Demographic trends in the United Kingdom, such as these discussed in the report on Demographic Change and the Environment, show an ongoing population growth in the south-east of England. With London being the dominating city in the UK’s economy, this is little surprising, as key industries but also most key institutions are still located in the capital city. This is one major reason why the southeast is like a population magnet that will have to find strategies to cope with an increasing population if these conditions persist. Demographic trends do also predict a slowdown in population increase over the next decades, with an aging society and declining birth rates as they can already be observed in Germany or most Easter European countries. All trends include challenges for policy making and planning, which is why population projections play a key role for urban planners to face future challenges in their decision-making. The Greater London Authority as the key administrative body for the most populous area in the UK (see map) released such projections on borough level to the year 2031, including population estimates for the past years (see London Datastore) which I have used for some of my research recently. Following a series of population maps created from this data by Spatial Analysis I used this data to create a population cartogram animation for the 30 years covered by this data which shows the changing shares of the population within the boroughs of Greater London, including a colour code for the net migration (taking population change, births and deaths into account). This is how the London population trends look like: Continue reading
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A Personal Geography of Injustice in Britain
All maps and visuals presented on this website are closely linked to the works of the Social and Spatial Inequalities research group at Sheffield University. Although maps are one very prominent outcome, there is a lot more work produced. The recording from the Off the Shelf festival in Sheffield is part of that work created last year in the spotlight of a discussion about inequality in the United Kingdom – an issue that has not least emerged during the election campaigns but continued ever since as the debate about the lessons learnt from the recession has probably just begun. The short films shown in this live performance at the Showroom Cinema give a very local view, focusing on the reality of living in an unequal city within an unequal countries. Each of the films discusses one “tenet of injustice”, as proclaimed by Danny Dorling in his book on Injustice.
These are:
- elitism is efficient;
- exclusion is necessary;
- prejudice is natural;
- greed is good; and
- despair is inevitable.
How these relate to Sheffield, home of the Sasi research group as well as of Carl Lee is examined in this film. Carl, who is teaching at the Sheffield College, is Co-Author of the short films and Danny’s counterpart in the live show.
The show does also reflect outcomes of Sasi’s report on Sheffield as an unequal city from 2009 (download here: A Tale of Two Cities: The Sheffield Project) which presents much of the evidence for these claims. For those less familiar with Sheffield, Carl’s book on Sheffield (Home: A Personal Geography of Sheffield) is highly recommended as well. But the stories told in these films is a story that can be observed in many cities of Britain these days, and inequality in education as well as in many other parts of people’s lives needs to stay on the agenda of politics that claims to re-invent the big society…
Much more multimedia material on all these issues can also be found in the Sasi lecture archive which contains a lot of material related to inequalities around the world.
Here is the recording from the Off the Shelf festival:
Be about Something: A Personal Geography of Injustice from Worldmapper.
In Focus: The General Election 2010
A map showing the detailed results of this year’s General Election in Great Britain is now featured in the “In Focus” section of Political Insight journal (September 2010, Volume 1, Issue 2). The accompanying article written by Danny Dorling and me includes a brief analysis of the swings in the new Parliament at Westminster.
Here are the bibliographic details:
- Dorling, D. and Hennig, B. D. (2010). In Focus: General Election 2010. Political Insight1 (2): 72.
Article online (Wiley)
More election maps can be found here.
General Election 2010: The swings that did matter
We have seen and heard a lot about the election outcome, not only on this website (here, here, here, here and here), but one more map: The following hexagon map (see here for a comparison of the different map types we are using) shows the changes that have actually taken place in the constituencies. The colour scheme indicates where seats have changes between the parties, and where they remained the same. For a clearer picture, the national parties in Scotland (SNP) and Waled (PC) have been put together under one colour.
This map is also available as a kmz file for GoogleEarth and other compatible software, which allows to zoom in and identify constituencies (a geographical version of the map is also included in the file).
Click here to download the kmz file (15MB)
General Election 2010: Different views
The following three map show different ways of mapping the British election results in comparison. The left map uses a traditional projection (using the British National Grid), which represents the geographical area and thus overemphasises the vote of rural areas (making blue much more dominant than the real results are). The map in the middle uses hexagons to represent the constituencies, so that this map distorts land area in favor of a representation of seats in the British Parliament. This kind of visualisation has recently become very popular in the media and is now a common feature on most online election maps (like the BBC one). The right map shows the election results on the gridded population cartogram, which has been shown in more detail on this website before. Here the projection puts the population distribution in focus, so that this reflects best how many people are represented by a certain party. The overall picture is more similar to the constituency-based map than the land area map, however, is still shows some differences as constituencies are not exactly the same population size (for administrative reasons, but not least also because not all people in an area are entitled to vote). Each of the maps is useful for itself depending on what you want to know about the election outcome, as all three are telling a very different story of it.
(click for larger view)All maps are property 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 elsewhere. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.
A people’s vote
Another map of the British election results: This time we mapped all winning parties in relation to the population distribution. Like in the previous maps (Here: 1, 2, 3), we used the gridded population cartogram as a basemap, because unlike conventional maps (showing land area) or the increasingly used constituency maps (showing one shape per constituency), this maps resizes the results related to the population distribution. It shows, how many people are represented by the winning party, and each grid cell refers to the same geographical extent. The smaller a grid cell, the fewer people are living there, so that rural areas are those were many lines are close together, whereas conurbations literally bulge out of the map. For better identification, some places are labeled, so that the geographical reference is easier to make (see the second version below for more detail). So here is the true picture of the people’s vote in Britain:
Zoom in and interact: The election results in high-resolution
The map may need a moment to be loaded. Use the mouse to interact with this map: Double click or use the control symbols to zoom in, pan to move around, or use the mouse wheel to see more details. This interactive map was created using Microsoft Seadragon requires the Silverlight Plugin. If you are not able to view it, you can see a static version of the map here.
All maps are property 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 elsewhere. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.