NSNR Final Evaluation

Just over a week ago (4th March 2010), the final evaluations of two major English urban policy initiatives were published by CLG. One of these was the New Deal for Communities (NDC) final assessment - the other was the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (NSNR) final report. This short post is about the latter document, which contains 119 pages in all.

The NSNR was launched in 2001 with the notion that "within 10 to 20 years no-one should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live" - a very noble (unrealistic?) goal. The report itself covers the following, in some detail:

• the nature of deprived neighbourhoods;
• change in deprived areas;
• factors influencing change in deprived neighbourhoods;
• the impact of NSNR on deprived neighbourhoods;
• the effectiveness of NSNR arrangements; and
• lessons for the future.

With all such evaluations, however, the real issue is not the evaluation itself but the wider context within which the programme operates. It has been said that the most effective anti-poverty strategy is economic growth and in many ways this is true, but even in a period of sustained growth (e.g. 1997 to 2007) what we have seen is a deepening of concentrated deprivation in many cities, though there have been some successes. So, on p. 80 we have "overall value for money appeared to be good for the majority of the interventions" and on p. 112 a more engouraging statement: "in terms of value for money, NRF appears to have performed well – demonstrably so with regard to reducing worklessness in particular"

Some earlier work I was involved in at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies is reported from p. 18 to 21 and there are many other interesting results, data and maps. The report also makes a very kind acknowledgement of my input!

Visualising London Population Growth

Update, 7 June 2011 - See bottom of post for a new animation...

Following the theme of the last post - and the last series of posts with video content and animations, this is a short post on the development of London's population, by Borough, from 1801 to 2001. The data is, of course, Crown Copyright - and I downloaded the files from here, in case you want to know. There are a lot of data here, so how to make sense of it? First of all, an animated bar chart sequence, with the original 1963 Inner London Boroughs (i.e. not the ONS definition) in red and the Outer London Boroughs in blue...


You can see it in full size here, to enable reading of label names.

The next experiment in visualizing this data was to convert it into a Google motion chart. The results of this are shown below. You can start the graphics by hitting the play button and you can query them by hovering over any of the coloured bubbles. To label a bubble, just click it. It's a bit small here but this is just for illustration. Experiment with the tabs at the top of the initial chart to see the data in a different format. There's lots of options for experimenting here...



Finally, a view of what all this looks like spatially, in 3D.

As for the data itself, you can discover a lot from these visualizations, but the high point in population for a London Borough was Tower Hamlets in 1901, with 597,000 and the low point was in Brent with 2,000 in 1801 and 1811.

Postscript, 7 June 2011. I've since done a proper London animation for the Centre for Cities. A small version is shown below. For the full version, check this link.

Geovisualization

Following on from the previous post, I dug out some of my previous work, did a bit of experimenting, editing and touching-up to produce some new geovisualizations. I believe that geovizualisation is about more than just making pretty maps - it is about communicating a lot of spatial data in an effective way, which could not otherwise be easily digested.

In short, geovisualization is part spatial data analysis, part graphic design, part art. In this post, I've tried to use a combination of techniques in order to produce the set of images below. The data displayed is commuting for wards in North West England in 2001. I used a GIS to create the raster images and convert them to 3D, I used some image editing tools to add labels, and I used some more advanced techniques for the colour/grey background focus ones.

Click on the individual images to view in full size at best resolution - the smaller versions below are not super high quality. Areas with high red spikes = areas of high in-commuting and blue = areas of high out-commuting. In effect, the red areas are where people work and the blue areas are where people live, though in reality there is of course some overlap.

Image 1 - Commuting in NW England, 2001

Image 2 - Same image as above, but with labels

Image 3 - Same image, with different colours

Image 4 - More colour experimentation

Image 5 - Colour focus area for Manchester

Image 6 - Colour focus area for Liverpool

dataviz - Improving data visualisation for the public sector

The topic of today's post is dataviz, a new website devoted to improving data visualisation - specifically focused on the public sector. It's a joint initiative between CLG and OCSI and is really quite an attractive new website with lots of interesting visualisation examples, including Time magazine's population density spike map.

There's a CLG pdf document about this new development here, and it explains all the 'what', 'why' and 'how' questions about the project. Finally, the gallery of examples is definitely worth a look...

Journal Rankings from Australia

A lot has been written (e.g. see this) about the RAE, so this is not the focus of this post. Instead, this post is about journal rankings. The link here is that the eqivalent exercise in Australia (Excellence in Research for Australia, or ERA) has produced a ranked list of journals to be used in assessing academic outputs. Clearly, this is contentious and controversial and it has heated up exchanges in e-mail lists worldwide. It has also been written about in the mainstream press.

First, though, where can we find these rankings? Click here to find them, and click on the next link to download the Excel spreadsheet with all the data.

In many nations, academics are assessed on the basis of their research outputs. Here in the UK, this was previously done using the Research Assessment Exercise and will next be done via the Research Excellence Framework, in 2012.

Journals are ranked on a four-point scale: A*, A, B and C. Clearly, this is not good news for C-ranked journals or, in fact, most B-ranked journals. Even some of the A-ranked journals can't be happy about this. However, I'm sure the A*-ranked journals are happy. But, what on earth do these tiers mean? The associated web page is here, but this is the gist of it:

• A* - Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of a very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted. Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions.

• A - The majority of papers in a Tier A journal will be of very high quality. Publishing in an A journal would enhance the author’s standing, showing they have real engagement with the global research community and that they have something to say about problems of some significance. Typical signs of an A journal are lowish acceptance rates and an editorial board which includes a reasonable fraction of well known researchers from top institutions.

• B - Tier B covers journals with a solid, though not outstanding, reputation. Generally, in a Tier B journal, one would expect only a few papers of very high quality. They are often important outlets for the work of PhD students and early career researchers. Typical examples would be regional journals with high acceptance rates, and editorial boards that have few leading researchers from top international institutions.

• C - Tier C includes quality, peer reviewed, journals that do not meet the criteria of the higher tiers.

In the field that I mainly work in, and journal types I would submit journal articles to (urban and regional planning, human geography), how does this translate?

Well, here are some examples of journals by ranking tier:

• A* - Urban Studies, Regional Studies, Town Planning Review, Environment and Planning B, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of Planning Literaure, Progress in Planning...
  

• A - Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Housing Studies, European Planning Studies, Environment and Planning A, International Planning Studies, Cities, Environment and Planning D, Planning Theory and Practice...
  

• B - Area, Australian Geographer, Geoforum, Spatial Economic Analysis, Space and Polity, Professional Geographer, Australian Planner, GeoJournal...

• C - Applied Geography, Journal of Geography, Critical Planning, Scottish Geographical Journal, Global Built Environment Review, Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal...

Should we be worried? Probably, though some of this is country-specific and many journal ranks would change if this exercise was carried out in other countries. However, a precedent has been set... (and I didn't even mention the conference rankings!)

Fly to in Google Earth

Another video post today. Some time ago I was experimenting with the latest update of Google Earth, which at the time was (and still is) version 5. The 'Fly to' function allows you to enter a place name, address or other geographic identifier and when you hit search Google Earth flies there. There's a short video on this on the Google Earth pages.

I find these kinds of tools very useful for teaching and helping students think about spaces and places, though not usually at the global level. There is now even a Flight Simulator in Google Earth, one based on a jet and one based on a slower aircraft - lots of fun, but not totally relevant for teaching planning students...

The short video below starts includes the places I've lived in and/or worked in since I was born and ends at the University of Sheffield, where I currently work.

London Commuting Surface in 3D

I've moved on from some of my original flow mapping work of 2008/09 and am now working on different kinds of things. However, I came across some interesting work on geovisualisation at The University of Manchester Geospatial blog which made me want to revisit previous work.

In particular, the reference to a short population density animation caught my attention.

In short, I have experimented with 3D animated geovisualisations - in this instance it is of my London flow surface and flow lines using commuting data. There's a short video below (it may take a moment or two to load - it's a large file).