Views of the World

In Focus: The World’s Billionaires

worldmapper — Mon, 13 May 2013 04:00:49 +0000

In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (April 2013, Volume 4, Issue 1) Danny Dorling and I looked at the global geography of wealth. The map that I created for this feature displays data published by Forbes Magazine in spring 2012 (updated annualy). For 2012 Forbes counted 1153 billionaires across the globe (this figure includes families, but excludes fortunes dispersed across large families where the average wealth per person is below a billion). The total wealth of the billionaires was US$3.7 trillion – as great as the annual gross domestic product of Germany. Top of this league table is the US with 424 billionaires (or billionaire families), followed by Russia (96) and China (95). The following cartogram animation shows, how the distribution of billionaires and the distribution of their total wealth compares. Although there are only small changes between the two maps, it is quite apparent that the wealthiest in the wealthier parts of the world accumulate slightly higher shares of wealth than those living in the emerging economies such as China (though this may be some of the less worrying inequalities that exist globally):

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Looking at similar data collected by WealthInsight (extracts published in the Guardian newspaper) – which published more detailed statistics on the geographic distribution of 521 of the wealthiest billionaires – we can see that the plutocrats’ global city of choice is Moscow with 78 billionaire residents, followed by New York City (58), Hong Kong (40), and London (39). The most attractive place for foreign wealth appears to be the United Kingdom with 15 different nationalities represented in the richest of the rich there. This tops even Switzerland (14 nationalities) and the United States (9).
Much of the wealth of billionaires is held offshore and their wealth is the tip of an iceberg of hard-to-tax personal assets. In a recent Tax Justice Network report (pdf), James Henry estimated the overall global offshore financial assets held by the world’s richest to be between US$21 trillion and US$32 trillion (out of the total global wealth, estimated at US$231 trillion). Nearly half of these offshore assets are owned by the world’s richest 91,000, just 0.001% of the global population.
The distribution of this wealth is a story of extreme inequality. For each billionaire there are millions of people who can only ever dream of such wealth – the ratio is only slightly smaller in the richest countries of the world: in the USA one billionaire can be found for every 740,000 people, while in India one billionaire is found amongst every 26 million people.
Over time the inequalities in the distribution of global wealth have become ever more polarised. According to a 2006 study by the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER), half of all global household wealth was owned by the richest 2% of adults. The poorer half of the world’s population owned just 1 per cent of the global wealth between all of them. Their distribution is the reverse image of the wealth maps shown here.
But it is not only wealth inequality that becomes very apparent in these numbers. The gender gap is large among the rich: Of the countries with more than 10 billionaires, Sweden is the most equal. But even here only 27% of billionaires are female, followed by Germany (20%) and Brazil (19%). Russia, home to the second largest number of billionaires, only has one woman in the ranking, and the USA is not much better with only 10% of the country’s billionaires female. 37 of the 59 countries shown here have no female billionaires at all.

Here are the bibliographic details:

Hennig, B. D. and Dorling, D. (2013). In Focus: The World’s Billionaires. Political Insight 4 (1): 38.
Article online (Wiley)

The Space of Climate Change

worldmapper — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 04:00:18 +0000

In the face of unprecendented occurences of extreme weather, loss of species, and pollution, it is clear that climate change is affecting our planet. We cannot afford to wait any longer to act. This quote from the Earth Day 2013 website outlines the theme for this year’s Earth Day campaign which runs under the motto Climate change has many faces.
As the Earth Day campaign points out, the stories of the impact of climate change are extremely diverse: “A man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise, a farmer in Kansas struggling to make ends meet as prolonged drought ravages the crops, a fisherman on the Niger River whose nets often come up empty, a child in New Jersey who lost her home to a super-storm, a woman in Bangladesh who can’t get fresh water due to more frequent flooding and cyclones.”
All these tales have one thing in common: They are a story of our impact on planet Earth, but equally of the impact of a changing planet on human’s lives. Our species has become one that is not just living in the natural environment, but is one factor that changes the environment to a level that no other species did before. This is happening to an extent that geologists discuss whether this can be seen as a new geologic era. Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen started promoting the idea of the so-called Anthropocene, a concept that has now left the scientific world and is increasingly entering the public debate regarding issues of global sustainability and humanity’s impact. Anthropocene.info is a project initiated by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) that aims to “to help visualize and better understand humanity’s geographic imprint in recent time.” Not only is it important to find better ways of understanding the complex interrelations of humans and their natural environment, to which visualisation can contribute, but also is it important to create a public understanding of issues relating to the challenges connected to global change.
Here is one example of a more challenging view existing knowledge that demonstrates how changing the view can make us rethink the way our natural environment is shaped. According to research by the US National Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, “[t]he strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth’s climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Most hurricanes do not reach their maximum potential intensity before weakening over land or cooler ocean regions. However, those storms that do approach their upper-limit intensity are expected to be slightly stronger in the warmer climate due to the higher sea surface temperatures.”
This is relevant due to the impact of more frequent flooding and cyclones on humans mentioned earlier. So where are these spaces where this is relevant. We know from historic records where there are tropical storm tracks, and the emerging pattern on a normal world map may be familiar to some of us (see here). But what if we change the perspective and focus on the actual areas that have the highest density of tropical storm occurrences. Using the records from 1945 to 2008, this intensity can be turned into quantities which are suitable for visualisation using the gridded cartogram technique. The following map shows a gridded cartogram of tropical storm intensity visualised over land based on a 0.25 degree grid. The larger a grid cell, the more tropical storm activity has there been over the past >60 years, indicating where the most affected areas of tropical cyclones (with a sustained wind speed of ver 40 mp/h) has been and how the climate patterns shape the world in a highly relevant issue of the Anthropocene:

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The land area, transformed with additional geographical layers shows a very extreme shape of the continents. Some parts are considerably increased in size, while large parts of the world are shrunk to a minimum extent (the Worldmapper colours are used as a guide to make this very abstract shape more understandable). The continents of Africa, Europe and South America can hardly be seen in the map, while parts with more familiar shapes like the southeast of the United States of America or Australia and Japan are clearly visible as tropical storm prone regions. Webster et al. (2005) described how the number of tropical cyclones, their duration, and intensity is changing in a warming environment, which makes that link to our impact on the planet’s changing climate. Maps like the one above makes these issues visible by looking at the dimensions expressed in the data collected by scientists and by providing unusual views of such data that raises interest and curiosity in a very different manner than the charts and tables that normally go along with that research.
In a cartographically even more conceptualised way this principle of transforming Euclidean space into spaces of quantitative measurements can be taken even further by not limiti8ng the gridded cartogram transformation to land area (as I did for population before), but applying the data to the whole surface of the planet. The result is a rather bizarre, yet intriguing depiction of global storm intensity. This is the Storm Globe that this transformation produces:

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Why am I drawing all these maps? Being open to new perspectives and looking for new ways to explore our world is one central role of geography as an interdisciplinary subject. We are no longer seeking to find new lands to conquer, but have now moved on to look at the world by being creative with our curiosity to discover and understand the Anthropocene, to explain the world that we created.
The map on this page was shown first to the public in a National Geographic talk by Dan Raven-Ellison who calls himself a Guerrilla Geographer in a passionate plea for Geography. He sums up what geography means in today’s world: “Geography is about curiosity, exploration, and discovery. It gives you the power to see places in new ways, search for your own answers, challenge things as they are, and make sense of the world.” See his talk in the following video clip:

Adding to that, geography matters more than ever, because there is so little we understand of our place on planet Earth. The age of discovery has just begun…welcome to the Anthropocene!

Happy Earth Day!

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). You may use the map under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

A mapping sequence for malaria and mosquito nets in Africa

worldmapper — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:54 +0000

The upcoming annual World Malaria Day on the 25th of April is one of the most visible international activities to tackle the problem of a disease that today is mainly a problem on the African continent. Beyond that day, activists from public sector as well as from many private organisations have regular meetings to find solutions for a disease that UNICEF describes as both preventable and curable.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease, and the provision of mosquito nets treated with insecticides is seen as one cost-effective method of prevention. As explained on Wikipedia, longer lasting insecticide nets (LLIN) have now replaced [Insecticide Treated Nets] in most countries, although they also need regular replacement for the insecticide to remain effective. The Alliance for Malaria Prevention (AMP) is one of the groups campaigning for the use of LLINs: “Since 2002, mosquito net campaigns in Africa have delivered tens of millions of long lasting insecticide treated nets (LLINs) under the leadership of African Ministries of Health and National Malaria Control Programs“.
In collaboration with Milliner Global Associates of the AMP core group I produced a cartogram series for AMPs February meeting in Geneva. The map series aims to highlight the problem of Malaria in Africa and show how LLIN deliveries contribute to the protection of the population at risk. The data shown in the following six maps were compiled by John Milliner (complemented by UN population statistics). The first two maps put Africa and its population distribution into perspective to help reading the subsequent cartogram transformations:

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Keeping the shape of Africa based on population in mind, the risk of malaria can be identified as predominantly a sub-Saharan problem, as the following map shows. That also explains the total number of LLIN deliveries in the period 2010-12, which has a similar overall distribution, although there are some differences between these two maps – not only in their total numbers that are shown below the maps:

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A simple calculation can now help to find out where LLINs may help to fight malaria. When using the figure of 1.8 persons per mosquito net, then the population at risk to malaria can be calculated against the LLIN deliveries to find out the net number of people who are not protected by these deliveries. The following map shows the population at risk of malaria without LLIN deliveries from 2010 to 2012 based on these calculations:

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These maps are likely to change significantly in 2013 as old nets (delivered in 2010) will no longer be useful and new nets are delivered. They show one aspect of attempts to tackle one aspect of global inequalities in health, where poorest are hit hardest by a problem that would not need to exist anymore. Malaria is preventable…

The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) in collaboration with Milliner Global Associates, Inc (Idaho, USA). You may use the map under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

A Cold World

worldmapper — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:00:48 +0000

While much of Europe has been denied a white Christmas, many of us were still having a white snow cover while the clocks went forward for ‘summer’ time this weekend. But although it appears that this winter is never-ending, it mainly comes very late this year. The coldest of temperatures and the main snowfall arrived in February and March, while the early winter months were even above average in some areas of central Europe.
Regular observations are collected regularly by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, which records data about the land surface temperature (i.e. “how hot the ‘surface’ of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location“, a different measure than the air temperature we see on the weather reports every day). This map shows the land surface temperature anomaly this March compared to the average temperatures from 1951 to 1980 projected on a gridded population cartogram where every grid cell is resized according to its total population. The projection used in this visualisation shows, how the world’s population was exposed to the temperature anomalies in the late spell of winter last month:

