Tag Archives: gridded cartogram

The Human Shape of the Planet

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Remember those insect posters from the biology lessons at school? Butterflies, bugs and spiders assembled in a mosaic-style depiction that shows the diversity of these species in nature. The resemblance with insects was also one widespread reaction to the gridded population cartograms when the online world population atlas was released:

At first glance they could be mistaken for distorted creepy-crawlies – bloated body parts with randomly placed antennae and spindly legs, their gridlines looking much like the compound eyes and variegated wings of an insect.
(Source: BBC News Magazine)

The diversity of the population distribution in the countries of the world is reflected in these population maps. The atlas creates a unique perspective of the human shape of the planet. Taking their analogy to these good old insect posters into account, I have created two mosaics in a similar style that assemble all maps from the world population atlas. They portrait the diversity of our world and give a new perspective on the shape of humanity. This is how the insect poster of the humanity looks like:

The Human Shape of the World: The World Population Atlas
(click for larger map)

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Views of the World at Night

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The Sendai earthquake in Japan sparked a debate about sustainable energy supplies of industrialised countries – with a controversial discussion about the safety and sustainability of nuclear power. The book ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air‘ by David MacKay is an outstanding read in this regard, outlining the all key issues that matter for our future energy need (the digital version is free, although I recommend the paperback which can even be read without wasting any electricity).
Switching the lights off was not a matter of choice for many people in the North of Japan after the devastations of the earthquake also affected the energy supplies (not only because of the Fukushima accident, but also because of a widely destroyed basic infrastructure). Another image featured in the NASA Earth Observatory takes a closer look at the electricity losses that occurred after the Earthquake by creating a composite image of two images of lights observed in 2010 and after the earthquake at March, 12 this year. As a highly industrialised country, the illuminated areas in Japan usually show the places where people live (see worldmap below), while dark areas are the unpopulated regions, hence the reprojection on a gridded population cartogram results in a dominantly bright image. Using NASAs display of the electricity losses therefore gives a good representation of the number of people affected by the power losses (and largely also the Tsunami and Earthquake itself) in the Northeast: The redrawn version of the image shows these as the red areas, while the brighter yellow areas in the South and West show the regions that has a similar illumination compared to the previous image. This is how ‘Japan at Night’ looked after the 2011 Earthquake:
Japan at Night after the 2011 Earthquake displayed on an Equal Population Cartogram Continue reading →

Mapping people, not sheep: Why our planet’s well-being can look so different

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Today I held a talk at the IDEA CETL Applied Ethics Research seminar at the University of Leeds. My talk was titled ‘Mapping people, not sheep: Why our planet’s well-being can look so different’ and focused on issues of mapping well-being in new ways. Continue reading →

A Population Map of Tibet

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The 10th March is a controversial day in the history of Tibet: It marks the anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 and thus contributed considerably to todays political state. As the Tibet Autonomous Region it is now governed as a Chinese province, and political demands for an independent Tibet regularly find their way into the public debate. The latest in these developments is the announcement of the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, to retire from political life. While the Tibetan Parliament is a government-in-exile, ethnic Tibetans are estimated to make up 93% of the population within the Tibet Autonomous Region, with an increasing rise of Han Chinese in the last decades. The total population living in Tibet is estimated to be 2.91 million, and the region has China’s lowest population density, with only 2.2 people per square km. Hence it is no surprise that the gridded population cartogram of China in the world population atlas gives Tibet little space in the map there (situated below the larger bulge that is Urumqi, and by far degraded by China’s populous Eastern provinces). To get a better picture of the population distribution within the region, I created a gridded population cartogram for the area of Tibet which gives a more detailed impression of the Tibet’s population distribution (using the boundaries of the Tibet Autonomous Region). The population cartogram also includes a transformed topographic display that illustrates at which elevations most people live in this region that is the highest region on earth :

Population Map / Cartogram of Tibet
(click for larger map)

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Qatar – A Population Cartogram

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High hopes of England have vanished on today’s draw of the forthcoming FIFA Football World Cup hosts, with Russia getting the event for 2018. More surprise was caused by Qatar which will be hosting the 2022 World Cup: With an area of 11,437 sq km and a population of approximately 1.7 million people, by far the smallest World Cup host in Fifa’s history.
In fact, Qatar is so small that we didn’t even bother to put up an individual map for Quatar in the Worldmapper World Population Atlas, but merged it with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain (Russia has its own map though, despite beating England’s bid).
With its new fame, Quatar’s population shall now get its own population cartogram which gives space to all the people living there and removes all those sandy areas in the south and west. Here is the Qatar gridded population cartogram:

Map of global GDP growth 2010-2015
(click for larger map)

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