‘How to Land a Jumbo Jet’ is the catchy title of a little book published by Lonely Planet a couple of month ago. The book is a “visual exploration of travel facts, figures and ephemera” and a “visual guide to the way we live, travel and inhabit the globe”. Edited by the British graphic designer Nigel Holmes, the book follows the increased interest in information graphics that started to flourish yet again with the increasing availability of ever growing amounts of data. This reminds a lot of the ‘Golden age of statistical graphics‘ from the 19th century, where we have seen a manifestation of the prospering achievements in statistical graphics and thematic maps that we take for granted nowadays.
Jumbo jet is a mixed bag of visualised information that fits in that renaissance with a wide-ranging look into (as one might expect from Lonely Planet) everything travel-related (some sample pages can be downloaded from the link at the end of this page). And what would a travel book be without maps? Certainly quite incomplete, which is why there are some maps included that provide a different look at the world than that one usually finds in travel literature. One example for that is my contribution on visualising the more remote parts of our planet – the lonely patches on the world’s land surface.
Drawing a map of the remote areas (as also described in my PhD thesis) it is not simply a matter of putting the less populated area of the world in the foreground. Transformed maps that show the human spaces, such as a gridded population cartogram, work very well because of the specific distribution of people in a very limited amount of space. With more than 95% of the world’s population living in approximately only 10% of the land area, the remaining 90% of the land area vanish from a gridded population cartogram. Reversing this therefore is much less striking, because 90% of the land surface is almost empty and would remain on a transformed cartogram, making it look much more like a conventional map projection. The optimal grid data for a gridded cartogram transformation thus needs a high variation and a data distribution that has the highest values for the topic of interest in a limited amount of grid cells, like the major population densities cover approximately 10% of the full grid. A different approach is therefore needed when looking at the loneliest places on the planet. Such an indicator is the relative distance of areas to the majority of people, which can be measured e.g. by travel times – most of the remotest places are also hardest to get to (apart from flying over it and jumping out of the plane, which is when Nigel Holmes’ infographic on how to land a jumbo jet from that book may come handy for the remaining passengers).
In an analysis of people’s closeness, Nelson points out that only 15% of people in rich countries live more than an hour of travel time from a city (of at least 50,000 people), while the same applies to 65% of people living in the poor countries of the world. The information about the absolute travel time from a given point can be transformed into a grid that translates remoteness into a quantifiable measure which combines the human and physical space in one layer. The gridded dataset can then be transformed according to the absolute travel time that is necessary to reach the nearest major city that was defined by Uchida & Nelson, the authors of the study, as one of the 8,518 cities with 50,000 or more people. The transformed grid thus shows each grid cell resized according to that absolute travel time that is needed from that grid cell to the nearest major city by land transport, giving the remotest places most space on the map.
The following gridded cartogram of the remotest places visualises the picture of a lonely planet where the spaces shown are those that are furthest away from those places of civilisation that define the 21st century. The map is resized according to the estimated land travel time to the nearest large city (over 50,000 inhabitants). Antarctica has not been included in the calculation, as there are no cities of that category. More than half of the world’s population according to UN estimates now lives in cities, and this map shows those places that most of the people living in the world need the longest time to get to. It draws an image of the areas that are almost disconnected from those shrinking effects of globalisation. This world map is the striking opposite representation of our image of a globalised and interconnected world, of those vanishing places that we thought do not exist anymore:
British News of the World
According to the British Guardian, 2011 was the year of the news overload, with many people perceiving the year’s news from around the world being extremely significant in manifold ways. “There is no news“, as reportedly broadcast by the BBC an a day in 1930, is an unlikely in our media age, but whether last year’s news were more significant than usual remains another question. It may just as well be a proof of an increasingly connected world where news become ever more instant and people demand new news virtually every second – the news overload of 2011 may therefore also be a result of the overload of news produced by the media (and demanded by the population). Continue reading
In Focus: America’s Debt to the World
Amid Europe’s debt crisis it remains less noticed that the largest mountain of debt in the world is piled up across the big pond in the United States of America. The topic will be critically debated in US politics as presidential elections are due in 2012. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (December 2011, Volume 2, Issue 3) Danny Dorling and I took a closer look at the foreign liabilities of America’s debt.