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The picture of the late winter started emerging in February which is shown in the following map. Here it can be seen that the comparably warm February land surface temperatures in large parts of Russia were not only in the remote areas that disappear in such a map, but were also affecting larger parts of the population that lives in the western parts of the country, with Moscow being the ‘dark red’ blob just east of the already freezing people in Eastern Europe:

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In contrast to the recent cold months, the picture in January provided a much more mixed impression, where parts of the densely populated Eastern seaboard of the United States was warmer than average – before the February blizzard brought the memories of winter back into people’s minds:

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What we perceive as a very cold winter in the northern hemisphere is not only an effect of the very late arrival of cold temperatures and snow, but also a result of our perspective on the weather patterns. The gridded population cartogram reflects a lot of how many of us in the northern hemisphere experiences the conditions this winter, while a conventional map of the data (shown in the inset reference image on the bottom left) shows that considerable regions in the Arctic – which are sparsely populated – had above average land surface temperatures in February: Large parts of Greenland and the Arctic regions in North America showed much warmer than average land surface temperatures, but affect very few people (and hence do not appear in these map projections).
The full picture of changing land surface temperatures during this winter season can be seen in the following cartogram animation that starts with the conditions as observed in October 2012 and goes until the most recent image of March 2013. It confirms, that we were far from a long-cold winter, but experienced a rather late arrival with a bitterly cold ending in March that sticks most in our minds now as our image of this winter:

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Climate change, or indeed global warming is far from off the table just because some of us experienced a rare ‘white Easter’ instead of an equally rare white Christmas. In other parts of the world, the maps and animation also show that despite above average land surface temperatures in Australia on many parts of the continent, most of the population faced below average values in February and March. Changing climates are more complicated than what we see in front of our doorstep, but also more complex than current weather phenomena. This image is a snapshot which together with many other snapshots can give us more insights into how the global weather patterns chance and contribute to a changing climate.
As explained on NASA’s Earth Observatory website: “Some land surface temperature anomalies are simply random weather phenomena, not part of a specific pattern or trend. Others anomalies are more meaningful. Widespread cold anomalies may be an indication of a harsh winter with lots of snow on the ground. Small, patchy warm anomalies that appear in forests or other natural ecosystems may indicate deforestation or insect damage. Many urban areas also show up as hot spots in these maps because developed areas are often hotter in the daytime than surrounding natural ecosystems or farmland. Warm anomalies that persist over large parts of the globe for many years can be signs of global warming.”
The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) using data by NASA (temperatures) and SEDAC (population). You may use the map under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Earth at Night

worldmapper — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:00:59 +0000

In 2007 nature conservation organisation WWF initiated a campaign “encouraging households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour to raise awareness about the need to take action on climate change” (Wikipedia). The campaign is called Earth Hour and always takes place at the end of March – this year on Saturday, the 23rd.
The Earth Hour campaign has motto of “uniting the world to protect the planet”, although certainly not everyone will join in switching off their lights at 8.30 pm to unite each time zone with a dark night sky (and there is criticism of campaigns like this). But the wealthier parts of the world will be the main focus, as large parts of the poor world live in relative darkness at night anyway. NASA’s composite satellite image of the world at night (as featured on this website before) that gives us an indication of where light pollution affects most of the night skies has just received an update recently. Earth at Night 2012 was published by the NASA Earth Observatory last December, promising nothing less that “It’s the end of the night as you know it; you’ll see fine.” The resolution and level of detail revealed in the data is stunning, so that I reworked my version of the Earth at Night in an equal population projection using a gridded cartogram transformation. The new gridded population cartogram of the Earth at Night gives an equally stunning insight into how human activity relates to the distribution of light at night, showing the already highlighted inequalities that became apparent in the old version of the map in even greater detail where large parts of the populations in Africa and also in some parts of Asia live in the shadows of the wasteful brightness of the wealthy world. The Earth at Night as seen by humanity – an image of an unequal world:

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Earth Hour can be a reminder of what a unique planet we live on and that it should take more attention than switching off the lights one evening a year to remind ourselves of the fragility of the blue marble that is far from being a black one at night. Reflecting on our wasteful use of energy in the brightest spots shown in this map is only the start for living a more sustainable future.

The following NASA video clip shows detailed views of the more conventional perspective:

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). You may use the map under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

A Military World

worldmapper — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:00:12 +0000

World military spending for 2011 is estimated to be over $1.7 trillion at current prices, and has come to a relative stagnation after it has been steadily rising in recent years. As summarised on the Global Issues website, “the 15 countries with the highest spending account for over 81% of the total; The USA is responsible for 41 per cent of the world total, distantly followed by the China (8.2% of world share), Russia (4.1%), UK and France (both 3.6%).” The data cited here comes from the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute who use publicly available data sources for its reports. Military expenditure is defined as “all current and capital expenditure on: (a) the armed forces, including peacekeeping forces; (b) defence ministries and other government agencies engaged in defence projects; (c) paramilitary forces, when judged to be trained and equipped for military operations; and (d) military space activities. Such expenditures should include: (a) military and civil personnel, including retirement pensions of military personnel and social services for personnel; (b) operations and maintenance; (c) procurement; (d) military research and development; and (e) military aid (in the military expenditure of the donor country). Civil defence and current expenditures on previous military activities, such as veterans’ benefits, demobilization, conversion and weapon destruction are excluded.”
SIPRI’s long term observations show how the decrease in military spending following the end of the cold war in the 1990s slowed down at the turn of the century, and has significantly been rising again over the last 10 years – now exceeding the levels of the 1980. A major impact on these figures has the revival of military spending in North America, as the regional breakdown of the data shows. Compared to that, the rise of Asia appears much less significant than one would expect, although the region is clearly gaining importance (see an interactive graphic of the data on the Guardian datablog).
The following cartogram uses the latest available figures of military expenditure from the 2012 update of the database, completed by own estimates for the missing countries. It shows the estimate absolute expenditure in current (2011) US$ for the year 2011:

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To add some more context to the map, I added a small inset map on the bottom left corner which shows the Global Peace Index. As explained on Wikipedia, “the Global Peace Index (GPI) is an attempt to measure the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness. It is the product of Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) and developed in consultation with an international panel of peace experts from peace institutes and think tanks with data collected and collated by the Economist Intelligence Unit.” Further details about the measure and related studies can be found on the website Vision of Humanity.

The above map was created related to the work on a series of material on geopolitical issues within the context of war and peace for Wissenschaft & Frieden, a German-language academic journal on the research of peace. The first issue of 2013 looks at the geopolitics, to which I contributed a paper on the visualisation of geopolitical issues and also prepared a series of maps that were featured throughout the issue. Due to the deadline for the paper, the above featured updated military spending map is not included in the paper, but the 2010 version of the map where very little has changed to the new data.
Here are the bibliographic details of the paper:

Hennig, B.D. (2013). Kriege, Krisen, Konflikte…und Karten: Ein neuer Blick auf die Welt. Wissenschaft und Frieden 2013 (1): 35-38.
Article online (modified/edited version of the printed work)

Going back to the beginning, how did things change over the last decade in the period where expenditures have been increasing steadily? A map of 2002 that we created for the launch of the initial Worldmapper website shows the dominant role of the USA, but in comparison to the map of the current spending makes the slowly emerging military powers in East Asia and Brazil in South America visible. This is, how the military world looked like in 2002 (which has to be compared to today by bearing in mind that the absolute military expenditure has been growing, so that a smaller share of today’s expenditure may not mean an absolute decline in overall spending):

Money well spent?

On the grid: Worldmapper and beyond

worldmapper — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 05:00:08 +0000

My research on gridded cartograms has its roots in the works of the Worldmapper project, which was originally released in 2006/07 and extended in the following years. While the first phase of the Worldmapper project has visually describes the world, mapping the national contours of hundreds of variables, it did so only in one way and a way easily open to criticism despite its novelty and wide scope. To tackle this, I conducted further research to help address these potential criticisms, to work on moving the resource beyond its simple descriptive form. This included a look at more theoretical issues of how world resources, flows and shares are understood, particularly visually understood – and how this can be improved.
The gridded cartograms are one of the key results of this second phase of the Worldmapper project to advance and improve the capabilities of the Worldmapper maps. So far we integrated gridded cartograms on the Worldmapper website only in form of the World Population Atlas that shows an extensive collection of gridded country cartograms. These are the first ever made compilation of maps showing population distributions in cartogram form at that level of detail for every country of the world, but there is more to the underlying technique than this.
Following the release of these first maps using a gridded cartogram approach, I have made progress not only in enhancing the accuracy and quality of these country-level maps, but also in advancing the technique to a stage where gridded cartograms can be utilised as an alternative map projection (explained and discussed in full detail in my PhD thesis). Some examples are shown on this website: One example for the new capabilities at country level is the map of population changes in Germany. At global level the example of agricultural spaces presented at last year’s Annual Meeting of the Society of Cartographers demonstrates their applicability not only for population-related issues, but beyond that for other quantitative dimensions with a new level of detail, but also new capabilities of showing additional layers of information that the original Worldmapper approach was not capable of achieving.
There sometimes is a certain confusion about the differences between the maps drawn in the first stage of the Worldmapper project (and that we carry on producing as well), and the new gridded cartograms. The following map series shows the differences by using the Worldmapper colour scheme applied to the different map types (for full clarity, the map series starts off with a conventional map projection):

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The two cartogram depictions are both based on the same underlying principle of a diffusion-based algorithm developed by Gastner/Newman, but take a very different way of applying this principle. The comparison of the two maps showing population distributions (and a look at a normal map) makes this very apparent: The original Worldmapper approach results in a relatively easy to read map depiction (which can vary in its character depending on the topic depicted – some of the most extreme disoroted maps are harder to read). This is because it preserves the country shapes, one of the great advantages of Gastner/Newman’s approach. Anyone being familiar with the shapes of the countries will be able to adapt to the depiction in a fairly easy manner (although this approach becomes more difficult when administrative areas that a map reader is less familiar with are transformed with this method – borders are arbitrary lines drawn by humans, and only the knowledge where these borders are helps to read these maps).
In contrast to that, the gridded cartogram shown on the bottom shows more unusual shapes – the colours help to see that e.g. China is now extremely distorted within its borders. A closer investigation of this map (better seen in the enlarged version of the map series) shows the individual grid cells within this map projection that are the base for the transformation, depending on the number of people living in an area. That explains, why there is a distortion within countries, as people are not evenly distributed within a country. In the case of China, the major share of its more than 1.3 billion people squeezes into the eastern provinces, rather than the sparsely populated western region.
This map series demonstrates the principle and differences between the different density-equalising cartogram approaches. It explains, why one map is easier to read, but not suitable for advanced applications, while the gridded cartograms look a bit more complicated to read at first, but therefore contain a much higher level of detail that gives these maps equal capabilities of serving as a basemap for other geographic information that can be projected on top of these maps.
That, in short, explains the different stages of the Worldmapper project so far, and the evolving nature of the maps between the launch of the project website in 2006 and the completion of my PhD research in 2011. As for the future of Worldmapper, the first two phases have only marked the beginning. We hope to start work on a new Worldmapper that does not only contain updated maps of the existing >700 themes, but also extends the range of mappings towards a collection of gridded cartograms of which the more regular visitors of this website have seen some examples since I started doing this blog. Until then, please do visit Viewsoftheworld.net again if you want to see new material.
Any support, comments or suggestions on Worldmapper are always appreciated and welcome: info@worldmapper.org (we do read all emails, even if we can’t answer all of the inquiries we get)

The map series on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig. It is a modified version of a figure included in the book Rediscovering the World: Map Transformations of Human and Physical Space (Springer 2013).

