Journal Paper (by former undergraduate!)

I've been guilty of plugging my own academic work on here from time to time, which I suppose is fair enough because this is my blog, but today I thought I'd blog on someone else's work. Hannah Wright, a recent graduate from my Department (Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield) published a shorter version of her third year extended essay in Local Environment, an international peer-reviewed journal. Hannah now works for Arup in London but the paper below was written entirely during her time as an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield. 

I'm aware of undergraduates publishing work in scientific journals as part of larger teams, but I've never heard of a sole-authored publication in a peer-reviewed journal by a social science undergraduate. 

Hannah's work was obviously exceptional, and it is rather unsettling in some ways to see an undergraduate's work in print (!) but ultimately it is just very exciting to see this happen. I could claim that it's all down to the brilliance of the teaching here at TRP or that it's all down to my expert tutoring but I think it's fairer to say that we just provided the right environment for this kind of work. I'm not expecting this to happen again any time soon (though we do have lots of bright sparks on the UG programme) so that's why I thought it blog-worthy.

What does the paper say? Well, it's about green infrastructure and the contested meanings attached to it in English planning policy.

P.S. I'm happy to report that the original essay did receive a First Class mark!

Small Area Population Change in London, 2001 to 2010

Every ten years, data nerds in the UK get very excited by the prospect of getting their hands on new Census outputs. If you're lucky enough to be Canadian then you can get excited every five years but for many of us (Americans and Chinese included) it's the decennial Census that really does the trick. In the UK we can expect the first results in July 2012 according to this document. But what about in between Census dates? This is where small area data analysis becomes tricky. That's why the ONS publish mid-year population estimates for small areas in England and Wales. 

I've been looking at data for London again, so I thought it would be interesting to see which small areas have increased in population and which have declined in the period from 2001 to 2010 (the most recent data). Some map results below, but it is interesting that 11 areas (LSOAs) have more than doubled in population during this time. 

See this map with Borough outlines on a separate web page

• The 11 areas which have more than doubled in population are in Tower Hamlets (4), Greenwich (4), Ealing, Enfield and Hounslow
• 85 areas have increased in population by 50% or more between 2001 and 2010
• 344 areas have increased in population by 25% or more between 2001 and 2010

• 5 areas have decreased in population by 50% or more - these areas are in Greenwich (2), Southwark, Brent and Newham
• 19 areas have decreased in population by 25% or more during the 2001 to 2010 period.

Overall, the population of London has increased by hundreds of thousands between 2001 and 2010. According to the mid-year population estimates it has increased by approximately one Manchester in population terms (i.e. about 500,000 - equivalent to the City of Manchester population in 2011). That's about a 7% increase. 

The data are somewhat experimental but if we aggregate up to Borough level, then Brent and Newham both show losses (about 5% and 4% respectively) whilst City of London (60%) and Westminster (25%) show the largest gains.

This data for London - and lots more - can be found on the pages of the excellent London Datastore.

Inequality or Deprivation?

One thing I've been thinking about recently is the question of whether we should be interested in poverty/deprivation/disadvantage in particular or whether we should be concerned with inequality more generally. The latter is of course the big issue (interesting link) and more recently I've been interested in wider questions - some of which are captured in a new paper. With this in mind, I've taken the English deprivation data (i.e. IMD2010) and looked at it by local authority to see how many areas are within the 10% most and least deprived on this measure. Click on the image extract below for the full size chart...

Full size version

I've labelled some individual local authorities and have done this in absolute rather than percentage terms because I'm interested in both the level of inequality and the absolute number of 'poorer' or 'richer' areas in each local authority. Because Birmingham has by far the highest population it stands out but this chart is more about the internal differences in the number of areas in each local authority that are either in the most or least deprived decile in England and, therefore, the level of inequality.

A few final nuggets...

• Manchester has more than 100 areas within England's 10% most deprived, but no areas within England's 10% least deprived.

• Wokingham has nearly 70 areas within England's 10% least deprived, but no areas within England's 10% most deprived.

• Doncaster, Hackney, Haringey, Hull, Knowsley, Leicester, Newham, Nottingham, Sandwell, Tower Hamlets and Wolverhampton are among the areas with areas in the most deprived 10% but no areas in the least deprived 10%.

• Dover, Exeter, Gravesham, Nuneaton & Bedworth, and Thurrock all have equal numbers of areas in the least and most deprived 10% in England - though the total is quite low in each case.

Take a closer look at the chart to explore more - areas are arranged alphabetically to aid navigation. You'll have to zoom to see it in detail...

Population Density in New York City

In some recent posts I've been looking at the issue of population density. I did this for London in December and for the continental United States earlier this month. Given the extremely high population density in Manhattan, I thought it would make sense to take a closer look at New York City. So, I took some publicly available NYC GIS data, some 2010 US Census data and went to work. The result is the 3D map image below...

