Deprivation in Northern Ireland

On this blog I've covered deprivation in England, deprivation in Scotland and deprivation in Wales but, to date, not deprivation in Northern Ireland. Today I'll complete the UK set by looking at deprivation in Northern Ireland according to the Multiple Deprivation Measure 2010. What I've done is produce a couple of Google fusion table maps. A screenshot from one is shown below and if you click on it you'll be taken to a web page where you can select any local authority area. Clicking an individual area on the map will reveal a pop-up with all the information for that area, including the map key...

I've also produced a full screen version of this fusion table map, as you can see below in the screenshot. Once again, you just have to click an area on the map to find out more about it.

I'm going to get on to the more general subject of mapping deprivation and different methods and options for this type of thing (including cartograms) in a subsequent post but first a quick look at the actual deprivation data for Northern Ireland. According to the MDM, the most deprived super output area is the one named 'Whiterock 2' in Belfast, though this in itself is not perhaps that significant. Of more significance is where the clusters of the most deprived areas appear - and this is generally in Belfast and Derry. These two local government areas both have 47% of their super output areas classified among the 20% most deprived in Northern Ireland. Craigavon and Lisburn are next on the list, at 27% and 17% respectively. Having said that, many of the least deprived areas are also in Belfast, but this pattern is not mirrored in Derry.

In many ways, then, spatial patterns of deprivation in Northern Ireland are similar to those in different parts of the UK, with an inner-urban focus and smaller pockets and clusters of deprivation elsewhere. These are often located in close proximity to areas of affluence, though of course that is not really what the MDM measures.

The final image is a simple dot map showing the location of the 10% most and 10% least deprived super output areas in Northern Ireland in 2010...

The last thing to say is that this measure is produced by the same team who produce the deprivation indices for other parts of the UK. The web pages for the MDM are pretty useful and contain everything you need to know.

How Big is London?

In studies of cities and urban areas, a common question that crops up is 'how big' a particular city is. I'd be inclined to answer this in terms of population, which for Greater London in mid-2010 was 7.83million. Most urban academics, however, are more pedantic and if you asked them how big London is, they might ask what you mean by 'big' and what you mean by 'London'. So, following the theme of some posts over the past year I decided to take a look at this purely in terms of the land area of some key UK 'cities'. I looked at the London Boroughs for Greater London, plus local authority areas for the English core cities, plus Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast. I then put them side by side at the same map scale and produced the following image...

The cities (i.e. the local authorities) in the image above are ranked by land area. London is the largest, at around 610 square miles, and Nottingham is the smallest at around 30 square miles. One issue when thinking about all of this is the extent to which most of the UK's cities are 'underbounded' in the sense that the core local authority area with the name of the city does not reflect the true extent of the functional urban area. Manchester is a classic example of this, whereas Leeds is more 'overbounded'. Tony Champion and Mike Coombes, among others, have written about this - e.g. in this presentation. In many ways this is quite a serious policy challenge, particularly when it comes to understanding and planning for wider metropolitan housing and labour market processes. But I'm getting carried away with myself now!

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to compare the areas in the image above to the UK's largest local authority by area. I did this because a) I'm from the Highland region and b) see reason a). The Highland region is, famously, about the size of Belgium and it is bigger than both Wales and Northern Ireland by some way. In relation to the latter, it is more than twice the size in terms of land area. However, in mid-2010 the total population of the Highland region was only 221,630. A final nugget of information: the Highland region is about 275 times larger than Liverpool. The image below shows the Highland region at the same scale as the areas in the first image. Perhaps we should all move up north and have more space! Or perhaps not.

P.S. The City of London is the smallest administrative 'district' in the UK, at around 1.1 square miles. 

Comparing Populations: Night Time vs. Day Time

Esteemed Canadian and fellow researcher Brian Webb, from the University of Manchester, recently sent me an interesting image which compares the population of Washington D.C. in the day to the population at night. This got me thinking. I did a bit of digging and found some of my old data. Put simply, I had two datasets for wards in the North West of England. One file contained the resident population of wards and the other had the population of wards during the day time (i.e. residents, minus out-commuters, plus in commuters). Out of this came two visualisations, as shown below (red peaks = more people) and a short video.

I also decided to turn this into a very simple animation, which is embedded below. I have also produced a larger version of this on its own page. Note: the video embedded below will keep playing once you click play. The larger version allows you to pause the video and watch at your own pace.

