Local Enterprise Partnerships

In my previous post about Local Enterprise Partnerships I noted that 56 applications had been put forward to BIS/CLG (note here that BIS said they had 62 responses to the invitation to form LEPs but CLG said that 56 proposals were received). There have been some significant developments since then... The publication of the Local Growth White Paper yesterday formally introduced the Regional Growth Fund and states that RDAs are to be shut down by April 2012. This was not really news though. What was new was the announcement of the 24 areas which have been asked to form the first wave of LEPs (see below - click on image to view full size).

You can find more detailed maps of the areas here and on page 39 of the White Paper. I just made the image above because the official maps are a bit muddled/confusing. Some LEPs cover very large areas with many local authorities included (e.g. Kent, Greater Essex and East Sussex), some cover few local authorities but large areas (e.g. Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly) and many others cover local authorities in city region areas (e.g. Liverpool City Region). Some of them will no doubt come up with snappier names than they have at present although 'Coast to Capital' is the early front-runner for best name.

Large parts of England are covered by first wave LEPs (e.g. West Midlands, North West) and the striking thing from the detail of the White Paper is the difference between the Regional Growth Fund and the level of RDA funding previously available. Other sources worth a look are the Analytical paper on sub-national growth (SERC obviously a major influence here), details of the Regional Growth Fund (in a nutshell, £1.4bn over the three years from 2011 to 2014) and the remaining links at the bottom of this page.

There is also a new BIS website on 'Setting out the path to sustainable growth' introduced by the author of the 'one-eyed smile' (see the bottom of this document to understand what I mean).

Sheffield Deprivation

I've been experimenting with deprivation data (again) and google maps (again). This time I've overlaid deprivation data for Sheffield on to google maps. I did this by using a fairly simple technique, which includes making sure the geographic projection is correct. I've described this before too.

You can pan/zoom on the embedded map below, but to see the full thing you'll need to click on 'View Larger Map'. Once you've done that you can see further information on the left hand side. You can turn layers on and off using the little tick boxes on the left and you can query the map by clicking it.

Not much else to say apart from take a look at the map below.


View Larger Map

London Datastore

I've posted stuff before (e.g. economic deprivation, population growth) about London so this post is about data for London which is available via the London Datastore. It is a website run by the Greater London Authority which you can go to if you want data for London (obviously).



What kind of data is available? Well, you could look at the GLA Budget, average house prices, or even data on abandoned vehicles. You could also take a look at the A-Z list and/or search the archive. Hours of fun.

The data are available at various spatial scales, some below Borough level and some not. Finally, here's a map of Cannabis Possession Incidents recorded by the British Transport Police for a two-year period up to July 2010. This just covers incidents on trains, tracks, stations, etc. Click the map to see full size. The highest value is in Westminster.

Travel to Work Areas / Labour Market Areas

I've been doing some work recently which uses travel to work areas rather than local authority boundaries. The analysis is on deprivation in England using the Economic Deprivation Index, so I thought it would make more sense to do the work within the context of more local labour market areas. In England, the best proxy for these is the travel to work area or TTWA.

There are currently 243 of them defined in the UK - and there is a lot more information on this (including the methodology) available here. One part of what I have been doing is to compare the size of TTWAs for different places.

In the maps below you can see the London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester TTWAs displayed at the same geographical scale. The TTWA areas are coloured and the local authority boundaries are overlaid on top of this with black lines. Click on the image below to see it full size in your web browser.

It may be a bit of a surprise to see how big some of the non-London TTWAs are. Clearly, London is the largest and includes the most local authorities but Manchester and Birmingham in particular cover large areas and Liverpool covers a large north to south area.

100 Essential Books of Planning

Since this is my 100th attempt at a coherent post, I thought it would be a good idea to reflect upon something numerically appropriate.

In 2009, to celebrate 100 years of the American planning movement, the American Planning Association decided to put together a list of 'essential books of planning' - which of course contains 100 books. All good planners own well thumbed copies of all 100 and most have committed them to memory. Perhaps not. Actually, there are many people may have forgotten about/never heard of. The quick, at-a-glance pdf list is worth downloading just to check this.

The list is compiled by decade, and it makes interesting reading. Some examples below (can't say I've read them all but I did particularly like Leopold's A Sand County Almanac)...

• Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000)
• The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002)
• The Devil in the White City (Larson, 2004)
• The Geography of Nowhere (Kunstler, 1994)
• Edge City (Garreau, 1991)
• Cities of Tomorrow (Hall, 1988)
• Life Between Buildings (Gehl, 1987)
• The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Whyte, 1980)
• A Reader in Planning Theory (Faludi, 1973)
• Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1973)
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961)
• The Image of the City (Lynch, 1960)
• Towards New Towns for America (Stein, 1951)
• A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Leopold, 1949)
• The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Hoyt, 1939)
• Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier, 1923; in English, 1927)
• Cities in Evolution (Geddes, 1915)

...if you're wondering why Garden Cities of To-Morrow is not on the list, check your dates. Obviously, the list is US-centric but it does make interesting reading. There are even some 'methods' books on the list, such as Krueckeberg and Silvers' 1974 text on Urban Planning Analysis. Also, there are many on the list that are not really 'planning' books as such, like von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944).

Filtering Flow Data

My adventures in spatial interaction visualisation continue. I'm currently finalising some more of this work in a paper I'm writing and it gets quite complicated so I've tried to think of ways to simplify the patterns within the vast datasets I've been working with.

The image below shows inter-district migration in the UK for 2001 at different flow magnitudes in a very short animation. This is just one example of the kind of visual things I've been working on recently.

Flow Map Layout

I've been experimenting with mapping flow data (again) and this time have been looking at Flow Map Layout, by Phan et al. at Stanford. There is a short paper on it, and a slideshare presentation, but basically it offers a slightly different approach to flow mapping.

I experimented using UK commuting data for 2001. I looked at the top 50 flows (by district) into Greater London. This equates to more than 550,000 commuters going in to London but it excludes intra-London moves obviously. It's a bit tricky at first when you are trying to get used to it but when you do you can produce some nice images... Click on the image below to see it full size.

You can move things around in the (basic) mapping interface and it is actually quite flexible. There are some display options for colours and edge routing, etc.

The largest inflow was from Epping Forest, with around 26,000 commuters.