"The Regional World", version 2

I recently came back to CartoDB to do a bit of experimenting for some GIS work I'm doing this autumn, so I decided to revisit a topic I looked at before: sub-national regions of the world. In a previous version I posted via Twitter I took sub-national boundaries of the world and put together an interactive map (in about 15 minutes, so it wasn't very good). I've now produced a better one. It's not perfect but I have managed to add in an equal area projection version and other simple features - such as scale-dependent labelling and line styling.

The Regional World - version 2

According to Wikipedia, the largest sub-national divisions in the world are the Sakha Republic (Yakutiya) in Russia, Western Australia, and Krasnoyarsk Krai, also in Russia. The first two are more than ten times the size of the UK (which is 244,000 sq km) and number three almost is. If you click on the link above to go to the map then you'll see that you can also click on the equal area version. I did this because web maps often default to the Mercator projection, which causes massive distortion towards the poles and leads people into thinking Greenland is bigger than Africa, which of course it isn't.

The Regional World - equal area projection

The equal area projection does of course mean that areas towards the poles are extremely distorted, but that's part of the deal with some map projections. I've taken the administrative boundaries at face value, but of course they may not be 100% accurate, as the authors of the data acknowledge:

"This is the toughest dataset to keep current. Unlike the United States, other countries constantly rearrange their admin-1 units, slicing and combining them on a regular basis."

Read more about the data

You'll notice that I have put links to a small number of countries on the main map. I chose these because I find them interesting, that's all. This was part experiment with CartoDB and a little SQL (projection) and CSS (scale-dependent styling), part GIS project, part teaching material, partly driven by my interest in regions more generally, and part pre-holiday wind-down. In relation to the latter, just for fun, I have hidden two little artefacts in the main map that only appear when you zoom to a certain level at two places on earth. 

Can you find them? 

Answers via Twitter or e-mail...

The London Problem Revisited

I've been thinking about the matter of London and the kind of 'two-speed Britain' stories which have been in the press recently. The idea is that London's continued growth and prosperity - in contrast to the rest of the UK - is a problem. The BBC covered this via Stephanie Flanders in March and the Guardian did a piece on it in May this year. The Economist even did a special supplement on London last year, entitled 'On a High' in which they covered a range of issues, not just economic growth - e.g. a map and some of my work on deprivation on p. 7 of the pdf. These kinds of stories always generate a lot of debate (see the comments on the Guardian piece for an example) of the 'London vs. the rest' variety but I suppose the thing that sticks in my mind is that none of this is really new. The precise nature of London's recent resurgence is perhaps unique but it's hardly a new problem. I was reminded of this last week at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies 30th Anniversary conference in Manchester when Sir Brian Briscoe quoted from the Barlow Report of 1940 (photo below - yes, I actually have a real copy to hand!). 

This in turn reminded me of the 1985 edition of the Planner magazine that I've had on my desk for some time. Why do I have this? Because it's a special issue to commemorate the life of former Chief Planner and University of Sheffield Professor JR James, who featured on the front cover of the April 1985 edition, five years after his untimely death in September 1980. In this edition, leading planners of the time gave a series of lectures on seminal reports - Peter Hall on The Barlow Report, Gerald Wibberley on The Scott Report and HR Parker on The Uthwatt Report.

Peter Hall's reading  of Barlow is fascinating for many reasons but I found it interesting that he chose to pick out the exact same quote that Sir Brian Briscoe did last week: "the continued drift of population to London and the Home Counties constitutes a social, economic and strategical problem which demands immediate attention" (p. 202 - see below for copy of the original, in paragraph 5).

These words were written in very different times (e.g. it was published shortly after the outbreak of WW2 and in fact some of the content had to be changed to reflect this) but the over-arching message of a dominant London and a lagging rest of Britain resonates today. The policy solutions proposed in 1940, however, are rather different to those suggested today. For example, there was a strong emphasis on regionalism in the Barlow Report - unlike today. Further, there was a real concern about what could be done to address this nationally problematic uneven development (well, at least in theory) - e.g. Part IV from p. 185 is entitled 'Remedies ... And to Report what Remedial Measures, if any, should be taken in the National Interest'. So, this is not just an historical curiosity. On p. 197 we have more on 'methods of decentralisation or dispersal', which many today would like to see.