A New Image of the World

worldmapper — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 06:00:37 +0000

A feature about my work is featured in today’s edition of the German national daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. The map of the remotest areas on the planet made it onto the front page (pictured above), and the article features a number of graphics from my PhD research as well as some unpublished works. The feature can be found in today’s print edition of the paper, and can also be accessed via their digital edition on the iPad in the Frankfurter Rundschau app (some knowledge of German may help to read the article, but the maps do also speak for themselves – so go and see it yourself).

If you found your way here via the print version or the iPad article, then you may find the following resources mentioned in the text useful (beyond the further content that you find on this website of course):

Worldmapper: Project within which I have undertaken my research (funded by the Leverhulme Trust)
World Population Atlas: Collection of gridded population cartograms (extension of the Worldmapper map collection)
My book publication about the research: Rediscovering the World: Map Transformations of Human and Physical Space (Springer); doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-34848-8; available as a Springer book, also available at Amazon and Apple iBooks

My research was awarded the 2012 German Study Award (Deutscher Studienpreis)
by the Körber Stiftung who made a short slideshow about my work:

Credit: The front cover image was taken from the Frankfurter Rundschau iPad edition.

Cartograma cuadriculada de la población de Ecuador

worldmapper — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 05:00:30 +0000

The people of Ecuador are going to the polls today, voting at the first general election after the constitutional court resolved the Democracy Code in 2012. This comes at an interesting time from a British perspective, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange still calls London’s Ecuadorian embassy his home. Ecuadorians may care little about this international diplomacy row, and some may be more interested in issues regarding press freedom in their home country. But after many years of economic uncertainty and political instability following the collapse of the banking system in 1999, many other questions will rate far more important at these elections in a country that is extremely diverse for its size, not only in its nature, but also its population.
“Ecuador is a patchwork of indigenous communities, including people of colonial Spanish origins and the descendants of African slaves” (quoted from the BBC Country Profile Ecuador). For a country of only 283,561 sq km size (slightly smaller than Nevada, as the CIA World Factbook puts it), Ecuador has a remarkably diverse natural environment: The continental area stretches from the tropical rainforests in the east over the Andean highlands to the low lying coastal zone. And 1,000 km westwards off the coast the Galapagos Islands form the volcanic outpost of the country.
The population of over 15 million people is concentrated in two of these four major regions: ‘La Costa’ – the coastal region – is home to Ecuador’s largest city Guayaquil (2.3 million people), while the capital Quito (1.6 million people) is located in ‘La Sierra’ – the highlands at an elevation of over 2,800 m above sea level). Despite their high altitude, the Ecuadorian part of the Andes is home to a considerable population almost equal to the coastal areas. The less accessible rainforest region as well as the the Galapagos Islands in contrast are home to only small numbers of people.
The distribution of Ecuadors population is visualised in the following gridded population cartogram (a ‘cartograma cuadriculada de la población ‘ in Spanish), which is a much improved display compared to the original version of this map that I created in 2009 for the World Population Atlas. The improved resolution is made possible by using the LandScan population data which in this case provides a better estimate for the real distribution of people than the SEDAC GPWv3 data. The map shows an equal-sized grid over the land area of Ecuador resized according to the total number of people living in each of the grid cells, so that larger grid cells reflect higher numbers of people, while depopulated areas almost disappear from the map.
The green to brown colours in the map reflect the altitude of the areas, so that the coastal and mountainous regions are clearly distinguishable. The transitional zones of intermediate shadings (and elevations) almost disappear from this map, which shows the relatively small numbers of people living where relief gradients are steepest. The rainforest region (La Amazonía, or also El Oriente as it is situated in the east) which makes almost half of the land area, is equally underrepresented in this map, as it is home to less than 5% of the population. This is the human shape of Ecuador:

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As diverse as its landscapes and natural environment is Ecuador’s population that is shown in this map. “Ecuador’s population is ethnically diverse. The largest ethnic group (as of 2010) is the Mestizos, the descendants of Spanish colonists and indigenous peoples, who constitute 71.9% of the population. Amerindians account for 7% of the current population. Afro-Ecuadorians, including Mulattos and zambos, are also a minority, largely based in Esmeraldas and Imbabura provinces, and make up around 7% of the population” (quoted from Wikipedia). And although there has been a high rate of emigration (read more details in the demographic profile on Wikipedia) following a severe period of economic decline in the 1990s, the overall population keeps steadily growing at over 200,000 people a year.

A look at the human geography of a country can teach us a lot about the human impact on our planet. In the most underrepresented areas in the population cartogram, population growth and in-migration pose the biggest threats, as these are also areas of the most unique biodiversity on the planet: The 25,000 people living on the Galapagos Islands, for example, are the most problematic invasive species and part of the central environmental issues of the Galapagos (though the temporary population, i.e. the tourists, pose equal threats). Read more about biodiversity hotspots at risk of human populations here: Biodiversity Hotspots – A World at Risk.

Copyright note for the LandScan population data: UT BATTELLE, LLC. Developed under Prime Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has certain rights herein.

The Worldmapper Rainbow

worldmapper — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 06:00:43 +0000

A question often asked about Worldmapper is in regard to our choice of colours for the different regions and countries. On the website we briefly explain that the colours used on the maps group the territories into 12 geographical regions, and allow for an easier visual comparison between the maps than would otherwise be possible. The shading of each territory within a region is consistent throughout all of the maps.” But there is a little bit more to the colours which tell a story about the unequal fortunes of the world which follow a general pattern along the major regions.
The colours of the world’s regions are chosen very consciously, and have a deeper sense behind their distribution. We split the world into twelve contiguous geographical regions of population groups, with every region being roughly symmetrically balanced and having at least a population of one hundred million people. This is how the world’s population is distributed:

We then applied a unique colour hue to each of the regions and applied different shadings of the colours to the countries (or territories, as they are, because not all territories that we use are independent countries) within that region. Each territory therefore has a unique colour that stays consistent throughout all worldmapper maps and helps to find your way around in the most distorted maps. The colour hues are also included in the supplementary material (such as the spreadsheets with the underlying data that we provide as a download along each map).
The actual choice of which colour hue goes to which of the twelve regions of the world was made by looking at the Human Development Report (we worked with the 2004 version at the time we developed worldmapper, the latest report and further information can be obtained from the UNDP website at http://hdr.undp.org/en/). We used the HDR to sort these regions from the poorest to the richtest. We then applied a rainbow colour scale to determine the colour hue for each of the regions, starting with shades of dark red to demarcate the poorest territories, then moving through the rainbow scale to a shade violet for the best-off region which is Japan. Here you can see, how the land area map relates to the colour scale of a rainbow:

But even without knowing that background, the colour scheme is a sensible design decision. It helps the map reader to identify individual countries and at the same time not get lost in the overall picture. One just needs to get used to the colours scheme once and is then able to read even the most distorted maps, such as this disturbing picture of executed death penalties:

The colour scheme has proven very useful so that I continued using it in the initial launch of the World Population Atlas. It was the first published series of maps based on the new gridded cartogram technique and (while it was also related to the Worldmapper project and therefore the colour choice seemed obvious) the colours helped to relate to our existing mapping approach so that the very unusual new shapes of the gridded cartograms appeared less intimidating to many of the visitors to our website:

Gridded cartograms, however, are much more complex than the original Worldmapper cartograms. Using just one colour in these maps makes very little use of its capabilities as a real map projection. This is a gridded population cartogram of the United Kingdom as I created it for the World Population Atlas. It is compared to a population density map to illustrate the differences between a choropleth display population density and a gridded population cartogram:

The choropleth map basically wasted its space for the choropleth overlay to display the information it wants to show. The gridded population cartogram in contrast gives equal space to the quantities that are shown in different shades in the reference map: It is an equal-population projection where every person in the UK gets an equal amount of space on the map. The geographical reference is retained at an objective unit, which is the grid. By displaying the grid and its distortion, the individual grid cell (each representing the same ‘real’ space in the physical world), the extent of the distortion helps to read and understand the geographic pattern and to comprehend the reference to the real world. Each grid cells retains its topology, and neigbouring spaces in the real world remain neighbouring spaces in the map. That is why this cartogram can be used like any other map: To draw other things on top of it – such as mountains, valleys and rivers (but also many other things – anything that has a spatial reference in the ‘real’ world that surrounds us). It is a map projection for the human spaces that surround us. Helps to read the world from our perspective – and therefore sometimes is even more powerful when seen without the familiar Worldmapper rainbow:
Now show this on a choropleth population density map…cartograms are not the better map, but they can sometimes be much more useful depending on what wants to be shown, just as is the case with any other choice of map projection…
Copyright note for the LandScan population data: UT BATTELLE, LLC. Developed under Prime Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has certain rights herein.

The maps and images on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). The material can be used under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Megacity London: ever growing, ever more unequal?

worldmapper — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:00:03 +0000

What is it about London? Population growth is slowing across most of Europe – people are having fewer children and, it could be argued, steps are being taken to try to reduce social inequalities. But London is unusual. London continues growing, and London is becoming more youthful. The middle aged and those who are poor, but not desperately poor, are being squeezed out. Graduates from the rest of Britain and the rest of the world flow in ever greater numbers and require ever higher degrees of optimism. Many fail to achieve their aspirations. Above them a few are becoming ever richer. Below them, as private rents and social housing becomes too expensive for huge numbers of lowly paid families and many leave, a new poor may be growing, less well documented, less well protected, with even less to lose.
With a population of currently 8.2 million (according to the 2011 Census), London is not only unique for one of the old world’s megacities by being projected to continue rising significantly in population size over the forthcoming decades, but also by its specific demographic structure. Like many large cities, London has a large share of people in the younger age groups – over 20% in the cohorts from 25-34 – but also a significant share of the youngest with around 7% of its population being 0 to 4 years old. Here is a population pyramid of London compiled from the 2011 Census data that has been released recently:
It is not only the demographic structure that is interesting about London, but also its geographic distribution across the city. Taking a closer look at the individual distribution of age cohorts across the boroughs shows, that those seeking for their fortunes in the capital city in their 20s and 30s are concentrated in the inner London boroughs, contributing significantly to the extremely tense situation on the housing market. The following map animation shows the changing shares for each 5-year age group in their geographical distribution based on borough-level data:

(click for larger version)

These finding are only one part of an analysis of the most recent Census data that Danny Dorling and I presented about the emerging poverty and inequality challenges facing London at a talk and networking event hosted by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation today. With the key statistics being out for just a few weeks, we were able to analyse the changing levels of poverty and wealth in London using indicators developed for the 2007 study of Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain. Comparing the 2001 and 2011 Census, it becomes clear that share of people in the ‘Middle’ is in decline on average, while there are rises on both ends of the spectrum, with exclusively wealthy being slightly on the rise, and the share of breadline poor being significantly on the rise, both contributing to London becoming a much more polarised city even before the most recent welfare cuts started having an effect on the population. Some key numbers and a large amount of maps demonstrating these changes as reflected in the Census data can be seen in the slides that we made for the event:

View on Slideshare

And here is a recording of the main talk:

The maps and graphics on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the University of Sheffield. You may use the map under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Visitors of the World 2012

worldmapper — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 05:00:55 +0000

2012 has been a quite busy year on this website with the number of annual visitors breaking the 100,000 mark for the first time. The analytics tool Piwik which I use for monitoring my website counted precisely 113,359 visits in 2012, up from almost 90,000 the year before. So thanks everyone for visiting either once (as 85,000 people did) or as one of the 16,800 more regular visitors. This asks for a new map that’s showing, where each of the counted visits came from last year: 176 individual countries were counted, as well as a larger number of unknown origins (and of course all those who prefer blocking any analytics tool, they do not appear in any of these statistics). Despite such a large diversity of visits from around the world, the majority comes from places that one may expect, given certain characteristics of this website (language, location, etc.), and also given the accessibility of the internet, which until today remains a very unequal story, even if availability of the online world slowly finds its way to the less privileged places on this planet. But I digress, so here is the map of all visits to viewsoftheworld.net in 2012:

(click for larger version)

As the diagram in the large version of the map shows, the top number of visits last year by far were counted from the USA (46,458 to be precise – I suspect very few from Alaska even if the map suggests otherwise – but this is caused by my ignorance of treating the shape of the USA as one large piece of land). A giant leap behind follows the the United Kingdom (17,496) from where I currently maintain this blog, followed by Germany on rank 3 with 6,107 visitors. In case you wonder about the size of Antarctica where a stunning 2,168 visits are shown: Sadly my counter did not track any penguin (or else) visiting from down there, so that left space for all the unknown visitors to be allocated down there.

Views of Christmas

worldmapper — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:01:06 +0000

Another year over

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year

* the map on the Christmas bauble displays a population cartogram of London

Born abroad: A look at the Population of the UK

worldmapper — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 08:00:10 +0000

According to a BBC News feature, “trends in migration are changing. Once, migrants from the same country tended to cluster in areas where they had relatives or friends. But new maps of England and Wales, reveal that for more recent migrants this is no longer the case” The maps of which this quote speak are a short series of cartograms created in collaboration of the BBC with the University of Sheffield in which we took a look at the first set of data from the 2011 Census in the United Kingdom (with much more detailed statistics due early next year). This is how some of the trends analysed by the BBC look like, using a gridded population cartogram of the country as a basemap for the lower maps shown here:

As described by the BBC, “the maps show a large concentration of people from India in Leicester, Pakistan-born residents congregate around Slough and old northern mill towns such as Bradford and the Irish communities tend to be in the London area [while] more recent immigrants, such as those from Poland, tend to be more widespread – following the work rather than the community.”
It should be kept in mind that the data shown in this small map series covers just one aspect of the recently released key statistics. Related to migration, the indicator ‘born abroad’ does not necessarily relate to a foreign background as widely (and often quite emotionally) discussed in the days following the release of the data last week. The data can also relate to people whose ‘British’ parents lived abroad while they were born (such as members of the army who returned from abroad before the 2011 Census). Nevertheless, as the maps indicate there are some distinct patterns to the distribution of foreign-born population.

However, some of these patterns come less as a surprise and follow trends that have started much earlier than over the last 10 years. A more detailed analysis of the previous Census together with a large number of similar maps can be found in Danny Dorling’s second edition of The Population of the UK which has just been released as a fully revised and updated edition and where I have fully redrawn the cartography of the first edition. The following map shows a map from the chapter on Identity and highlights the question of ethnicity as it looked in the previous Census – showing the diversity that existed then already in most of the largest urban areas across England (sic!):

(click for larger version)

Beyond identity, migration and ethnicity, the ONS draws a few conclusions from the release of these first key statistics (quoted from the ONS website):

- The resident population of England and Wales on the 27 March 2011 was 56.1 million, a seven per cent (3.7 million) increase since 2001 with 55 per cent (2.1 million) of this increase being due to migration. One in six people were aged 65 or over (16 per cent, 9.2 million).
- In 2011, four out of every five (81 per cent, 45.5 million) residents of England and Wales described themselves as being in good or very good health.
- The number of residents who stated that their religion was Christian in 2011 was fewer than in 2001. The size of this group decreased 13 percentage points to 59 per cent (33.2 million) in 2011 from 72 per cent (37.3 million) in 2001. The size of the group who stated that they had no religious affiliation increased by 10 percentage points from 15 per cent (7.7 million) in 2001 to 25 per cent (14.1 million) in 2011.
- Of the 13 per cent (7.5 million) of residents of England and Wales on 27 March 2011 who were born outside of the UK, just over half (3.8 million) arrived in the last 10 years.
- The number of cars and vans available for use by households in England and Wales increased from 23.9 million to 27.3 million between 2001 and 2011. In 2001 there were on average 11 cars per 10 households whereas in 2011 there were 12 cars per 10 households. The proportion of households with access to no cars or one car declined over the decade whereas the proportion with two or more cars rose. London was the only region where the number of cars and vans was lower than the number of households.
- In 2011 there were more people with Level 4 or above qualifications, eg Bachelor’s degree (27 per cent, 12.4 million), than people with no qualifications (23 per cent, 10.3 million).

The map series on this page has been created by the Visual Journalism team of BBC News in collaboration with Benjamin D. Hennig of the University of Sheffield. Please contact me if you have further questions regarding these maps.

In Focus: Mapping Britain’s Super-rich

worldmapper — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:00:33 +0000

George Osborne’s autumn statement on the government’s budget rekindled the ongoing debate about the fairness of the coalition’s spending cuts. How does it look like if you take a look at the richest and the poorest parts of society? In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (December 2012, Volume 3, Issue 3) Danny Dorling and I plotted the geography of the wealthiest of the wealthy in the United Kingdom in comparison to poverty.
The map that I created for this feature displays the distribution of the top 1% of the wealthiest 1% according to information published by the agency WealthInsight, one of the companies trying to gather information on this part of the publication that is a prime target for exclusive marketing. Displayed in the map are data on people with assets in excess of US$30 million and where they have their prime address registered in the UK. The extent of the data is very limited because WealthInsight releases data for only 20 UK cities and regions based on postcode areas (Northern Ireland is a single postcode area which is why we did not correlate that data with Belfast’s overall population). Here we have superimposed that data on a population cartogram of the country, drawing circles with an area in proportion to the numbers of super-rich (in red) over people living in each city (in blue). Where they overlap, the circles turn into a purple colour. Where there are more super-rich people than population alone would predict, there is an orange ring around a purple core, as shown around London. Where there are fewer super-rich than the population of a city might predict, there is a blue outer-ring, as around Birmingham. The underlying map shows the distribution of poverty in the UK in five shades of grey.
Cities such as Leeds, Birmingham and Nottingham have fewer super-rich than might be expected – partly because they are not especially affluent urban centres but also, most probably, because their postcode does not include nearby areas such as the North Yorkshire stockbroker belt or the Cotswolds. Aberdeen, in contrast, has some multimillionaires: beneficiaries of the oil boom with an Aberdeen postcode who live some distance from that city. With Manchester it is hard not to speculate that a few extra footballers may have tipped it over the limit.

Here are the bibliographic details:

Hennig, B. D. and Dorling, D. (2012). In Focus: Mapping Britain’s Super‑rich. Political Insight 3 (3): 42.
Article online (Wiley)

A World Map of Organic Agriculture

worldmapper — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 06:00:13 +0000

Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects. Organic agriculture combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved. (IFOAM 2009)

The practice of organic farming is not only relevant for soothing the bad conscience of wealthier societies, but it plays an important role in preserving croplands from degradation that is often caused by conventional intensive methods of farming. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recognised this need and set up the Organic Agriculture Programme. Its objective is “to enhance food security, rural development,sustainable livelihoods and environmental integrity by building capacities of member countries in organic production, processing, certification and marketing“. With a still growing world population and the rising demand for food, more sensible (and thus sustainable) ways of agriculture are needed more than ever to stop damage to the world’s arable lands.
In a joint paper published last year in the European Journal of Social Sciences (Vol. 24, Issue 3) John Paull and I presented a new world map of organic agriculture that presents countries as proportional in size to their share of the total of world organic hectares (data sources are described in the paper, reference see below):

(click for larger version)

In the paper we conclude that the World Map of Organic Agriculture illustrates the great unevenness of the global uptake of organic agriculture. The map is dominated by the presence of Australia which appears especially bloated, and this reflects its world leadership position in terms of its number of organic agriculture hectares. South America has a strong presence accounted for in large measure by three countries, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Europe collectively has a strong presence with substantial contributions from many states, and led by Spain, Italy, Germany, UK, France, and Austria. China and India dominate the Asian representation. Africa has an eviscerated presence, Russia appears anorexic, and the Middle East is emaciated, in each case reflecting the poor diffusion of organic agriculture into these regions – and perhaps the great opportunities for future organic penetration into these territories. The map presence of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) reflects their recent commitment to the adoption of organics (BFA 2009) and the newfound status of the Falkland Islands as a current world leader with 36% of its agricultural land classified as organic (Paull 2011).

