Bikes in Delft

Not a lot of data analysis or research been done on my part recently. That's because I've been on the road a bit, including attending the Regional Studies Association international conference in Delft. While I was in Delft I was not only amazed by the sheer volume of bikes but also by the way in which bikes are given their own space. I knew about this in advance but it was quite amazing to see it in action, as the short video shows. The video, by the way, was taken on my phone on a slightly windy day at the lovely TU Delft campus.

The number of bikes at Delft station was also staggering, though you can't really even begin to get the scale of it from the picture below...

While I was in Delft I gave a paper on housing market search, based on some Rightmove data. It seemed to go down quite well so hopefully during the summer I'll have time to finish the work and submit it for publication...

How did I manage to do a post without a map? I'm sure I'll rectify this next time.

The Population of the United Kingdom

Partly inspired by a global analysis of population by latitude and longitude and partly intrigued by the latest population estimates for small areas, I've been looking at the population of the United Kingdom in more detail recently. According to the latest small area estimates (for mid-2010) the total population of the country is 62.3 million. The 2011 Census results are not out yet (release schedule here) but this figure should be pretty close to the actual number from the Census. I've been looking at where people live according to different north/south cut-offs. The series of maps below looks at (roughly) how many people live south of a) the River Thames, b) Birmingham, c) Manchester, d) Newcastle and e) Edinburgh... [click an image to see it full screen]

About a quarter live south of Thames

About half live south of Birmingham

 

About two thirds live south of Manchester

Nine out of ten live south of Newcastle

Over 93% live south of Edinburgh

This is not all that mind-blowing really but I was quite surprised that for the UK about half the population live south of Birmingham. The cut-off lines are slightly fuzzy because the data are based on super output areas and data zones (and local authorities for cities) but the figures are pretty accurate. 

In terms of distribution within the United Kingdom (as it still is for the time being!), 83.9% live in England, 8.4% in Scotland, 4.8% in Wales and 2.9% in Northern Ireland. There are ten times as many people in England as there are in Scotland. Or, to look at it another way, you could easily fit the population of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland south of London (though I'm sure they might complain).

On a more serious data-related point, I'm still baffled as to why, for example, the US and China can get some early Census results out so quickly whereas we have to wait until July 2012 for the first releases. It will be interesting to see what the final figures are.

London's 100 Poorest Areas

The theme for this post follows on from some work I did recently which looked at the increasing level of deprivation in Outer London, as reported in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago - see also the maps on the Guardian datablog. It's true that housing market pressures (among other things) are helping to push poverty away from Inner London but the majority of London's poorest are still within the inner city, and Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham in particular. In order to provide a clearer picture of where exactly the very poorest (most deprived) areas are, I produced a map and animation of London's 100 most deprived areas. 

Animated version

The results are not at all surprising. Of the 100 most deprived LSOAs in London, according to the 2010 Indices of Deprivation, the Borough with the most areas is Tower Hamlets (18), followed by Hackney (17), Newham (13), Haringey (12) and Brent (10). Deprivation is increasing in Outer London relative to the past and I was particularly taken today by the news that Newham Council were looking to re-house poorer residents in Stoke (more than 150 miles away). That's taking the suburbanisation of poverty a bit far! 

Some work I did with Ed Ferrari last year looked at residential mobility patterns amongst the richest and poorest sectors of the population in England. What we found surprised us at the time. Our analysis showed that it was often the poorest areas which were associated with the longest residential moves. We didn't have enough fine-grained data to make more of this but it was an interesting insight into what might be happening more broadly.

Taking the 100 most deprived locations is of course arbitrary but the point here is that despite debates about whether 'the poor' should live in 'rich areas' the fact is that many of the poorest people living in London are in areas which in recent years have changed considerably so that they are now experiencing very high demand, inflated rents and severe socio-economic inequalities. This represents an intensification of existing processes rather than something entirely new but it does mean that policy makers need to think carefully about what to do about it...

Blog spring clean

I've decided to give my blog a little spring clean by changing some of the fonts and headings and adding a new header because I was getting tired of it. At the same time, I've been checking out my Google analytics stats for the blog - an extract is shown below for a recent period in early March 2012...

Not everything I post on here is directly related to my academic research (and some isn't really at all) but the value of blogging for academics is very clear to me, for three main reasons. 

1. As someone who produces a lot of visuals (usually maps) in my work, the printed page is not always a good medium for publishing because of the costs associated with colour printing and the limited pages you are assigned within a journal paper. Basically, it's much easier and more efficient to publish spatial visualisations here; 

2. Since I began blogging I've been contacted by countless researchers and students from all parts of the world either seeking to share their knowlegdge, borrow some of mine or just simply to say they are working on similar things too. Given that what I work on can be quite 'niche', this has been a really useful development; 

3. By putting some of my work on here I'm able to make connections with the outside world in a way that is not possible with journal publications - since they're usually locked behind a paywall and they are normally published 18 months or more from when they were written. The immediacy of blogging is hard to beat (even if it does allow a lot of unstructured, unmoderated content to appear!) and it's also quite therapeutic.

