Deprivation in your area - search and zoom

After making a new website when the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation 2012 was released, I've been looking at some of my old English IMD web pages and tools and so have decided - in anticipation of the next update to the IMD - to add a 'search and zoom' tool so that anyone who is interested can find out what deprivation is like in their area - or any other area of England you are interested in. Like my previous versions of this kind of thing it's based on Google Maps but in the version seen in the screenshot below you can simply enter a place, neighbourhood, postcode or address (or even an organisation, like Centre for Cities) into the search box and it will go straight there after clicking 'search'. Click the image or the link below to use the tool.

IMD Search and Zoom

As usual with these kinds of maps, if you click on an area the pop-up will give you more information. The next update of the IMD was to have been in 2013 but I'm not sure if that is still going to happen. However, I've updated this tool just in case so that I can add in the next update whenever it becomes available. The Scottish version of this tool is on this page, but I have not yet done the same for Wales or Northern Ireland.

IMD 2004, 2007, 2010 - Change Over Time...

This is the last deprivation-related post in a while. I promise. I've been experimenting with English IMD data from 2004, 2007 and 2010 and have finally found a moment to do to it what I did to the Scottish IMD data, where it is all online and clicking an area produces a chart showing change in rank through time. In this new example, I've also added in the change in rank between 2004 and 2010, as you can see below. The rank change doesn't tell you if an area became more deprived in absolute terms, only that it is less or more deprived in relation to the other 32,481 LSOAs in England.

You can see in the example above a case of a quite large change in rank. This is for an LSOA in London. The maps are quite basic because I don't have time right now to build a more sophisticated site but the colour scheme is based on quintiles, with red most deprived, yellow next and blues less deprived (the darker the blue, the less deprived), as below.

For the moment, I don't have any plans to extend this analysis to Wales or Northern Ireland, but you never know...

Isolated Entities or Integrated Neighbourhoods?

My paper on spatial context and deprivation is to be published in Urban Studies in August 2009. Since it is imminent I thought I'd do a very quick blog on the topic. In a nutshell, it's about looking beyond the attributes of individual locations and also considering the spatial location of neighbourhoods as an important contextual factor in how they operate. This paper is really just a baseline study in terms of data and a method of understanding spatial context, so more on this in future...

The front page of the paper is shown below, but for the real thing you'll need to see Urban Studies itself.

Sustainable Communities in Manchester

A new piece of work has recently been published by the Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER), a Commission set up to provide an evidence-base for decision making in the Manchester city region (MCR). The publication is called 'Sustainable Communities' and is an overview of deprivation and neighbourhoods in MCR. Some of the material is related to work I was involved in during my time at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies in Manchester and I still have an interest in what's going on there. Changes in neighbourhoods in many parts of MCR have been good, but the performance varies across the different areas.

Since I'm doing some work on indicators and spatial policy monitoring at the moment, I thought I'd do a short post on this topic. In particular, I wanted to explore the changes in the percent of people in each Greater Manchester district (Bolton, Bury, Oldham, etc...) who live in areas ranked among the 10% most deprived nationally between the Indices of Deprivation from 2004 and 2007. In actual fact, of course, the IMD2004 is based mainly on data from 2001 and the IMD2007 on data from 2005 - so the comparison here is really between conditions in 2001 and 2005. Nonetheless, I wanted to see how things had changed.

I linked the population in each lower layer super output area (LSOA) to the IMD data for each area and then added up the population in each district that fell within the most deprived 10% nationally (i.e. ranked from 1 to 3,248). The results are provided in the chart below, followed by some comments. [Quick explanation: for example, Trafford now has around 2% less of it's population living in areas classified as amongst the 10% most deprived in England - this ought to mean things are getting better - very crudely speaking]


As you can see, the population of Manchester within the 10% most deprived nationally (England) has fallen by around 8%. This is the most obvious change. Falls were also evident in Bury, Salford, Trafford and Wigan. In contrast, Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport and Tameside (marginal) saw a rise in the population ranked amongst the 10% most deprived nationally.

Notwithstanding such issues as the ecological fallacy and questions about the validity of such indices in the first place - the changes are very interesting - particularly when we begin to ask questions about how these changes have occurred. Has it been because of household mobility, increased prosperity, or another reason? That's for someone else to answer. For now, I'll just finish by adding this chart on population changes between 2001 and 2005 - it makes an interesting comparison (has the increase in Manchester's population between 2001 and 2005 been a process of displacement of less well off people by more affluent people? maybe).