How many people live in Tokyo?

Back in August 2014 when I was preparing some material for teaching students how to query data in a GIS, I devised a very simple example where they had to select all the countries in the world with a lower population than the Tokyo Metropolitan Area (or Greater Tokyo Area, as it's sometimes called). I did this just as an example but since I found the results quite interesting, I quickly turned it into a map and posted it on Twitter, complete with 'Toyko' typo in the subheading. It was really just a quick example of how to query data in a GIS but it also highlighted the massive population of the Tokyo metropolitan area. You can find the full size, original image here. I was prompted to write this blog because the map was reposted on the Canadian Twitter feed @AsapSCIENCE a few days ago and since then my inbox has been a bit busy.

Now, back to the original question of how many people live in 'Tokyo'. Well, when I say 'Tokyo' in the map, I'm referring to the wider metropolitan area, which in 2014 the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects said has a total population of 37,833,000, far beyond the next largest urban agglomeration, Delhi, at 24,953,000. By way of comparison, using the urban agglomeration population (rather than a city's administrative boundaries), Toronto had 5.9 million, London had 10.2 million and Beijing had 19.5 million. Clearly, these definitions include other urban places that are not Tokyo (e.g. Yokohama) but they are recognized as being part of a fairly coherent metropolitan area. 

So, in the map, I'm using a figure of 'approx 36 million' as I say but in reality the UN figure is a bit higher. If we want to narrow the definition down to just the inner urban area then obviously the figure reduces significantly. I'm not usually one to cite Wikipedia, but in this case it's a good place to go to learn about the various definitions of the Greater Tokyo Area/Kantō region. If you don't want to click, here's a summary of some Tokyo populations...

• Former city area (23 'special wards') - 8.95 million people
• Tokyo Metropolis - 13.05 million
• Tokyo Metropolitan Employment Area - 31.70 million
• National Capital Region - 43.47 million

If we take the metropolitan definition used by the United Nations, then Tokyo does indeed have more people than Canada, at 35.5 million (2014 Statistics Canada estimate) and far more than Australia at 23.7 million (see their population clock). The Tokyo metropolitan population is roughly the same as the whole of California, which currently stands at about 38 million.

Link to chart

This was all just a little bit of map trivia and whilst it seems to have annoyed some people who live in a red country, the point was just to demonstrate the simple analytical power of GIS in addition to the size of Tokyo (to make it more interesting). The data I used are from Natural Earth if you want to have a look yourself and the software I used is a free GIS called QGIS, which is really good. Some other random facts about what happened to my original tweet...

• It was tweeted by Guardian Cities and then retweeted 309 times and favourited 107 times.
• It was tweeted by AsapSCIENCE on 22 January 2015 and since then retweeted 96 times and favourited 110 times.
• Akihabara News wrote an entire article about the map, and even spelled my name correctly - that hardly ever happens.
• Tokyo Desu also did a piece on it - and added another map too.
• What does it all look like on the ground? This photo (below) from ATBREAK gives you some idea.

Tokyo metropolitan area

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...

A plan to save Detroit?

A recent article by Bruce Katz captured my attention today. It's entitled 'The Detroit Project: A Plan for Solving America's Greatest Urban Disaster' - strong words indeed. It's of interest to me for a few reasons: 1. urban policy is one of my main research areas; 2. it mentions Sheffield - where I live; 3. it uses European examples in a positive light; 4. it makes international comparisons; 5. my Grandparents used to live and work in Detroit (they were immigrants in the early 1930s); 6. I've been there and seen the city first-hand (see photos below).

The policy challenges faced in Detroit are huge. The population has halved since 1950, unemployment is at 28% and there are 1,220 violent crimes per 100,000 people. Despite all this, I found it a very enjoyable city to visit. Maybe that's because I've also lived in cities such as Glasgow and Liverpool and I like interesting places. Anyone who has driven along the lower dock road in Liverpool and West Fort Street in Detroit will understand. However, the claim that 'Europe is filled with cities that have risen from similarly miserable conditions' is, in my view, a bit over the top. Having said that, anyone who grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s would understand the comparison.

I do agree with the assertion that 'recovery requires at least a generation' - as Katz says.

Everything is Connected

One of the things I said I'd be blogging about is urban issues and things to do with urban life, specifically as they relate to planning. However, I thought it would be good to do a quick post on the topic of connections and how it's really impossible to fully separate the urban from the non-urban or rural. This is a topic which a colleague of mine, Andreas Schulze Bäing explored in his PhD thesis and one which I do research on, but without so much focus on the rural dimensions. I'm also aware that I come from an area that is not exactly an exemplar urban area (the Highlands of Scotland), even though I've lived all my adult life in cities (Glasgow, Columbus (Ohio), Liverpool). So, if you're from a rural area like this...