These are the full bibliographical details of the paper:

Paull, J. and Hennig, B. (2011). A World Map of Organic Agriculture. European Journal of Social Sciences 24 (3): 360-369.
Article as PDF; Journal issue online (EJSS);
High-resolution version of the map (Oxford University Archive)

Visualising the EU Budget

worldmapper — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 05:00:29 +0000

Last week’s map series on the financial state of the European Union focused on a general overview of how population and economic activity relate to the financial framework of the Union. The current financial framework covers the period of 2007-2013 and ensures a certain planning security for the main areas of the common political goals of the EU. With the current framework expiring next year, tense negotiations are under way for the forthcoming Multiannual financial framework 2014-2020. The outcome will undoubtedly have major implications on the functioning of the European Union, as the budget allows key political areas to be pursued beyond national politics: “The Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) defines the EU’s long-term spending priorities in line with the agreed political priorities and sets annual maximum amounts to be spent on each priority. The financial framework stretches over several years [...] to ensure sound and responsible financial planning and management.”
The following map series shows the current funding priorities of the EU budget. It shows that beyond the net benefits and contributions, large proportions of the money are actually redistributed between the wealthiest member states. The first two maps compares how much is paid into and received from the EU budget by each member state at the moment:

(click for larger version)

Although the poorer countries such as those in the east of the EU (following the colours of the wealth spectrum outlined before) indicate a certain element of solidarity in the redistribution, a lot of the money goes back to the largest contributors. This chart shows where the current EU spending focuses on:

These individual fields of spending are distributed very differently amongst the member states, as the following series of cartograms shows. The maps take each individual area of spending shown in this chart and resizes the countries proportionally according to the money they receive from this field of spending (explanations below each map are quoted from the Financial Framework documentation). The pie chart next to each map highlights the share of each of the fields of spending from the overall budget:

Competitiveness for Growth and Employment

(click for larger version)

This includes “research and innovation, education and training, trans-European networks, social policy, economic integration and accompanying policies.“

Cohesion for Growth and Employment

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This includes the “convergence of the least developed EU countries and regions, EU strategy for sustainable development outside the least prosperous regions, inter-regional cooperation. [...] Cohesion policy helps poorer regions and countries catch up and connect to the Single Market..”

Preservation and Management of Natural Resources

(click for larger version)

The largest part of the EU budget “includes the common agricultural policy, common fisheries policy, rural development and environmental measures.“

Citizenship, freedom, security and justice

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This includes “justice and home affairs, border protection, immigration and asylum policy” as well as “public health, consumer protection, culture, youth, information and dialogue with citizens.“

EU as a global player

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This area “covers all external action (“foreign policy”) by the EU.“

Administration

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This much discussed aboutfield of spending “covers the administrative expenditure of all the European institutions, pensions and EU-run schools for staff members’ children (“European Schools”).”

This map series explains the patterns behind the EU budget which are less discussed in the public. They show which member state benefits from what area of spending, where national interests were most secured, but also how common EU policies try to address regional imbalances to achieve more social cohesion and sustainability in Europe. The maps give a clearer picture of EU spending that merely looking at the total ‘costs‘ as well as the net spending (and net benefits), and the often discussed costs of bureaucracy.

The European Commission’s own account of the budget is of course biased, but makes a point about the benefits from a joint budget that funds common policies that individual member states would hardly engage in: “The EU budget focuses on bringing growth and jobs, tackling climate change, migration, cross-border crime and other challenges that affect us all. It helps boost prosperity, for example by better interconnecting Europeans through energy, transport and ICT infrastructure, by supporting less well-off regions to create growth and jobs both there and in the rest of the EU, and by pooling our efforts in areas like research. It is also about securing our own food supply. And finally, it is about making the EU’s size count in the world – just as the US and China make their size count, and pooling our efforts to help the world’s poorest people.”

While one may understand the criticism of spending money on the European Union in times of austerity and recession, a lot of the debate misses the central question of what the European Union means as a project for Europe. Some of the arguments brought forward are also distorted or incomplete, resulting in some EU budget myths circulating the public opinion in the countries most skeptic of the EU. To counterbalance this, here are some more facts behind these maps (as outlined by the European Commission): “The EU budget was around € 140 billion in 2011. [...] To put this in perspective, the average EU citizen paid [...] 67 cents on average per day to finance the annual budget in 2010. [...] the EU budget represents around 1% of EU-27 Gross Domestic Product – the total value of all goods and services produced in the EU [...] 94% of what is paid into the EU budget is spent in Member States on policies and programmes that benefit citizens directly.”
This is what the above maps show: The money is being redistributed, and in large it benefits the individual member states – sometimes very directly within their own country, but beyond that also by creating a more equal Union, which should remain its main goal in the future. For doing that, the most capable countries should perhaps give in on some of the benefits they receive from the EU and therefore allow the EU budget to focus more on a larger solidarity between the member states for a better future…

The following interactive graphic by the European Commission allows you to explore the data shown in the maps interactively to find out more details and changes over the years:

Note: The figures used in the maps are the most recent as published by the European Commission. According to the EC, the data includes the 2011 adjustments for national GDP movements. If a country’s GDP is significantly above or below the estimate, the amount allocated for cohesion policies (to increase economic convergence between EU members) is adjusted accordingly.

The graphs and maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). You are welcome to use the maps under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

The State of the European Union

worldmapper — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 04:00:28 +0000

The European Union is an economic and political partnership between 27 European countries that together cover a large part of the European continent. As the EU website explains: “It was created in the aftermath of the Second World War. The first steps were to foster economic cooperation: the idea being that countries who trade with one another become economically interdependent and so more likely to avoid conflict. The result was the European Economic Community (EEC), created in 1958, and initially increasing economic cooperation between six countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Since then, a huge single market has been created and continues to develop towards its full potential. But what began as a purely economic union has also evolved into an organisation spanning all policy areas, from development aid to environment. A name change from the EEC to the European Union (the EU) in 1993 reflected this change.”
The Nobel Prize Committee recognised the achievements of the European Union by awarding the 2012 Peace Price to the project “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe“. But in the shadow of the European debt crisis Europe appears less the united with Euroscepticism gaining momentum in some countries. A 2009 study by the European Commission “Portugal and Hungary (both 50%) and Latvia (51%) contain the fewest people who feel optimistic about the EU’s future. The UK (53%), Greece (54%) and France (57%) also record noticeably low figures” (see page 212 in the accompanying report). “Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom has been a significant element in British politics since the inception of the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor to the EU”, concludes a Wikipedia contribution, which reflects the emotional and often – in either way – dogmatic nature of the debate in the most skeptic members of the Union. The EU appears to have become a welcome recession scapegoat.
But what is the European Union anyway. Rather than an alien construct imposed on the member states, it still is the agreed structure set up by its member states (for the good or bad, that is). The following series of maps gives a brief introduction into some of the key figures that shape the countries that are part of the EU and who are about the meet for negotiations on how to fund the European Union for the rest of the decade – having crucial implications on the role and purpose of the project. All maps shown here are cartograms based on national-level statistics. The first map is a population cartogram of the member states showing where how many people live (a more detailed perspective gives this gridded population cartogram of the EU):

(click for larger version)

Comparing this to a cartogram of the economic output as expressed in GDP shows that there is a strong imbalance between the east and the west of the Union where the western economies (most noticeably the north-west) have a much stronger economic base than the eastern member states (see this time-series of GDP-figures on how this imbalance started to shift over the last decade, a process which came to a halt since the beginning of the global financial crisis):

(click for larger version)

Combining these two key indicators – population and GDP – explains the choice of colours that has been made in these maps. Using both figures one can make a rank order of wealth of each member state expressed in GDP per head. Using this order the colours were applied to a rainbow scheme going from red for the lowest GDP per head via yellow, green and blue to purple/pink for the countries with the largest GDP per head figures. The result are the colours as shown in the following conventional map showing the wealth spectrum of the EU on a conventional map projection:

(click for larger version)

These two key figures explain some of the financial framework that has been set up for the contributions of the individual member states. It aims to also address the imbalance between the poorer and wealthier member states, so that the following chart showing the net benefits from the EU budget as share of the national GDP (as of the current Financial framework 2007-2013) can be better understood: The poorest member states in the left part of the chart receive more than they pay in, while most of the wealthier countries pay in as a net contribution (although it often is not mentioned that no member country pays more than 0.5% of its annual GDP as a net contribution):

Some of the countries in the supposedly wealthier part of the EU benefit in relation to their national GDP. Most noticeably these are Belgium and Luxembourg, which both have a relatively low GDP (and equally low population), but receive in comparison to that GDP a lot of funding due to their central role in EU administration. Also a net gainer in the most recent figures is Ireland which has been one of the first EU member states to be hit by the financial crisis and thus received more funding according to the last figures that have been released (we may therefore expect quite some chances in this pattern as a result of the current economic turmoil). The total figures were also part of a feature in Wiley’s Political Insight that visualises the net funding in a series of two cartograms (using the same colour scheme):

(click for larger version)

The same data is also shown in the following chart that adds up the contributions paid into the current EU budget and the payments a country receives from the EU budget:

This chart demonstrates one other often less discussed aspect of the EU: While some of the wealthier countries pay in quite some large sums into the EU budget (depending on their GDP – as stated in our Wiley feature the EU’s overall budget represents approximately 1% of the gross national income (GNI) of all member states). The largest contributors such as France and Germany and also the United Kingdom are also those in receipt of the largest payments from the EU budget.

A more detailed look at the individual fields of spending by the European Union will follow in a map feature on this website published next week.