Although these are really just some pretty pictures there are some important points to be made here. We think about the population of places - and the associated local costs and constraints - in relation to resident population but in some areas the day time population is so high that the impact on the local area is far out of proportion to the size of the resident population. Another matter is the well known issue of spatial mismatch or, more generally, understanding the differences between where people live and where people work and the implications of this. 

In short, understanding the spatiality of populations is important for planning and policy purposes - these visuals are just a simple way of telling the story of data. This is important because the data on display here comes from an analysis of a commuting data matrix of 1000 x 1000, or one million cells of data. So, another point here is that data on its own is not information, as we all know.

The New ONS Website

Not all that long ago, the Office for National Statistics unveiled their new website which, in my view, is significantly better than the old one (screenshot of the new site below). There have been some teething problems but I just wanted to highlight some of the interactive data features.

There's a box to the right of the home page which says 'Interactive Content' and if you click on it you will be taken to a page full of more interesting visualisations of ONS data. There's a map and data visualisation using unemployment benefit claimants plus lots more.

On the population page, you can also see up to date snapshots for the UK, including the up to date total population (currently estimated to be 62.3 million). The site is not yet perfect but is definitely worth a closer look.

Energy Consumption in London

Gas price rises have been in the news quite a lot in recent months, and with good reason. Clearly, it's a big issue in many ways so I've been trying to explore more about it from a data point of view. This is where the Department of Energy and Climate Change come in, because they now provide quite localised energy consumption data for the whole of Great Britain. There's quite a lot of it and it can be a bit messy and difficult to understand but if you want to find out more the full explanatory pdf is here. From my point of view, I was interested to see how it looked spatially, so I took the domestic gas consumption data for London in 2008 and 2009 and mapped it at the small area level. I've done a full screen map which you can see by clicking on this link but you can also see it embedded below, though it works best full screen. Click an area on the map to see consumption data for that area and a key which explains the colour coding. 

Click here to see the full screen version

Finally, a simple dot map of where most domestic gas is used in London. This reflects a number of things, not least the size of properties, but perhaps also things like poverty and deprivation... The final thing to say is that the highest gas consumption areas consume about 41,000 kWh per year and the lowest areas less than 10,000. The London average is about 15,000 kWh.

Comparing Populations: China, US, Europe

Since the US and China have both recently (2010) conducted a census I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the population results. Given the vastness of the US and China, I thought I'd do a little experiment and compare Chinese province populations with US states and European countries. I've put this data into a spreadsheet as well and also produced a map graphic comparing various areas. The purpose here is to highlight the large populations of so many Chinese provinces.

Some interesting nuggets from the data...

• Guangdong province in China now has a population of 104 million, which is more than any European nation except Russia (141 million). The European part of Russia has 110 million. 
• Poland, Shanxi province and California all have around 37 million people. 
• Shanghai has 22 million compared to Romania at 23 million. 
• Beijing and New York state both have about 19.5 million people. 
• In total, ten Chinese provinces have a population of 50 million or more. The US and China have a very similar land area. 
• Be honest, did you know that Anhui province has about the same population as Italy (60 million)?

Finally, some non-Chinese comparisons. Greece and Ohio both have a population of about 11.5 million and Michigan and Belarus are similar at about 9.5 million. Wisconsin and Denmark both have about 5.7 million people, and Finland and Minnesota have about 5.4 million. At the lower end of the scale, North Dakota and Montenegro both have about 670,000 people.

Divided Cities?

There has been a lot of talk recently about the links between deprivation and the recent riots in England (e.g. this from the Guardian), and since I'm interested in the issue I thought I would do some very basic analysis to look at the spatial divisions of deprivation in English cities. To do this I took London, the eight core cities plus Bradford, Coventry, Hull and Leicester and mapped the 10% most (in red) and 10% least (in blue) deprived (IMD 2010) areas on one large map graphic. The results are shown below - click the image to enlarge.

Some interesting comparisons can be made from this image. In Hull, Leicester, Manchester and Nottingham there are no areas amongst England's 10% most deprived and in Liverpool there is only one. In Sheffield there is a clear NE/SW split in terms of the location of the most and least deprived and in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool the number of areas in the most deprived 10% is quite high.

Not much else to say now except that I think in studies of deprivation we should perhaps be more concerned with inequalities and how they manifest themselves spatially.