... it doesn't mean that cities are irrelevant. In fact, given that they are now seen as the drivers of economic growth in many advanced industrial economies, we really should be aware of how things are connected. When you look at the major migration patterns in the UK, these kinds of connections are more obvious.


When you look at the patterns in even more detail, in this 3D image I created for migration patterns in the North West of England (high in-migration areas in red, out-migration areas in blue), we start to get a better understanding of the ways in which cities import people (mainly students and young people). However, they do export families who generally tend to rely on urban areas for a living but don't want to live there... But that's another matter.



So, everything is connected to everything else. This is exactly what Waldo Tobler's First Law of Geography states and I am a firm believer in it. Nothing should be studied in isolation (especially in planning) and that's why much of my work includes a spatially dynamic element. The relative importance of this connectivity may vary, but it is invariably important. We need to see the big picture if we are to understand what's going on in our own back yard, so to speak.

How Many People Live in Manchester?

A quick post on a common urban theme. Answering the question of how many people live in a city is very tricky. Do you use the political boundaries of the local authority? Do you use the extent of the urban area? Do you use some other definition? In a completely unscientific experiment, I've developed a different approach - and it turns out that the populations I come up with are not that different to those given for the city-regions of the places on my list.

Here's what I did... I took the eight core cities in England, plus London and chose the main central train stations in each of them as the central location (e.g. Lime Street in Liverpool). Then I used a bit of GIS wizardry to calculate the population within a 15 mile radius of said stations (statistically significant distance determined after much spatial analysis... and a bit off the top of my head). Here's the results (using ancient 2001 Census data):

Obviously, these figures differ a lot from the local political entities with the same names (e.g. Manchester the district has about 430,000 people). Even though I've used a fairly arbitrary technique, the populations are a much better reflection of the urban population than others often cite. So, let's compare the figures. On Census day in 2001 London had 7,172,091 people, Birmingham city-region had 2,693, 917, Manchester city-region had 2,482,328 and the other cities on the list show similarities to the 15 mile figure. What does this tell us? Not much really, except that if we use a 15 mile buffer from central train stations we get a good approximation of city-region populations for the major English cities. Here's how it looked on the map:

Cities are Back?

Just a quick post today regarding the issue of whether British 'cities are back'. Since the report of the Urban Task Force in 1999 and the much-cited 'urban renaissance' cities have been back on the agenda but in a more positive light than in the past. People now seem to want to live in them again, city-centre living has been given a new lease of life and huge amounts of public and private cash have been spent doing them up. However, is all of this a good thing? I would say that overall it is but I just wonder how sustainable it is. What are the implications if it all goes wrong and investors and people flood out of the cities once more? What if people don't really want to live in the shadow of tower blocks forever. What if it is not really a renaissance?

I took this picture in Glasgow in July 2004. Contrast between 1960's tower blocks at Red Road and 2000's new builds. Quite striking I think. An illustration of how urban policy plays out in reality. We'll have to wait and see how the urban renaissance pans out but for now I suppose we ought to wish it all the best and keep track of how things go.

It has to start somehwere

I have just arrived in the blogosphere after much deliberation about whether or not I have anything useful/interesting to say. This should become clear over time. I aim to write on my work on screeencasting, e-learning, GIS, urban things to do with my work as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies at the University of Manchester and anything else I want to. Perhaps other people with similar interests with their own blogs will find me and we can compare notes. So, what to write about today? For my first post I've decided to talk about my current work developing screencasts (eh?) for teaching here at the University of Manchester. A screencast is a video demo of some kind of computer activity. Read on...

Screencasting - Being in Two Places at Once
A lot has been written about screencasting. It's not new. Neither is e-learning. Yet the two are not as well acquainted as they ought to be. In any class where software is taught there is only so much time that you can spend helping individual students, so having a back-up is ideal. This is where screencasting comes in. You just record your screen activity and then save it for playback later by ultra-keen, interested students (just like the ones at the University of Manchester). Host it on a virtual learning environment (a fancy term for web pages for university classes) and let students go wild learning all about it. Here's an example (reduced in size):

Essentially, it allows you to be in two places at once demonstrating a piece of software, or in the case of the above showing how to download data from an online data store. I suppose it really allows you to be in as many places at once as there are people using it. Isn't this the whole point of e-learning? As a result of my enthusiasm for screencasting, my interest in e-learning and the fact that I teach a range of different software skills at the University of Manchester (including GIS), I have embarked on an ambitious project which aims to produce lots of screencast content for students in the School of Environment and Development here.

There's not really much more to say about it at this stage but I'll be writing more in the near future.