Satellite night images of Athens, Buenos Aires and London (not to the same scale). From a distance, millions of single light-emitting elements (lamp-posts, car lights, building lights, etc.) add up to define the form of the full city. The tiny size of those light-emitting elements, when seen from space, diffuses the form of the city into a nebulous massing, where only a few elements such as thoroughfares and roads, neighborhoods, or the higher-density areas, are distinguishable. In these images, form is the result of the addition of a large number of minuscule units, in the same way that a large number of pixels define the image in a computer screen. This definition of form rejects the idea of contour, even geometry. It proposes a way of understanding complex formal relationships by means of very simple parameters such as concentration -in this case of light; adjacency -lit versus dark areas; or relative position -centralized versus radial arrangement.
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http://benfry.com/allstreets/
Check out the link above. Ben Fry has drawn every street in the United States, which produces an image that is reminiscent both visually and conceptually to the nighttime satellite images. As the dark eliminates all that is not a light source, Fry willfully disavows all that is not paved. Each acts as a graph of population density, land use, and manifest destiny (Jefferson's grid can easily be found in some places on the map).
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