The map we created for this feature is a cartogram with the world’s countries resized according to the total amount of US treasury securities that are held in each country (as shown in data from July 2011). This is a preview of the maps that we created for the article:
Continue reading
Views of Christmas
London in Maps
London 2012 means a busy year for the British capital. Not only are the 2012 Olympics coming up, but also will London be part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and on the more serious side, the current economic crisis will continue to have considerable impact on the people living in a city that is heavily reliant on the global financial markets. Although London is “by far the richest part of Britain and the engine of the national economy [, yet] it also has the highest rates of poverty and inequality” (more on these issues are highlighted in the latest release of London’s Poverty Profile). In the dawn of all these events, Londoners are also electing a new mayor and assembly to decide whom they want to see in the driving seat for the next four years.
The world of cartography and maps is paying its own contribution to this city with the London Mapping Festival. “The London Mapping Festival 2011–2012 is an 18 month programme of activities designed to promote the unique range of mapping, innovative technologies and applications that exist for the Capital. The festival will showcase all mapping-related disciplines including cartography, surveying, GIS, GPS and remote sensing” (quoted from the LMF website). As part of the cartographic community, the Sasi Research Group of the University of Sheffield is an active supporter of the LMF, and we have contributed one of our maps to the new book London in Maps: a changing perspective. It brings together a wide range of contributions to the LMF’s London Map Exhibition that was on display at a wide range of events during the last months, including the Mapping Showcase 2011 early December in the Emirates Stadium. The book has a wide range of highly detailed maps, charts and cartograms, artist impressions as well as aerial and satellite images ranging from the modern day back to the 17th century. A particular focus is made on maps and images from the last 20 years, giving it a modern cartographic flavour.
Our map of the Human Shape of London is a gridded population cartogram giving every person living in the city the same amount of space. Smaller grid cells indicate fewer people living there, while larger grid cells refer to the same amount of space in the real world, but with a much higher number of people living there. And although London is generally characterised by a very high urban population density,
the grid pattern shows some significant variation in the crowdedness between the London boroughs, and even within them. The following map is a simplified version of the original map printed in the book with a lower-resolution grid that provides a more generalised overview of the population patterns:
Material flows: The impact of global resource extraction
Climate change as discussed at the climate talks in Durban is just one of the complex impact that humans have on the natural environment. The history of humanity is closely linked to benefiting from (or exploiting) the natural environment in order to improve living conditions. “Stone, Iron, Bronze and Steel Ages – the names of these periods have been chosen according to the main materials in use” (see materialflows.net). Over a long period in human history, this behaviour had only little impact on the environment from a global perspective (not least because there were much fewer people around). This has changed considerably since the industrial revolution started spreading across the globe from its British roots. “The industrial revolution marked a fundamental change of the energy system based on fossil fuels and saw the introduction of yet more materials. Coal, steel and aluminium allowed to tremendously increase output and efficiency. With the start of the commercial exploitation of crude oil in the late 19th century, the doors have been opened to a new era which one day might be called the ‘Oil Age’” (see materialflows.net). With growing populations, and an increasingly more intensive and extensive use of natural resources, the human impact on the environment has reached an unprecedented level which has such an impact that the environment becomes considerably transformed by human action. This led to the proclamation of a new geolocial era, the Anthropocene, which pays tribute to the “influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere in recent centuries“, which is said to be “so significant as to constitute a new geological era for its lithosphere” (quoted from Wikipedia).
Extraction of natural resources is one component of this change (amongst many other factors), which often stands at the beginning of the chain of changing and influencing the natural environment. Fossil fuels, minerals, metal ores, and other resources are taken out of their natural deposits, which already has an impact on the environment at the places where they are, and are then burned, processed, and eventually dumped in manifold transformed ways. Material extraction and the subsequent flows of them during their ‘human lifecycle’ (before we regard them as useless waste) are an important element in the understanding of our impact on the natural environment. “A dematerialisation strategy, i.e. a dramatic absolute reduction of our material consumption, will be inevitable – especially in industrialised countries – taking into account the concept of ‘environmental space’. This concept claims that the total amount of natural resources that humankind can use without damaging the global ecosystems is limited” (see materialflows.net).
In a collaboration with Worldmapper, the Materialflows project has released a series of cartograms as part of their online portal for material flow data which gives an insight into the shares and dimensions of global resource exploitation. On the basis of the MFA-database we created a series of cartograms where territories are re-sized to different categories of material flows. Here are two examples from the map series that demonstrate some of the aspects investigated in the project. The two maps show the total resource extraction and the fossil fuel extraction in 2007:
