlin College, and began to expand it during grad school at Harvard, where he earned a masters degree in urban planning. Freeman’s art is brainy and beautiful, but it’s hard to encapsulate in a brief phrase, which he says is the point; he has only occasionally shown his art in galleries because he doesn’t want to have to think about building a brand. “There’s a whole system of expectations that don’t exist on the Internet because it’s just stuff on the Internet,” he says.

Broadly, the goal of Freeman’s stuff is to visualize geography in surprising ways. Using publicly available data sets and software tools to manipulate them, he cuts familiar places into pieces and tiles the pieces into new patterns. Three years ago, for instance, he had the idea to draw a map in which every street in a city is centered on the same point. Viewed this way, New York takes on the shape of a sea urchin; Chicago, Freeman’s home town, is a four-point star; Los Angeles shoots out jellyfish-like tentacles across several axes. Often he generates a new work by messing around with scale: “Scale is a convention in maps that people take for granted and don’t notice.” In 2003, he created a deck of playing cards featuring maps of all nuclear-capable nations, rescaling the maps so that each of the sixty-seven nations was the same size; the following year, he took the subway grids of dozens of cities—Tokyo, Berlin, Shanghai, Madrid—and fit them to a single scale, revealing distinctions that weren’t as visible before.

Freeman’s best-known project is his most explicitly political. In 2004, with the Presidential election approaching, he started thinking back to the mess of 2000, when it became clear that a vote in Florida counted so much more than a vote in, say, Wyoming. The electoral college “really doesn’t make any sense,” yet no one had been able to reform it. Freeman wondered if he could make the case for abolishment by playfully pointing out its fundamental absurdity.

The result was a new map of the United States. To preserve the electoral college while making it fair, Freeman redrew state lines so that each state contained about the same number of people: 6,175,000. In his scheme, the bulk of California shatters into seven separate territories, including “Shasta,” “Mendocino,” “Tule,” and “Temecula,” while North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and most of the population of Colorado smush into one irregular rectangle called “Ogallala.” Although Freeman writes on his site that the map is “not a serious proposal, so take it easy with the emails about the sacred soil of Texas,” several prominent bloggers have found it captivating enough to consider how it would change American politics. Slate’s Matt Yglesias noted that parts of the Pacific coast would turn red and some Southern states would grow more liberal; Nate Cohn of The New Republic recently determined that, by turning some heavily Democratic-leaning cities into “city-states,” the map would have caused Democrats to win those regions by uselessly large margins in 2012, tilting the election toward Mitt Romney. In February, the forecasting guru Nate Silver used Freeman’s map to discuss whether the existing system gives an unfair advantage to either party. Concluding that it doesn’t, Silver defended the legitimacy of our tried-and-true state boundaries. “I like Nate Silver’s work a lot,” Freeman says. “He’s very interested in the states. That’s what he does! If there was only one state, he’d be out of business.”

As Freeman led us through Bushwick, he talked about everything that had gone into creating the neighborhood, across multiple scales and species, from the glacier that first carved out its geological features twenty thousand years ago to the animal inhabitants of coops and sewers (pigeons, cockroaches) to the cell-phone signals pinging in and out of homes. Freeman tended to run his fingers along the edges of things he passed: a raised street address on a piece of green fencing surrounding the South Bushwick Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, a U-shaped bicycle lock hanging randomly from a tree branch. At one corner, he pointed to a nondescript birch tree cramped into a tiny backyard and said that, according to his analysis of data on New York’s six million trees, that birch was “the center of the urban forest”—another centroid.

After an hour and a half, we came to the corner of Stanhope Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, a little more than a mile from where we’d started. There was nothing obviously remarkable about the spot—row houses, parked cars. Freeman asked us to look around. Notice how empty the streets are, he said. Why? Why had no developers built on such prime real estate? “There’s just this agreement that the streets will be open, and they are,” he said, grinning. “We create a fantasy of what it’s going to be like and we all agree to it.” More than just a physical space, he explained, a city is a set of cultural norms. “It’s kind of a shared dream.” Stop dreaming, stop continually making decisions to maintain it, and ivy creeps up the walls.

Freeman said we had paused here for a reason: if we visualized the city as a series of street intersections, we were now standing at the center of New York. In other words, if the city was a giant cookie tray and you put a tiny weight on every intersection, the tray would balance on this point. (Intersections aren’t evenly distributed across the boroughs, which is why this centroid is different from the one at the start of the walk.) It was a very Freeman moment: you focus on a place not because it’s inherently interesting but because it has some significance in a larger mathematical system, then you find what’s interesting afterward.

He said he was happy to keep talking with us, but he didn’t want to be the focus of attention anymore. He nodded toward a coffee shop across the street, and we hurried inside. After warming up for a bit, Freeman thanked us, walked back to the vacant lot, unlocked his bicycle, and pedalled home, to Gowanus.

Map courtesy of Neil Freeman.