See this image full size

The mapping here is done at the Census Tract level, of which there are about 2,100. These areas have an average population of about 4,000 though there is some considerable variation between areas in that several tracts contain more than 10,000. The spatial patterns above are fairly obvious and, as expected, Manhattan dominates once again. However, the individual Census Tract with the highest population density is actually in Corona, Queens with a figure of 216,000 persons per square mile*.

There's a lot more information on New York City's 2010 Census results on these pages, from the New York City Department of City Planning...

* N.B. It's important to point out here that these areas are much less than a square mile, but I'm using square miles since it is a conventional measure of population density in urban areas).

Cities Outlook 2012

Yesterday saw the publication of the Centre for Cities annual 'Cities Outlook'. The lovely people at CfC have now produced this publication for five years and it receives significant press attention (and was even one of the most read on the BBC website). I've written a thing or two about cities on this blog so it thought I'd just provide a few notes on this most recent incarnation of Cities Outlook...

• The first thing to note is that Cities Outlook 2012 uses Primary Urban Areas as a proxy for cities. See this document (and p.106-109 in particular). PUAs are not just the local authority area but rather a grouping of local authorities around a core local authority area. PUAs only exist for England (and there are 56 of them). For Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the definitions of 'city' are slightly different - see p.25 of Cities Outlook for more on this. 

• This has been covered a lot elsewhere, but 'the recovery' is at present not looking very good when compared to previous periods of economic turmoil - the chart on p.7 is particularly illustrative of this point.

• There is no harm in reinforcing key messages, and Cities Outlook does this many times. The most important of which is probably: "Unemployment is likely to become an increasing problem in 2012". When the youth figures are taken into consideration (1m+) we can only speculate at how this will play out in the long term.

• Hull and Cambridge are not necessarily on the same trajectory! See p.15 for more on this. Of course this is not really a fair comparison in some ways but it does illustrate some of the important differences between cities.

• On p.31, I'm not convinced of the utility of the landmass comparison for the entire UK, particularly when the definitions vary across the UK (even if the graphic is quite pretty).

• Let's all move to Milton Keynes (p. 36). On second thoughts, maybe not.

• Three cheers for Aberdeen: "Every city in the UK apart from Aberdeen saw a decrease in their business stocks from 2009 to 2010". More information on business type would be useful here of course. 

• Some useful emissions data on p.65, which I suspect isn't entirely fair on Middlesbrough without some additional contextual information...

• A very interesting piece of work!

England's Green Belt - 'Closed' Data

At the moment I'm doing some work related to housing market search behaviour and I have a very interesting dataset for it. I thought it would be nice to compare housing market search patterns to where areas of green belt land in England are. This is where I ran into problems. Everyone knows that there is green belt land in England, but knowing precisely where it is and how to get this in digital format is more difficult.

It seems that, for whatever reason, Landmark Information Group have the rights to the data, as you can also see from this BBC map. The problem is, I was quoted a price of £35,000 + VAT for the full dataset. I've nothing against Landmark but I couldn't figure out why it would be so costly or why it is not open data. To cut a long story short, I got the data directly from the Department for Communities and Local Government but the licence means I can't really do much with it publicly, so I've made a small map below showing what it looks like.

The problem with this is that if a normal person* just wants to check which areas of the country are green belt and which aren't (and given current proposals to reform the planning system in England, this is quite important!), it cannot be done easily, if at all. What I'd really like to do is take the green belt shape file and put it on top of a Google map and then let the world see it. But it's not my data, it's not open data, so I can't. This seems like a pity and not just because I'm addicted to mapping things. It seems like a pity because this information should, I feel, be in the public domain in an accessible format. 

*Clearly, I'm not a normal person or I would be doing something else at this time of day/week.

Daytime Population in the United States

My last post on London's Daytime Population is getting a lot of page views, which is nice, so I thought I'd do something else on the same topic. Although I do try to make nice images with data, there are some very important planning-related issues here. The first is just to do with the importance of knowing how many people live in an area. In New York City, the city challenged the 2010 results because it could have led to less federal aid, and in the UK in 2011 the city of Cardiff claims there was an undercount which could have led to them missing out on £85 million of funding since 2001. In relation to daytime population, this is also very important, but more difficult to calculate, as Robert C. Schmitt discussed in 1956. So, I looked at the 3,111 counties of the lower 48 states in the US and mapped them by daytime population density, as you can see below.

View full size version

Why does it matter that we know what the daytime population of a place is? Well, there are many reasons including planning for public transit, traffic flow, infrastructure needs, utilities and even for developing evacuation procedures (Schmitt was writing in 1956 but perhaps this last point is still relevant today).

In the United States, the county with the highest daytime population density is New York County (aka Manhattan). It is far and away the leader in this category, with 126,100 persons per square mile. That doesn't quite match the daytime population density of the City of London but bear in mind that Manhattan covers 22 square miles! Manhattan's daytime population is also about 1.3 million more than its total resident population, which in 2010 was about 1.6 million.