Four more years: US presidential election results

worldmapper — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 04:00:46 +0000

The old tenant in the White House stays for another four years after Tuesday’s presidential election in the United States. By the time of writing, Obama has secured 303 of the electoral votes, while his opponent Romney could only secure 206. The 29 votes from Florida were still undecided, but showed a favour towards Obama. The number of votes in the electoral college which elects the president reflects very much the population distribution in the country, and according to the US voting system one state gives all its votes to the winning candidate in that state. Therefore the presidential election is often displayed on a map based on state-level results. What the conventional maps fail in though is a correct proportional view of the votes, giving the less densely populated space in the mid-west a lot more space in the map display compared to the densely populated east or also larger states such as Washington. The following state-level population cartogram corrects that perspective by resizing each of the US states according to its total population and colouring the state by the colour of the winning candidate in the 2012 presidential election (assuming Florida also goes to Obama as currently predicted):

(click for larger version)

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). You are welcome to use the maps under Creative Commons conditions for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Art meets Science: Views of the Arab World

worldmapper — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 04:00:48 +0000

‘Arts-Science encounters‘ are much talked about but much less often put into practice (for their supposedly little economic benefit – not least in times of tight science budgets). Science and art are not such opposing worlds as we often see them today, as they were much less divided world in the past. As I wrote in my PhD thesis, “Cartography has always been connecting the worlds of art and science. McLuhan & Powers (1992) underline the importance of cartography by claiming that without the map ‘the world of modern science and technologies would hardly exist’ (McLuhan & Powers 1992, quoted from Thrower 1999: 1). One may not fully agree with this notion, but the importance of cartographic contributions to our understanding of the physical and social environments is hardly questionable.”
More widely, science and art remain closely intertwined. From the view of science, this link is often to be found in the field of scientific visualisation. The exhibition Places & Spaces: Mapping Science for example “is meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale” (see scimaps.org). And where both worlds actively start to meet, the outcome can be a valuable contribution to a new perspective on research, as well as research can gain inspiring ideas for its own work. As stated in the Guardian, “the results [of such collaborations] can be seismic“.
Less seismic in a literal sense but not less inspiring have been some of the collaborations that originated from the Worldmapper project. Amongst these collaborations that I was involved in were the Story Map: What I Heard About the World by Sheffield-based performing artists Third Angel and the short film Sheffield – A City in Context by (again) Sheffield-based creative agency Human where we as academic geographers learned a lot about the approach artists take to see and explain our world.
A very different example of science and art encounters are the sculptures by Bay Area-based artist Jennifer Brazelton who came across my gridded population cartograms that I created as part of my PhD research and published online in the World Population Atlas. Here is an example of her work showing a sculpture based on the shape and structure of the gridded population cartogram of Syria, a country that made the most recent but also so far most lasting headlines in the events of the still so-called Arab Spring:

Syria

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

As explained in a feature from the 2012 Ceramic Art Show in Fort Mason, Jennifer’s work “draws inspiration from visual patterns. [...] Order and place in these structures are emphasized like links in any living chain.” That may explain how the abstract yet also organic nature of the population maps also found their way into her work in a series also inspired by the events of the Arab Spring. About the sculptures created from the maps she writes:

After years of looking at topographical maps and trying to think of ways to incorporate their line quality and movement into my sculptures I found the gridded population cartograms. I loved the abstracted, organic, insect like shapes, and the quality of the line. I work primarily in clay so I started building them and experimenting with the surfaces. My current sculptures are focused on the countries of the Middle East.

More of her work – including the sculptures made from the gridded population cartograms – can be found on the website http://www.jenniferbrazelton.com. Here is a selection of some of the works, shown alongside my original population map (the links below the maps give you a larger view of the sculpture as well as they lead to the original map on the World Population Atlas):

Afghanistan

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

United Arab Emirates

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Egypt

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Iran

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Iraq

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Libya

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Morocco

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Tunisia

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Yemen

(click here for a full-size picture of the sculpture – or here for the population map)

Encounters between art and science may not produce the economic benefit that is often demanded by politicians. As US president Obama said addressing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last year (quoted from this Nature news feature): “Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before.” If we are to take that claim seriously, the benefits for society sometimes may go beyond measurable (economic or other) output, but something that can simply inspire people, change the way we see our world, and change the way we live our lives on this vulnerable planet.

The maps on this page have been made by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). The sculptures are the work of Jennifer Brazelton.
You are welcome to use the images under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

World Population Cube

worldmapper — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 05:00:30 +0000

Last weekend I was invited to a workshop on future developments of society. The event took place in Berlin and was organised by the German research institution Fraunhofer-Institut für System- und Innovationsforschung (ISI) as part of the Foresight Process initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The Foresight Process is described as ‘a strategic instrument (…) that provides technology foresight and the determination of future societal needs in terms of research and development‘. The workshop was a day full of creative buzz to squeeze interesting ideas out of the participants. To kick off the discussion everyone was asked to bring an item that symbolises one’s own work. For my work that had to be something abut maps. But to make it a more interesting item than a flat map I decided to craft a more sophisticated version of my maps that also stands for the challenging world views that lie behind the cartographic techniques that I work on. Cubic globes are not a new idea, but are quite handy when wanting just a little bit more than a simple map. They are much less work than creating a spheric version of the earth, and (as said by Carlos Furuti on his online cube globe collection) the cube is an ideal introduction to folding one’s own pseudoglobes.
My very own version of a cubic globe is the World Population Globe which I took with me to the workshop. It shows my gridded world population cartogram including topographic and bathymetric details and is reprojected onto a six-sided figure with square sides. If you want to create your own world population cube from my map, you can use the following template, print it out and have your hands on with a pair of scissors and a little bit of glue. The key instructions are shown on the printout (make sure to click the image or the links below for a full-size DIN A4 version of the template). Change your views of the world – enjoy the world population cube!

(click here for a full-size jpg image – or here for a pdf version)

The material on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). You are welcome to use it under Creative Commons conditions for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

The Population of the European Union

worldmapper — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:00:37 +0000

Europe appears to be far from being a perfect union these days, with many countries suffering severely from high debt levels as a lasting legacy of the financial crisis that brought the slowly shifting economic equalisation between East and West to a halt. In a symbolic move the Nobel Committee made the decision to award the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union. It reflects a plea for European Unity which is seen as a great achievement for a continent where countries had repeatedly been at war for centuries. The Committee argues that the EU “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe“. The European Union is a project to unite the population of the continent peacefully in all its diversity, a population which is shown in the following map. The map displays a gridded population cartogram of the EU27 member states without any borders drawn onto it. The map is as a reminder that here we really are all in this together regardless the place we live on the continent (and the islands surrounding it), instead of all against each other:

(click for larger map)

The map on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under the Creative Commons conditions; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Global Publishing Markets

worldmapper — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 05:00:13 +0000

From 10 to 14 October book lovers and publishers look to Frankfurt where the annual Frankfurt Book Fair takes place. However nostalgic one may see books, they are as much a commodity as any other traded good, and publishers – however committed to their business – look for a good business deal and reasonable revenues when agreeing to a new book project. On Worldmapper we looked at the number of books published in 1999. At request and with the help of the International Publishers Association (IPA) we have now updated this map using the most recent data that we could get. The following map takes a slightly different methodological approach and therefore displays not the total number of books, but represents domestic publishing markets by market value at consumer prices:

(click for larger version)

The data has been compiled by Rüdiger Wischenbart for the IPA, who described the map in an accompanying short report: “The Global Map of Publishing Markets is the first visual representation of publishing around the world by the numbers. The map demonstrates the way that books and the industry behind them reflect access to knowledge and to the opportunity to dive into the imaginary worlds brought to life by written words—where books are freely available and where books are hidden behind scores of cultural, social, or economic obstacles. The map and the data behind it provide a better understanding of the opportunities, as well as the challenges, in making reading and access to books universal. The 2012 Global Map of Publishing Markets displays a world of striking inequalities. A few countries form powerful centres of gravity, with several more–those which economists call “emerging markets”–shown at least relatively equal to their size in terms of territory and population. But the majority of markets are difficult to identify, lost in the periphery.
Yet the Global Map of Publishing Markets and, even more so, the underlying data and research on market developments, do more than portray an uneven playing field. They can be used as a road map for anyone concerned with the globalisation of culture, knowledge, and learning; they highlight huge opportunities for all those who are in the business of publishing and related industries. They hopefully serve as incentive and encouragement to stakeholders particularly in emerging markets and in lesser-represented regions. The strategic goal going forward is certainly adjusting this map so that in the future, the world of publishing more closely resembles that standard map of geographers and demographers—one in which countries have a roughly identical size with regard to their population and publishing market.”
More details on the map and the methodology behind the underlying data can be found in the report from the IPA website (pdf download):
Drawing the Global Map of Publishing Markets 2012: An experimental introduction

This year’s honorary guest country at the Book Fair is New Zealand,
shown here in an equal-population projection from the World Population Atlas

The main map on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield) for the International Publishers Association. The gridded population map is taken from my World Population Atlas, which is part of the Worldmapper project. Please contact me for further details.

Changing demographies of Germany

worldmapper — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 05:00:55 +0000

22 years after re-unification Germany has become an ‘accidental empire’ (Guardian) in Europe through its economic might. It is the largest economy in Europe and also happens to be the largest country by population. Germany has gotten into a political role that it seemed to be reluctant to take over ever since – in many regards the country is still seen as a reluctant power as Meier described it in a paper published in 1995 (today going much further than the role of the nation’s army). Post-unification Germany has been marked with many changes and the emergence of a reborn nation which stands in the centre of the future challenges of Europe. While the country struggles with a redefined role in Europe, its domestic challenges are appear equally tough: They are those of building a sustainable future for a rapidly changing demographic structure of society that is able to sustain a strong economic base. With a declining population, Germany may be smaller than France or the United Kingdom by 2060 if current trends were to continue (predicting future populations must always be seen with great caution – as some predictions from almost 50 years ago demonstrate quite well). Putting uncertainties about future trends aside, the question may also be whether a decline in population is a negative thing (and on the opposite, whether growing populations are bad either)? The pure numbers are less the problem, rather than the spatial and social implications that come with them.
Panic is never helpful for finding solutions, but look at what demographic changes are actually happening to find ways of dealing with it. The decrease of the fertility rate down to 1.36 children per woman in 2011 (according to the Federal Statistical Office) is already tackled with political measures (which may even already have first influences on the predicted trends as suggested by the MPG) and could lead to a changing trend – though probably not a reversal in the general trend of an ageing population (as reflected in the changing population pyramid of Germany). But most of the negative impact of demographic change in a spatial context have started with reunification in 1990 and lead to specific geographic problems that are the much more imminent for the country, as they led to a considerably changed population landscape:

(click for larger and more detailed version)

This map demonstrates the current demographic reality in Germany as a problem for regional planning. The map highlights how Demographics and economic power split Germany geographically: Shown is a gridded population cartogram of Germany (see a topographic version of the map here, data based on the LandScan 2008 population model) where each grid cell is resized according to the total number of people living in that area. The colours in the map indicate the estimated population changes between 1990 (the year of unification) and 2015 (based on SEDAC population estimates). The colour shows the expected change in 2015 compared to the year 1990. (It has to be noted that the SEDAC estimates are based on district-level data (‘Kreise und kreisfreie Städte’) and therefore less detailed than the underlying grid. The changes in a city such as Berlin reflect overall changes rather than changes within the city.)
Peak population of Germany seems to have been reached in the last decade, but the population changes that went on since reunification have resulted in a Germany that remains very much divided in the population patterns that shape its demographic landscape. The following chart does not only show the changes between 1990 and today (2009 respecitevly, but the prevailing trend continues), but also the split between east and west and the slowly growing differences between their already very different population numbers:

East Germany is smaller and therefore has a smaller population, but especially when leaving Berlin out there are stark differences between the two parts: In 2010 West Germany was much more crowded with an average of 261 people per square kilometer, opposed to 121 persons living in the same space in East Germany. These figures are not least a result of trends in East-West German migration (such as those described in a paper for the period of 1989 to 2002). The spatial implications of internal migration combined with demographic trends towards an ageing population and economic trends of less prosperous regions that are most affected by out-migration of young as well as skilled people are the real challenge in today’s Germany. What is a North-South divide in Britain appears to be an East-West divide in Germany which especially in the demographic development is growing according to the this year’s annual report on German unity by the German Federal Interior Ministry.
Only few places in East Germany have seen growing populations compared to the early 1990s. The suburban fringe around the capital city Berlin and few other cities (e.g. Halle, Rostock and Dresden) are growing – mostly catching up with an almost non-existent suburbanisation and a move out from the city centres which are therefore shrinking almost everywhere. Leipzig is one of the few exceptions where growth has not only reached the suburban areas, but also the revived city centre. This was actively supported by economic investments to encourage industrial development as well as the relocation of central institutions (such as the federal constitutional to Leipzig). In the west ongoing suburbanisation trends (with growth rates over 125% in the period observed) are mainly taking place around prospering cities – Munich, Hamburg, but to a smaller extent also around places like Stuttgart, or Cologne. Population increases are much more prevalent across many parts of West Germany, and where populations are not growing, they are often stable rather than shrinking.
The less prospering regions in the East and in some old industrial areas of the west (Ruhrgebiet, Saarland) are that places that are most affected by considerably declining populations, leaving the most vulnerable in society behind in these areas. In the East this affects even the least densely populated regions (where the grid cells are smallest in the map) that in the enthusiasm of unification were invested in to improve infrastructure for what were believed to be growing populations – now also leaving behind a much over-sized (or underused) infrastructure.
Demographic change is becoming increasingly more important in political and planning discussions, given that it is considered to be an important factor for future land use, development and urbanisation trends throughout the whole of Europe. Shrinking cities may become the norm in a Europe that – if trends continue – will not only shrink relatively to the rest of the world, but also in absolute terms. Germany’s (economic) ability to act in the most affected regions that appear on the map can be seen as a chance to find solutions for decline becoming the norm, and for societies growing older.
Urban growth has long been an important topic, but urban decline is becoming ever more relevant as global population growth is going down ever since the early 1960s (a far less mentioned statistic than that of the growing world population). Shrinking cities are part of our future, and Germany may become once more a role model for other countries to look at in the future. The demographic patchwork revealed in the map above is a picture of a Germany that has reached its peak population. if trends continue, and the world is ever closer to reaching its population peak as well.
In every change lies a chance…

(click for larger map)

The map and material on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the Sasi Research Group (University of Sheffield). You are welcome to use the maps under Creative Commons conditions for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Sheffield – A City in Context

worldmapper — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 06:00:42 +0000

What happens if you lock two creative people and three geographers in a pub, pour some statistics about their city over them and let their mind work out the rest? You could find out the result at this year’s Festival of the Mind of the University of Sheffield that went on for 10 days throughout Sheffield. Nick Bax and Daniel Fleetwood of Humanstudio were the two creative minds that teamed up with Carl Lee of Sheffield College and Danny Dorling & myself from the University of Sheffield to take a look at the impact of higher education on the city in a slightly unusual way. The result of this collaboration is the short film ‘A City in Context‘ viewed during the festival and now available online.

As the notes to the film explain, the thinking behind this short film is to show that so much of what is studied in geography is part of a complex, evolving complexity. Individual ‘facts’ can be linked to other information to help build up a wider and better understanding of the world in which we live. Carl starts his new geography students off by suggesting that it is a ‘join the dots’ subject; all those snippets of information whirling around the world waiting to be connected in some way so a more complete understanding can be developed.
However one of the fundamental principles of geography is that ‘Everything is related to everything else (but near things are more related than distant things)’. This is known as Waldo Tobler’s first law of geography. It has been thought that globalisation and particularly the internet would lead to the ‘death of distance’, the ‘Flat World’ propounded by Thomas Friedman. Such thinking is an outright challenge to Tobler’s law. It is true that the distant can now be near; in Sheffield that is increasingly felt by the rapid growth in non-UK students studying in the city. We can Skype, surf and stumble our way through a more complex world than we ever imagined even a couple decades ago and all from our smart phones where-ever we are.
Perhaps more pertinently economic forces that develop far from Sheffield shape the city’s fortunes. Whether that is the Chinese savings that provided a significant amount of the initial capital to fuel the ballooning private debt that has led to Sheffield and the UK mired in economic recession at the present time. Or it may be demand for basic food stuffs from a growing and increasingly wealthy global population that is helping to drive up the price of many staples food in the UK.
However it would be foolish to discard Tobler. In a city like Sheffield, for most people, the most important focus of their life is the neighbourhood in which they live. This is a reality that can have profound impacts upon not only their general well- being but their life expectancy. In Sheffield the difference between the highest life expectancy and the lowest is the same as the gap between Japan (with the World’s highest national life expectancy – blip from the tsunami excepted) and Pakistan (a country at an altogether different level of development to Japan). In Sheffield that gap is expressed over just 4 miles from Worrall to Netherthorpe.
For this commission the focus is on the city of Sheffield. However understanding a place today has never been more linked to how that place is related to the rest of the world. This is at the heart of globalisation. Sheffield was one of the first cities of the industrial revolution which propelled globalisation from colonial plunder to one driven primarily by urban patterns of consumption.
With the University of Sheffield currently ranked at 101 in the global rankings of universities. And a more recent international ranking placing the University as 66th best out of the top 200 worldwide the city still has an important global presence beyond its World renowned manufacturing skills. The success of Sheffield increasingly depends on us all appreciating the connectivity and complexity of the world in which we live even if we rarely venture into the city centre let alone far flung foreign lands.
All the statistics used for the film are explained in the accompanying film notes (pdf).

The Festival of the Mind was a celebration of ideas, culture and collaboration. The University of Sheffield has teamed up with the city’s creative community to design a magical week of performances, talks, exhibitions and activities going from September 20th-30th 2012 in various locations throughout the city. A City in Context was first screened and discussed at the Spiegeltent at Barker’s Pool. The picture above was taken at one of the open air screenings of the film. It shows Tobler’s first law of geography projected onto Sheffield City Hall after sunset.

In Focus: Financing the European Union

worldmapper — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 05:00:21 +0000

The Eurozone crisis has made monetary issues the focal point of political debate about the nature of the European Union, not just within members of the common currency but across the 27 states that constitute the EU. Discussions about emergency bailouts and transfers to support struggling economies have distorted the public perception of the costs and benefits of the Union.
The actual EU budget is based on a multiannual financial framework, negotiated among the individual members and agreed upon at the level of European institutions. The current financial framework covers the period 2007–2013. Negotiations for the framework from 2014 to 2020 are under way. These discussions are greatly influenced by the implications of the current crisis. In a feature for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (September 2012, Volume 3, Issue 2) Danny Dorling and I looked at the current financial framework and how the money is redistributed across the member states.

Despite claims of the high costs of the EU, its overall budget represents approximately just 1 per cent of the gross national income (GNI) of all member states. Payments into the EU budget from a country should also be seen in comparison to payments that countries receive from the EU. The largest contributors, France and Germany, are also those in receipt of the largest payments from the EU budget.
Looking at net contributors, nine countries are currently paying in more than they receive from the EU budget. The remaining 18 countries are net recipients. The net benefits for those 18 countries range from around 1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) up to almost 5 per cent of national GDP (for Lithuania). The general policy is that the weaker economies get more (relative) financial support.
The total amount paid by the stronger economies is only a very small share of their respective national GDP. From a geographical perspective, the net redistribution of money in the European Union follows a trend from the wealthier northern countries to the economically weaker south and east of the Union. This tackles some of the prevailing imbalances within the common economic market.
Although there is a transfer of monetary resources, net payments into the EU budget from the so-called ‘paymasters’, Germany and France, remain below 0.5 per cent of their respective national levels of GDP. Among the relatively stronger economies, only Belgium, Ireland and Luxembourg were net recipients from the EU budget. (Belgium and Luxembourg benefit largely from their central roles in EU administration.)
The two maps visualise the net shares of those paying into, or receiving money from, the total EU budget in form of cartograms. The bar chart shows how large these payments are in terms of each country’s respective national GDP share. The countries are sorted by the GDP per capita data for 2010, going from the lowest to the largest value from left to right in the chart (and translated into a rainbow spectrum colour scheme on the map).

Here are the bibliographic details:

Hennig, B.D. and Dorling, D. (2012). Financing the European Union. Political Insight 3 (2): 34.
Article online (Wiley)

The Visualisation of Spatial Social Structure: Reflections on Critical Methods

worldmapper — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:00:20 +0000

‘(How) do we understand Capitalism? Reflections on critical methods’ was the title of a workshop on critical methods at the University of Manchester (September 13-14th). As the announcement of the workshop states, ‘there is no consensus on what critical social science is, exactly. Largely it is defined as not orthodox economics or positivist social science‘. It continues that:

Using methods as a framework for critical analysis allow us to consider how we understand capitalism an alternative way of differentiating between forms of critical inquiry. Methods can be approached as a tool box: a series of techniques that reveal capitalism. In this case, capitalism is explored and understood using different tools of analysis that demonstrate how it emerged historically, how it changes over time, creates periods of stability and how it impacts people’s lives. Methods are also a way to format the world that make realities appear or disappear. In this case capitalism is performative, it is always engaged in experiment, a perpetually unfinished project; therefore, it is a highly adaptive and constantly mutating formation.
In short, methods are not neutral tools of analysis; they (re)create a particular view of capitalism.

Geography strikes back says Robert D. Kaplan (author of the book The Revenge of Geography) in the Wall Street Journal, making a point about the relevance of space and place in today’s world: ‘But before geography can be overcome, it must be respected‘. Understanding the geographic relevance – as the Kaplan put it in a political sense – is one component in the understanding of conflicts, be they political or economical (and beyond). Spatial data analysis and geovisualisation are part of the method spectrum that can help to (re)create views of capitalism and reveal the realities and the impact of political and economic structures.
I was invited to present some thoughts and reflections on the relevance of geospatial data visualisation at the workshop, which I put under the headline ‘The Visualisation of Spatial Social Structure’. This is the title of the PhD thesis of Danny Dorling, written over 20 years ago (recently published in a revised and updated edition). The contents of the book have not lost any of their relevance, as especially social sciences appear to have developed an anxiety of using meaningful visualisations to support their arguments (but often use ‘meaningful’ photographs instead – or complex-looking charts and diagrams to underline the relevance of the research). Technology and techniques, however, have moved on a little bit in those 20 year, so I did not present any of the contents of the book, but what has become possible since then (and partly due to Danny’s work). Outside social sciences academia appears to embrace the power of visualisation much more, not only for making data and information more comprehensible, but also for analytical purposes (as shown e.g. in the Atlas of Science by Katy Börner). After looking at the broader use of visualisation, I presented the methods that I have been working on, and how they stand in a context of ‘distorted’ views of reality. Maps are not the ultimate solution for understanding every single aspect of spatial data, but they can be very valuable as one additional tool in the box of methods that stands at the end of an analysis of data. Social sciences, and even more so the social side of geographic sciences should rethink the power of maps and visualisation. Sometimes a map can be worth a thousand words and help us to see and understand the world differently. These are the slides of my talk (unfortunately the animated elements on some of the slides do not work in Slideshare):
In 2009 I gave a presentation on the visualisation of a world in crisis where I looked at the ways how the then still quite early days of the world financial crisis are seen through the lens of visualisation (see more details and slides here). Many of the graphics that I used back then were taken from outside the world of social – or even economic – sciences. Not a lot has changed since then (neither in the crisis itself nor in the way how graphical representations are used within the core disciplines that try to make sense of it). The questions therefore remains: (How) do we understand capitalism? We probably don’t…

The slides on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) using additional material as credited.

