Tag Archives: gridded cartogram

Mapping a (un)happy humanity: a new perspective on our planet’s well-being

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Happiness and well-being found their way back into public debate in the UK with Prime Minister David Cameron wanting well-being to become a measure to steer policy. Maybe he was inspired by his recent trip to the G20 meeting in Asia: On the Asian continent lies the first country to have introduced Gross National Happiness as a measure for the country’s development – rather than economic growth, like we keep on doing. Happiness as the new economics is an appealing thought, but it is hard to imagine any major economy looking at happiness instead of money any time soon. And if so, how would the world look like? Happiness is hard to measure, and hence data is hard to get. One way to look at the well-being around the world provides the Happy Planet Index by the nef (new economics foundation).
Last year Sheffield University’s CWiPP is holding an exhibition at the ICOSS to mark the re-launch of the centre. My poster showing a new map of the Happy Planet Index was part of the exhibition:
pdf icon Download poster as PDF

Mapping a (un)happy planet

This map is also featured in the News section of the Happy Planet Index homepage.
Update March 2011: I have given a talk explaining the methodological background and the thematic relevance of the map at the IDEA CETL Seminar Series (University of Leeds). The slides of this talk are available here:
Mapping people, not sheep: Why our planet’s well-being can look so different

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Population Cartogram of Myanmar/Burma

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Myanmar / Burma in 2002 - Photos by Benjamin Hennig

Burma, or officially Myanmar, gains the world’s attention mainly with some sort of bad news in recent years: The suppression of the Saffron Revolution in 2007 and the natural disaster of Cyclone Nargis in 2008 are the most prominent events that brought the country back in people’s minds. Apart from that, few of us now much more about the country, which is ruled by a military regime since 1962.
Now it is back on the news agenda, as the first elections since 1990 have been announced to take place today. The 1990 result has been ignored by the ruling junta and Aung San Suu Kyi the leader of the then-winning party NLD has been under house arrest most of the time since 1989. Many wonder what impact this year’s election will have – if any at all. Apart from all the political implications, the perhaps most significant implication of this election – regardless of the outcome – is the fact that “We must keep telling Burma’s story“. Few genuine stories cross the borders, and there are little insights to the life under military oppression available, such as the footage of Burma Soldier which has recently been shown at Sheffield Doc/Fest.
Telling Burmas story does include learning about the country’s geography. As this website is all about maps and visualisation, this can be shown with a map to visualise the basic geography of Burma (drawing a map of the election may be less useful given the doubtful nature of these election and the general lack of reliable data). The following map shows a conventional physical map of Burma (with selected cities labelled) compared to a gridded population cartogram that visualises the population distribution. The population map shows the importance of the Irrawaddy delta region which is the most densely populated area of Burma. This explains the impact that cyclone Nargis had in this area that is situated only few metres above sea level. Yangon (or Rangoon) with a population of approximately 5 million lies on the Eastern edge of the delta region. It had also been Burma’s capital until 2006, when the military government decided to move the capital away from the main population to a less populated region but strategically well situated between Yangon and Mandalay. As a result, Naypyidaw was announced the new capital in March 2006. The last royal capital Mandalay, Burma’s second largest city, is the centre of the economically important region of upper Burma which is heavily influenced by trading links to China’s Yunnan province. Much less populated are the mountainous regions in the North of the country. Here are the maps:

Topography Map and Population Cartogram of Burma/Myanmar
(click for larger version)

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Mapping the US midterm elections

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Two years after Obama has been elected president, another political change has come to the United States in this year’s midterm elections. Politically most significant will be the changed balance of power in the House of Representatives, which has now a majority for the Republican party (winning 240 of the seats, compared to 186 going to the Democrats, and 9 undeclared at the time of writing). Unlike the seats in the US Senate (with still a small majority for the Democrats), the share of seats in the Congress reflects roughly a quite equal population. The congressional districts, which are the decisive constituencies for the House of Representatives, are thus reflecting a general image of the political mood in the US (while the Senate is composed of two Senators for each State, regardless of the population).
Therefore it makes sense to create a different map of the election results for the House of Representatives in order to show a population-centric view of this year’s midterm. The following map uses a gridded population projection and maps the election results onto it, so that it shows the proportional population share of the results in its true dimension: Each person on the following map has the same space, so it reflects the number of people represented by each member of congress. To see where changes took place, different shadings of red/blue have been used in addition. The map uses the same colour key as the election maps on the Guardian website – their map allows you to identify any of the States and gives further details on the results for each electoral district.
This is how the results from the election to the House of Representatives in the 2010 Midterm elections of the United States look like on a population projection (a geographical view with a conventional map is included as an inset to allow comparison with the more commonly used maps):

Map of the 2010 US midterm election results for the House of Representatives
(click for larger version)

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Geovisualisierung im Zeitalter der Globalisierung

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Unlike the post-apocalyptic scenario in infamous Waterworld, what would a world without oceans look like? An oceanless world, so to say, but not like one of the supercontinents that we already had. Instead, more like our today’s continents in the shape of the living space of humankind. In the digital era of cartography, this kind of map is just a few clicks (and much processing time) away, and results in this map curiosity: The image of the world as an oceanless population planet:

gridded population cartogram of an oceanless world
(click for larger version)

The map has been presented first at my talk for the DGfK‘s (German Cartographic Society) colloquium at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe (a German summary can be found here). In 2013 it has been published as a E&P A feature (see here).
As it was all about visualisation (and maps, of course), I used the Prezi presentation tool to visualise this talk. Here it is:

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What I heard about the world

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The Earth at Night as seen by NASAThis iconic composite image of the earth at night of NASA’s Defense Meteorological Satellites Program is the world as we imagine it when the earth is not facing the sun. But this image does not tell the full story of the night’s world, as it suggests that it shows where people are (because there is light). There are actually many people living with little light at night (and perhaps many others wish for some less light, but live in one of the bright spots of this image). Therefore, this image is some kind of fake thing when it comes to the real world at night. The real world at night for the world’s population looks more like the following map, which has been shown on this website before (see here). The reason for showing it again is not only that it has become the header-image of this website, but because the theatre performance What I heard about the World recently incorporated this map in the show’s announcements:

The Earth at Night shown on a World Population Cartogram(click for large image)
See here for an updated and more detailed version of this map

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Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon

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This map is part of this weekend’s Map Marathon at the Royal Geographical Society in London. It is an event of Serpentine Gallery and was conceived by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (here an interview with him talking about the event) . This is a quote from the official announcement:

The Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon will bring together an unprecedented group from diverse fields to showcase possible maps for the coming decade. The Map Marathon will explore all forms of mapping, of data, space and time, multiple dimensions, language and the body. The event will uncover the influence and possibilities of mapping in our world today.

A similar version of this map has already been shown in some of my presentations (and those of the Sasi Research Group), and it is also a contribution for the forthcoming “Maps for the 21st Century” book to be published in 2011:

World Population Cartogram with a topographic map view
(click for larger view)

And this is part of the caption that goes along with the map: The new world map creates an unprecedented view on the world’s population which allows new perspectives for mapping the social dimension of our planet. The projection creates space in areas that matter most in a human world. Mapping the physical terrain onto this map reveals at which elevation most people live on earth. Most people living at high elevations live in East and South Africa, whereas in East Asia the densely populated coastal plains become apparent.
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