It does take a time and effort to keep it going but most of what I put on here is directly related to my ongoing research and represents a kind of 'snippet view' of what I'm working on at any given time or just an insight into what I find of interest.

The National Planning Policy Framework

I work in a planning department at an English university so I'm duty bound to blog today on the new National Planning Policy Framework for England. It might sound a bit boring but it's likely to have significant implications for the built environment for years to come and it represents the biggest change to the planning system in England in a generation (or more).

What are the main changes? Well, much has been made of the reduction of planning policy guidance from more than 1,000 pages to around 50. That's one of the most obvious changes and there is certainly a good deal of simplification associated with the NPPF. It has 13 main sections (image below), from 'Building a strong, competitive economy' to 'Facilitating the sustainable use of minerals'. It also covers 'Protecting Green Belt land', which is something I've written about recently on this blog in relation to data.

I was interested to see that the Glossary (excellent as it is in many ways) does not include a definition of 'sustainable development' (the NPPF's key guiding principle). Instead, it says on p. 2 that:

"The purpose of the planning system is to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. The policies in paragraphs 18 to 219, taken as a whole, constitute the Government's view of what sustainable development in England means in practice for the planning system."

Paragraphs 18 to 219. That's quite a lot, but I didn't really expect it to be defined, given the inherent difficulties associated with defining it. To be fair, the Government could not really be expected to define this but it does seem strange that their view of the core principle of the NPPF cannot be articulated in fewer than 200 paragraphs.

Other interesting snippets I noticed so far...

• Section 3 on 'Supporting a prosperous rural economy' is only 157 words long (much shorter than, for example, Section 7 on 'Requiring good design' - which gets 840 words)
• The word 'regeneration' appears 3 times in the NPPF
• Among the documents the NPPF replaces is the 1990 PPG on 'Development on Unstable Land' - the NPPF mentions the word 'unstable' once
• The 'Plan-making' section from p. 37 says that 'Local plans are key to delivering sustainable development'
• Local planning authorities have to prepare a Strategic Housing Market Assessment and Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment
• Parishes and 'neighbourhood forums' can use neighbourhood planning to 'grant planning permission' through Neighbourhood Development Orders (p. 44)
• Related to the point above, the NPPF states that 'Where a Neighbourhood Development Order has been made, a planning application is not required for development that is within the terms of the order' (p. 46)
• But, NDOs and Community Right to Build Orders 'require the support of the local community through a referendum' (p. 47). 
• Annex 2 (p. 50 to 57) is the Glossary and v. useful
• Annex 3 (p. 58 to 59) details the documents replaced by this new NPPF

The ministerial statement on the NPPF from Greg Clark is on his website and all other NPPF materials can be found on the CLG website. The NPPF pdf doesn't take long to read! It will be 'interesting' to see how all this plays out in practice over the next few years. Perhaps it will not be as good or as bad as people think...

A final point of reminder here - the NPPF applies to England and not the whole of the UK. 

The Olympic Park Legacy Corporation

The London Datastore recently published on their website the boundary file for the Mayoral Development Corporation in East London. There is quite a bit of background information on the GLA web pages, at this link, but of particular interest is the precise boundary of the Corporation. If you are a GIS user you can download the file and then map it, or, you can look at the map and letter signed by the Mayor of London himself. Alternatively, you can look at my map below and explore the area in Google maps...

Full screen version

By my calculations, this area is 1.88 square miles in size (1,202 acres / 486 hectares) and has a perimeter of 6.47 miles. So, it's quite a big area and bigger than the City of London. It includes parts of the London Boroughs of Waltham Forest, Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets and the area has been described (in October 2011) as 'London's single most important regeneration project for the next 25 years'. 

The name of the corporation is to be the London Legacy Development Corporation, as outlined in this letter. This is also an example of the Localism Act in action.

I found it quite interesting exploring this area, looking at what is included and (more interestingly) what is not. I hope you find it useful.

Free House Price Data

In recent times it has been a little difficult to keep up with the increasing number and variety of datasets being released by central government in the UK. There are already around new 5,400 datasets out there but until this month the Land Registry's 'price paid' data remained closed. Unfortunately, what we'll be getting is not the entire back catalogue of price paid data, but only new data on a monthly basis. This is still a welcome development, but the release of new data only is a major drawback, as Owen Boswarva notes in this blog post.

I've used this data before and it's extremely useful and interesting (and it also allows you to find out how much your neighbours sold their house for, should you be so inclined!). Of course, you can do this already via websites like Zoopla but you can't get the entire datasets from these providers, which is only fair because they pay a lot of money for it (more than £50k). Perhaps the Land Registry will eventually release the entire dataset, going back to 1995 for England and Wales, but until then this remains a tantalising but ultimately frustrating development.

N.B. This data will, of course, be 'free' in the same way that all other datasets paid for by the taxpayer are 'free'!