As for the man himself, Sir Anderson Montague-Barlow (image at bottom of page), I'm not sure what he'd make of the current rhetoric of a 'two-speed' UK but I'm sure he'd recognise that it's nothing new. The question that remains in my mind is whether this London boom will continue indefinitely and what the consequences of that might be. Some final thoughts for now...

1. Lost in much of this two-speed UK talk is the fact that inequality and poverty in London are quite extreme. That's what I was getting at in my very small contribution to the Economist supplement last year and in another Guardian piece. This is something that Ben Hennig has been looking at in more detail in recent times - see here for more.

2. Much less has been said about why this London/rest issue might be a problem and - more importantly - what might be done about it. Certainly, I don't think we'll see a Barlow-style Royal Commission about this any time soon.

3. What about the contribution of the rest of the UK to London's growth - e.g. in sending graduates, commuters, funding for infrastructure, and public transport - to name just four factors. The question here might be to what extent is London's growth down to the fact that it has a Barlow-esque gravity? Easy to answer but harder to quantify.

4. Are we witnessing a 'London supernova'? Will this bright shining star gradually fade? Fancy rhetoric, but worth thinking about, given the cyclical nature of boom and bust. See p. 52-54 of this RTPI report for more.

5. And, finally, we ought to look at old books and magazines more! 

The Population of China

In a few weeks I will be travelling to China for a conference, where I'm co-presenting a paper on regional inequalities in China and the EU. This has meant I've had to get hold of lots of Chinese datasets, some of which I have produced maps from - so I thought I'd post one or two here, along with some facts and figures. I should point out that most of the data I've been using has come from the National Bureau of Statistics of China website. 

Higher resolution version

In this 3D map I've just extruded the surface using population density data at a very local level. This required a reasonable amount of computing power but the effect is simply to emphasise the significant West/East split in population within China. This geographical division has been the topic of discussion for a long time and in relation to a number of areas but is generally referred to as the Hu Huanyong line (also sometimes the Hu line, Heihe-Tengchong Line or Aihui-Tengchong Line), after the Chinese population geographer of the same name. Strangely enough, there is a Facebook page dedicated to the Hu line. The line divides China roughly into two parts. In 1935 when Hu first identified the split, the West had 57% of the area and 4% of the population. Today, the East has 94% of the population of China, but only 43% of the area. You can see how this looks in the map below... 

I'm still working on my parts of the presentation but am really fascinated by the facts and figures emerging from the 2010 Chinese census and data for different regions of China. China accounts for almost exactly 20% of the world population and both Beijing and Shanghai (i.e. the provinces) have 20 million or more people. I still need to learn a lot more about China, Chinese data and regional development there generally but my work so far suggests that patterns of regional inequality - while different in absolute terms - are often strikingly similar to patterns of regional inequality in Europe. A good example of this is in Jiangsu province, to the north of Shanghai.

Citations: Center for International Earth Science Information Network - CIESIN - Columbia University, International Food Policy Research Institute - IFPRI, The World Bank, and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical - CIAT. 2011. Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project, Version 1 (GRUMPv1): Population Density Grid. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). http://dx.doi.org/10.7927/H4R20Z93. Accessed 10 June 2012.

Balk, D.L., U. Deichmann, G. Yetman, F. Pozzi, S. I. Hay, and A. Nelson. 2006. Determining Global Population Distribution: Methods, Applications and Data. Advances in Parasitology 62:119-156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0065-308X(05)62004-0.

P.S. Thanks are due to Chunhua Liu for her insights here!

