The Geography of Agency
Introducing The Spatial Join
I was sitting in a cafe the other day, watching the light filter through the trees. It was one of those rare, quiet afternoons where Pune feels less like a construction site and more like the Pensioner’s Paradise it used to be.
I was thinking about Haruki Murakami.
There is a specific mood in his novels that I’ve always loved. The protagonist is usually doing something incredibly mundane: cooking pasta, ironing a shirt, or listening to jazz, while a parallel world hums silently just beneath the surface. There are two worlds: the visible one we live in, and the hidden machinery that actually drives the plot.
As I looked out the window, looking at the delivery boy wrestling his bike through the dug-up road, I had a bit of an epiphany. We like to think we have agency. We like to think we are the authors of our own stories. We choose our jobs, our friends, our hobbies. But we often ignore the invisible stage upon which these plays act out. We ignore the parallel world of geography.
To understand this, we have to look at the tangible, and the intangible.
When you pay 25,000 rent for a tiny apartment in Kothrud, the tangible is the transaction. You pay money; you get a roof. You might grumble that the rent is "mental."
But the intangible lies in what makes the rent so high in the first place. The rent is not just for the walls. It is the price of the invisible lines that converge on that coordinate. It is the price of the commute time saved because you aren't driving in from Wagholi. It is the price of the catchment area of a specific school. It is the premium that you pay for market forces that converge, causing the value of land to rise through: accessibility, quality of life, amenities and proximity to centres of commerce.
We spend our lives navigating these invisible currents. We fight traffic that was pre-destined by a road layout designed in the ‘60s. We pay surcharges on coffee because of supply chain logistics we will never see. We live in "boxes" (quite literally) that were defined by a surveyor before we were born.
That brings me to the name of this publication: The Spatial Join.
For the data scientists and map-makers reading this, you know the technical definition. A “spatial join” is a GIS operation- it’s how we take two different datasets and merge them based on their location. It’s how you take a list of crimes committed and a map of streetlights and combine them to see the relationship.
But for everyone else, think of it as a metaphor.
This publication is about the intersection where abstract geography crashes into the mechanics of real life.
We’re going to look at topics like:
The Economics: Why a 2BHK in one pin code costs a crore more than the one next to it.
The Supply Chain: How your coffee traveled 8,000 kms to get here, and why the last mile was the hardest part.
The Hidden biases: How algorithms map the world, and who gets left off the map.
If you have ever been stuck at a signal, staring at a stalled construction project and thinking, “There has to be a reason for this,” you are in the right place.
Welcome to The Spatial Join.
The Feed
A “Spatial Join” in the Wild: Fitness App Exposes Secret US Army Bases An oldie but a perfect example of why this newsletter exists. Strava publishes a heatmap of anonymised movement data acrosst the world. It looked innocent, until people realised the bright spots in the middle of the Syrian desert were actually secret US bases where soldiers were doing their morning runs.
Map of the Week: The Submarine Cable Map We talk about “The Cloud” like it’s in the sky, but it’s actually on the ocean floor. This interactive map shows the physical geography of the internet. Notice how the fiber optic cables follow the exact same shipping routes established by the British East India Company 200 years ago.
The Logistics of Now: Why Swiggy, Zepto and Blinkit see things differently The Ken breaks down the current Quick Commerce war. This deep dive explains how the “10-minute” promise is a complex financial derivative based on how close you live to a Dark Store.