As a follow-up to Nick’s post on the tradeoff between drawing reasonably compact districts and lowering the efficiency gap in a state like Illinois, this image of the districts in and around Chicago helps illustrate the district shapes the Democrats needed to use to ensure a more Democratic plan than drawing reasonably compact districts would have produced. On the tradeoff in general between districting that aims to generate particular outcomes (such as partisan “fairness”) and districting that is more process oriented (such as ensuring that neighborhoods stay together and districts are not highly contorted in shape), see here.