HS2 geodata - for download

Yesterday I wrote a short post on the Guardian's Datablog about my difficulties getting hold of the route data for the proposed routes for the new high speed rail lines in England. Coincidentally (or maybe not) HS2 responded to my request at almost exactly the same time as the piece appeared online. Anyway, sometimes it does take time for public bodies to respond to requests so my real question was why the shapefiles were not available for download, given that they are available under the Open Government Licence. I have a few ideas about why this must be but it would be good to have some information from this on HS2, though maybe they're too busy with other things! Clarity on this issue might, however, reduce the likelihood of data conspiracy theories and enhance transparency.

Anyway, enough about that. So that other people don't have the same wait as me to get hold of the GIS data I've made them available here via the link below. A few important points to bear in mind...

1. The Phase 1 (London to West Midlands) route is the 'post-consultation' route from January 2012.

2. The Phase 2 (Leeds and Manchester) routes are the 'initial preferred routes' from January 2013.

3. There is an interactive map of the Phase 1 route on the HS2 web pages, which is quite useful.

4. Users of the data need to remember to acknowledge the source.

5. It's not my data - I'm just making it available.

6. You can also get these files from Barry Cornelius, but not - as yet - from data.gov.uk

7. The route data available for download here doesn't necessarily reflect the precise location of where the train lines will be built - particularly for Phase 2. 

HS2 shapefiles, as of 2 May 2013

Population growth in Manchester city centre, 2001 to 2011

Manchester city centre experienced a population explosion between 2001 and 2011. In the area covered by the map below the population increased by nearly 400% - from 5,957 to 23,295; a rise of 17,388 people.  In 1991, the same area (roughly) had a population of 2,887, as you can see here. Anyone who knows Manchester will know about this but possibly not about the scale of the change. A lot has been written about these changes (e.g. Centre for Cities in 2006, Manchester Evening News in 2012) but it is clear that much of the growth experienced in Manchester has been driven by a new phase of city centre living. Click an area on the map to find out more about it and zoom in to the larger version of the Google map to see it in more detail.

Click for larger version of this map

But who are these new residents? Chris Allen, writing in 2006, said they might be a mix of 'counter-culturalists' from the new middle class, 'city centre tourists' from the service class and 'successful agers', who tend to be over 50. Whoever they are, they're living in the new apartment buildings that began to sprout in the perforated urban landscape of central Manchester over a decade ago.

The map above contains a total of 15 small areas known as super output areas. If you click on any area you can find out how many people now live in each. The map also tells you the total land area of each small parcel and how many households are in it. You can find more of this kind of information via the Guardian datablog and also by clicking through to the raw data on the ONS web pages. It was only released on Friday but I've been looking at it now because I'm writing a short paper on small area population change in the English core cities. Central Manchester has grown the most but other cities have also experienced rapid expansions.

A note for spatial analysts: the 15 LSOAs you see in the map above are new. They are just 15 of the 229 new LSOAs across the core cities and this makes change over time analysis a little more tricky. Manchester's total population growth during this period was just under 20% (or 80,000) so the growth in the centre accounted for just over 21% of the increase.

Digital democracy in action

A short story about digital democracy today. Anyone with an interest in politics, democracy or government will have been intrigued by the publication of the latest proposed parliamentary constituency boundaries for England. The next step would then obviously be to look more closely at the proposed changes, but how might we do this? Well, you can go to the website and look at some Excel files or some PDFs. Or, you could go to a public office and look at a map (I even took a picture of one of these - below).

The problem here of course is that it is 2012 and most people might like to have a nice interactive, user-friendly map to look at which allows them to zoom into their area to see how the changes affect them. But this wasn't produced by the Boundary Commission for England. Instead - just like last time - a user-friendly interactive map has been produced by expert-enthusiasts, if I might call them that. The one I did was just a quick overnight project and although the new version is much nicer than my one it was still not produced by the people who actually should have done it. The O'Brien/Cheshire version is covered in the Guardian DataBlog and you can see from the comments that it allows people to understand in fine detail how the proposals might affect them.

Why does any of this even matter? It matters because changing parliamentary constituency boundaries is a key aspect of our democratic system and the people who represent us in parliament are tied to individual areas. Changes in these areas are not trivial and we need to be able to understand - in as much detail as possible - how proposed changes will impact upon us. It is also imperative that as many people as possible are able to see the new proposals. Publishing them in PDFs, Excel and in hard copy in a number of locations is okay but it falls well short of what we ought to expect. It shouldn't be left to mapping experts to produce interactive maps - even if it is quite enjoyable making them!

Using the current/proposed slider on the new map I can tell within 10 seconds that if the proposals go ahead I may very well have a new MP. With the spreadsheets, PDFs and hard copy map this is just not possible. Time for the Boundary Commission for England to revisit their approach in my opinion.

What happens when you blog?

I began this blog back in 2008 without knowing much about what I'd say or what it would become. Tech guru Alex Hardman said it would be a great idea for me to start a blog since I seemed to do a lot of visual stuff in my work. So I began blogging and decided from the start to just post what I wanted and to see where it took me. I thought I'd share a bit about my blogging experience just to demonstrate that it's not all a pointless navel-gazing exercise...