2012 Paralympic and Olympic Medal maps

worldmapper — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 22:30:00 +0000

No more bread and circuses: London 2012 has turned into history while the Paralympic cauldron has been extinguished in a ‘Festival of Flame’. Just about time for a final roundup of the statistics of the games and the last maps that were still missing.
In the United Kingdom the spirit of the Olympics lived on in the Paralympics as created a similar media coverage (which has less been the case in many other countries). A lot of the public debate in Britain in the final debate of the Paralympics focussed on an increased relevance of the games – and that the results have started getting an equal importance as the Olympic medal counts. As already noticed at the Vancouver winter games, a comparison of the results showed some interesting differences in the achievements of the participating nations. This is shown in the following map animation of two cartograms showing each country’s share in the total medal counts (switching between the Paralympics and the Olympics 2012):

(click for larger version)

One of the striking differences is the comparably low achievement of the USA in the Paralympics (who are top of the Olympic medal table). The Guardian explains, that “there has been much debate around the lack of coverage in the US media and lack of profile for its Paralympic stars. That translates into a comparative lack of investment in the Paralympic team and talent ID and development.” Another strong nation that strikes out is Ukraine, which established a national Paralympic centre in 2002 and went up in the medal counts ever since. China’s growing investment in Paralympic success is similarly striking.
Other patterns as explained for the Olympic Games, however, persist in the Paralympic medal counts. Most importantly, the global inequality in medal success – already predetermined by the number of participating athletes – still dominates the overall picture of the final medal counts at the Paralympics, which are shown in the following map:

(click for larger version)

But it does not always need to be a map. Statistics can sometimes be much better understood in other visual form: Quite popular proved the scatterplot that showed the number of athletes plotted against the number of medals of the Olympic games. The same graphic for the Paralympics highlights a similar (and similarly unsurprising) correlation, but compared to the Olympics also shows that there are fewer extreme ‘overachievers’ – and the individual country positions are very different than at the Olympics (most notably that of the USA as shown in the map above):

Inspired enough now? Well, that is enough Olympics for this year…if you want live through all of this summer’s glory (and desperation) again, check out all the other Olympic mappings on my website:
http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?tag=olympics

The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). You are welcome to use the maps under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

From geovisualisation to neocartography: Maps in a digital world

worldmapper — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 06:00:48 +0000

Changing technologies have always had a considerable impact on cartography and continue to do so. Several technological revolutions marked important steps in the practice and process of creating maps. Mechanical, optical and photo-chemical technologies changed the way maps were produced. Then, the discovery of electronic capabilities made a new dimension in map production accessible: Not only most of the design techniques were transferred to digital platforms, used at some step in the production of almost all maps created today, but also the possibility to deal with huge amounts of data that can hardly be analysed by a single person enables cartographers to find ways to automate data processing for cartographic visualisation. This is where the term neocartography comes into play, which gives credit to the most recent trends in the field of map-making.
The recently established Neocartography Commission of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) states, that “many examples of new and innovative mapping are being produced outside the normal orbit of existing cartographers or map producers. The term neocartographers is being used to describe map makers who may not have come from traditional mapping backgrounds, and are frequently using open data and open source mapping tools. Another difference is in the blurring of boundaries between map producers and map consumers. The availability of data and tools allows neocartographers to make their own maps, show what they want, and often be the intended audience as well – that is to say they may make the maps for themselves, just because they can. There is a real need for a discipline to be established to study this essentially undisciplined field of neocartography.”
The ICA Neocartography Commission held its first official meeting following the annual conference of the Society of Cartographers in London yesterday. In my introductory talk From geovisualisation to neocartography: Maps in a digital world I outlined my understanding of neocartography and gave a brief overview of some of the major trends in cartography caused by the digital turn that started to transform the discipline since the 1960s. I emphasized the need to look beyond technical and practical aspects of the changes, and to see this as a chance for cartography to shape the evolution of maps, rather than being a passive observer of trends driven by others. Neocartography should be a chance to broaden the discipline by embracing revived interest in maps. This should be an inclusive approach that includes all aspects of visualising geospatial information regardless their diverse labels – be it Geovisualisation, GIScience, or the very traditional understanding of cartography.
Neocartography should look at the impact of the digital turn on cartographic practice and cartographic principles, just as it should reflect on more theoretical aspects of the ethics and philosophy behind geospatial visualisations. These are the slides of my talk which give a little flavour of these reflections:
Perhaps slightly pretentious, I concluded that “contemporary cartography needs to be redefined according to today’s challenges. This is a chance to revive cartography as the main contributor to a new understanding of our world. As early cartographers explained the world centuries ago by discovering previously unknown physical spaces, it is now a necessity to tell the stories of the spaces of humanity. One new role of cartography is to contribute to an understanding of those spaces that we still do not fully understand, and to analyse how these can be visualised.” Here is what I said in full length:

More videos and other material from the event is online at the Neocartography Commissions website. Gary Gale also wrote a blog post about his concluding talk titled History Repeats Itself And So Does The Map.

The material on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) using additional material as credited.

Global Spaces of Food Production

worldmapper — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 11:30:38 +0000

In the year 2000 there were approximately 15 million square km of cropland and 28 million square km of pasture which are represented in the two main maps. These are equal to 12% respectively 22% of the ice-free land surface. This is according to estimates of a study on the geographic distribution of global agricultural lands by Ramankutty et al (published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 2008) who used a methodology of combining agricultural inventory data and satellite-derived land cover data to come to these figures (data can be accessed via Columbia University’s SEDAC).
Agricultural activities have dramatically altered our planet’s land surface, as the authors state in the introduction to their study, but agricultural areas have spaces of central importance to humanity. They provide the foundations not only of the livelihood of the majority of people, but also for feeding the still growing world’s population. Where these spaces are at risk, potential conflicts arise. “We know clearly that inequalities around food, water and energy wealth do create wars,” says David Nabarro, UN special representative on food security and nutrition in a BBC report. When unusual weather events threaten agricultural landscapes, the result are rising food prices of which the poorest are most affected from.
Climate change and food security are therefore key issues in finding strategies for a sustainable future of the global population. A framework document by the FAO points out, that although the wealthier nations may be losing out less, the vulnerability of populations from food insecurity is a global problem: “As an indirect effect, low-income people everywhere, but particularly in urban areas, will be at risk of food insecurity owing to loss of assets and lack of adequate insurance coverage. This may also lead to shifting vulnerabilities in both developing and developed countries.”
Geography can make an important contribution by analysing the geospatial effects of global warming and climate change on food systems. In the delegate’s session at this year’s 48th annual meeting of the British Society of Cartographers in London I presented the basic concept for mapping out agricultural spaces using the gridded cartogram method developed in my PhD research. The first two maps provide a new insight into the distribution of these global food spaces for which I worked with the data from the above mentioned study. By calculating the total areas of croplands and pastures I was able to apply a gridded cartogram transformation at a spatial resolution of 5 arc minutes (ca. 10 km) in longitude by longitude. The following two maps show the basic result of that transformation, so that in the two maps the size of an individual grid cell reflects the total area of each respective agricultural land. A grid cell twice as large as another has twice as much agricultural land in its space, so that these maps show an equal agricultural area projection of the land surface.
These are the croplands, which represent a total area of 15 million square km:

(click for larger version)

And here are the pastures, which represent an area of 28 million square km:

(click for larger version)

Both maps are only a fraction of the worlds total land area of about 149 million square km, but these are the most important areas to look at when it comes to understanding food security. The maps above are only the start for using a different cartographic approach in understanding the interrelations between environmental threats and food security. The maps – here shown with a topographic layer – have further analytical capabilities and allow to show any other geospatial information in that relation (and thus the relations between these agricultural spaces and other issues). The topography demonstrates a (known) relation between altitude and the distribution of agricultural areas. But one can go much further into other issues, such as the intensively discussed issue of water scarcity and food production. A study published in 2010 pointed out the threat level of freshwater resources (which I looked at in relation to population before). Such data is centrally important not only because of the population’s need for access to freshwater, but even more so for a sustainable provision of freshwater for framing and food production. Therefore, looking at the relation between agricultural lands and issues of water security can help to identify regions at risk and provide the basis for finding solutions to these specific risks. The following map series shows the different components of the water security study in relation to agricultural areas – it focuses on the global threats to security of flowing freshwater resources and river biodiversity, and therefore has to be seen as only one of many aspects of water-related issues arising in agricultural lands:

(click for larger version)

Humanity may not be forced into vegetarianism, as catchy headlines warned recently, but we have to learn to better understand where our spaces of food production are most at risk and how we can better protect them. This is one little part on the way for a sustainable future of humanity, although equally important we have to look at our lifestyles – at our consumption and waste that we produce – and at the (un)equal distribution of food of which there is much more around than we sometimes think there is. Global food security under climate change is a challenge, but it won’t be solved by closing our eyes to it.

With the SoC conference’s focus on geovisualisation and cartography, these maps can only provide a small topical insight to the issues raised here. Not least are these maps global perspectives, and solutions have to be found by identifying relations at all geographical scales. However, they demonstrate the capabilities of such alternative mapping approaches which in general are seamlessly scalable and therefore adaptable to looking at these issues at varying scales. In addition, the concept demonstrates a general way of using GIS and visualisation techniques for enhancing the understanding of complex data. One central part of our understanding comes from our visual capabilities which we do not always fully embrace when using conventional mapping approaches.

The entry image was made using an extract of the cover image of Mission:Explore Food by the Geography Collective. The maps on this page have been created by Benjamin D. Hennig of the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). You are welcome to use the maps under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details – I also appreciate a notification if you use my maps. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.