NEETs in England, 2000 to 2011 (Animated Chart)

The news last week that the number of 16 to 24 year olds in England not in education, employment or training (NEET) reached an all-time high was widely covered, and quite shocking since there are now 1.16 million 16 to 24 year olds in this category. I thought it might be quite interesting to look at the data more closely to see how it compares to other time periods. The Department for Education publish the NEET data on a quarterly basis and the most recent data are for the third quarter of 2011 at the regional level. "What would the quarterly data look like in an animated bar chart?", I hear you say. Click the image below to find out!

Click to see a full size version of this animation.

I should say that you'll need to watch the clip a few times in order to make sense of it (and use the pause button), but once you get your head round it, it tells an interesting story (it also dances a bit like an equalizer on an old stereo). The lowest NEET total for England was in the second quarter of 2000 (629,000) and the highest total comes from the third quarter of 2011 (1,163,000). The highest regional percentage figure for NEETs was in the third quarter of 2011 in the North West (23.9%) and the lowest was in the last quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004 in the South West (7.4%).

Lots of interesting stories here but the most striking thing is the total number of NEETs in England. 

Note: I created this using Google's motion charts and recorded it using Camtasia.

GDP in the EU27 and the United Kingdom

New data on regional gross domestic product (GDP) was published by Eurostat yesterday. It is for the year of 2008 and covers the 27 Member States. When you look at the data for NUTS 2 level the results are very interesting. When you account for purchasing power standards and index the EU average at 100, the highest figure is Inner London, at 343. The lowest figure is for the Bulgarian region of Severozapaden - officially the poorest region in the EU by this measure.

Here's how it looks on the map...


Clearly, the eastern and southern parts of the EU territory are 'poorest' by this measure and there are some major concentrations of low values in the accession states - particularly in Bulgaria and Romania. Of the 64 regions with a GDP of below 75% of the EU average, here's where they are:

"Among the 64 regions below the 75% level, fifteen were in Poland, seven each in the Czech Republic and Romania, six each in Bulgaria and Hungary, four each in Italy and Portugal, three each in Greece, France (all overseas departments) and Slovakia, two in the United Kingdom, one in Spain, as well as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania."

Within the UK, there is significant variation, from 71 in West Wales and the Valleys to 343 in Inner London, though it is worth pointing out that GDP data is affected by commuting patterns, particularly in areas of high in-commuting like Inner London. Nonetheless, here's how it looks on the chart...


As you'd expect, this new data has led to various news stories, including this one by the BBC. The data on GDP are never as up to date as we'd like, but it is interesting looking across the regions of the EU and particularly so when we map it.

MIT and Great Britain Regions

Some interesting news from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the BBC News website...

Analysts from the SENSEable City Lab have produced a new map of the regions of Great Britain using a novel approach. The new map is based on telecoms data of human interactions (i.e. phone calls) and it is based on a dataset of "12 billion calls over a one-month period, estimating more than 95% coverage of the Great Britain's residential and business landlines". They must have a big computer. What does it all look like? Check out this video:



There's a longer paper on this and it's worth also checking out the Network&Society pages related to the work. You can even download a zip file with all the maps and use them free of copyright (so long as you acknowledge the source). The main map to feature in the BBC story is shown below - interesting when you compare it to some of the flow maps for the UK that I've blogged on before...

The Regional Studies Association

Today, I thought I'd write about the Regional Studies Association (RSA) and what they're all about. I am involved with the RSA in a professional capacity but have also enjoyed their conferences, events, and journals for many years and my interests are very much aligned with those of the organisation.

What does the RSA do? Good question...

"The Regional Studies Association is a learned society concerned with analysis of regions and sub national issues. Through our International membership we provide an authoritative voice of, and network for, academics, students, practitioners, policymakers and interested lay people in the field of regional studies."

So, if you're interested in regions, cities, regional economics, spatial analysis, urban issues and anything related to any of these areas, the RSA is likely to be relevant to your work. The international conferences are also really good and in 2010 it takes place in Pécs, in Southern Hungary (about 215km from Zagreb, and 200km from Budapest).

A screenshot of the RSA website is shown below. Take a look by clicking the image.