I'll start in July 2012 when I received an e-mail from legendary US-Swiss geographer Waldo Tobler saying that he noticed my map and work in the Economist (above). The June 30th edition had a special London supplement and they had asked me a little about my work on deprivation in London because they'd previously seen my work in The Guardian. I'd done a bit of work for The Guardian because Simon Rogers, the datablog editor-in-chief and all-round data journalism pioneer had seen some of my earlier work about deprivation on this blog. He'd simply contacted me to ask if I could help them get some online maps together for the release of the 2010 English Indices of Deprivation.

I started blogging about deprivation because that has been one part of my academic work for a while and there was tons of stuff (mainly maps, visuals and technical stuff) that I had produced but which would most likely never see the light of day again - and certainly not in an academic paper. Putting it on this blog means it can reach a wider audience and, more importantly, help connect me with others who have similar interests.

So, one very positive aspect of blogging (for me) has been that some of my academic-related work that would not otherwise be very widely read (i.e. it only appears in academic journals!) can reach a much wider audience. My view here is that if we're writing stuff as academics then surely we want people to read it. The blog gets somewhere in the region of 1,500-3,000 visits per month but this has taken a long time to develop. However, even when it was only getting 300 visits that meant I could still reach a much wider audience than writing academic papers alone.

The only thing that you need to do to keep the blog going is content, and that takes time so it is a bit of a commitment but I try to make my posts short and quite visual because reading from screens is just not as pleasant an experience as reading from paper. To my amazement people actually do find stuff I write and quite frequently they get in touch and we become collaborators - in a way that would not have happened had I not been blogging.

These are just a few examples of the type of things that have happened when I've been blogging. I'm sure others have had similar experiences. I'm not sure if it helps that my blog has a stupid name that I probably wish I'd never given it (!) but I try not to take myself too seriously so have not bothered changing it. At least people seem to remember it...

London's 100 Poorest Areas

The theme for this post follows on from some work I did recently which looked at the increasing level of deprivation in Outer London, as reported in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago - see also the maps on the Guardian datablog. It's true that housing market pressures (among other things) are helping to push poverty away from Inner London but the majority of London's poorest are still within the inner city, and Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham in particular. In order to provide a clearer picture of where exactly the very poorest (most deprived) areas are, I produced a map and animation of London's 100 most deprived areas. 

Animated version

The results are not at all surprising. Of the 100 most deprived LSOAs in London, according to the 2010 Indices of Deprivation, the Borough with the most areas is Tower Hamlets (18), followed by Hackney (17), Newham (13), Haringey (12) and Brent (10). Deprivation is increasing in Outer London relative to the past and I was particularly taken today by the news that Newham Council were looking to re-house poorer residents in Stoke (more than 150 miles away). That's taking the suburbanisation of poverty a bit far! 

Some work I did with Ed Ferrari last year looked at residential mobility patterns amongst the richest and poorest sectors of the population in England. What we found surprised us at the time. Our analysis showed that it was often the poorest areas which were associated with the longest residential moves. We didn't have enough fine-grained data to make more of this but it was an interesting insight into what might be happening more broadly.

Taking the 100 most deprived locations is of course arbitrary but the point here is that despite debates about whether 'the poor' should live in 'rich areas' the fact is that many of the poorest people living in London are in areas which in recent years have changed considerably so that they are now experiencing very high demand, inflated rents and severe socio-economic inequalities. This represents an intensification of existing processes rather than something entirely new but it does mean that policy makers need to think carefully about what to do about it...

Regeneration 2000-2009

Much has been written about regeneration in the UK over the past decade. A couple of days ago I saw a piece in the Guardian about 'regeneration in the noughties'. Interesting stuff - basically, it says that a decade of regeneration has resulted in nice looking city centres but not a lot else. In particular, it looks at the experience in Sheffield. (For Sheffield, the Sheffield blog is also quite interesting.)

I wrote a blog post about this general topic ages ago but it's useful to reflect on the past decade since the new one looks like it will be all about public spending cuts and not much shiny new regeneration.

Public Spending in the UK

The Guardian have been doing some interesting things with data over the past couple of years, including setting up their data store. One of the most interesting visualisations they have produced relates to public spending in the UK. The most recent version of this graphic (produced in conjunction with the Institute for Fiscal Studies), for 2008-09 reveals some interesting things...

• Total spending was £620.685 billion, up 7% on the previous year
  
• Department for Work and Pensions (state pensions, housing benefit, etc.) spending was £135.7 billion
• £94.552 billion was spent on the NHS
• Interest payments on debt were £24.1 billion
• 'Financial stability' measures (i.e. bailing out the banks) was £85.5 billion
• More money was spent bailing out LTSB and RBS (£36.9 billion) than on the Department for Communities and Local Government (£36.8 billion)
• DCLG spending for local and regional government was £25.4 billion

There's a fully fledged article on all this, and links to the downloadable pdf on the Guardian pages relating to this analysis. There's also a related flickr page for visualisations.