Yearly Archives: 2011

Seeing the world through British eyes

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A couple of months ago I looked into the global news coverage of the British Guardian newspaper which showed the distorted world views that we get from the printed media. Now a new media report by the International Broadcasting Trust and the University of East Anglia shows how British television viewers see the world according to the international coverage on the program (“Outside the box: How UK broadcasters portrayed the wider world in 2010 and how international content can achieve greater impact with audiences” by Martin Scott with Sandra Milena Rodriguez Rojas and Charlotte Jenner).
The foreword of the report says:

This research reveals how the nature of international factual coverage has remained remarkably static over time. Although individual producers and commissioners do not set out to reproduce the same view of the world on television each year, this study reveals that the combined result of all of those individual commissioning decisions, amongst all broadcasters, is to produce factual programmes that cover broadly the same topics, in the same formats, featuring the same parts of the world, every year.

Read more about the media report on Martin’s media blog and in the Guardian.
In collaboration with Martin Scott, the principal author of the report, I have created some worldmapper-style maps depicting the statistics used for this report. The following map is part of this map series, showing the amount of new factual programming received by different countries on British television in 2010:

Map of factual programming received by different countries on British television in 2010
(click for larger map)

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A Revolutionary World

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The people of the Arab world became a quite influential political voice in recent months, and the outcome of the Arab and the Middle East unrest remains unclear. But the events have put a region back on our mental map of the world that many had only in mind as either a holiday destination or a region to avoid. This picture has clearly changed, and many previously unknown places have become of people’s geographical knowledge. Why some places are more prominently named than others often has a direct link to the human geography of the countries where these recent events unfolded: The countries of the Arab world are characterised by diverse population patterns that draw a very different picture than the normal land areas suggest. Each of the countries human shapes can be seen in the World Population Atlas, which also provides a view of the global population patterns.
A coherent picture of the population patterns in the Arab region is given in the following new gridded population cartogram that I created from the countries of the Arab League member states, in which so far most of the democracy movements unfolded.
The Arab League has 22 member states with an estimated total population of 360 million who live in an area of 13,953,041 square kilometres (data from Wikipedia). The population density of 24.33/sqkm is less meaningful as a single figure. The population map shows that largest population densities concentrate along the coastal areas, while large areas are sparsely populated desert regions. The major population centres in the different countries were often the hotspots of the unfolding protests.
This is the human shape of the Arab world:

Population Cartogram of the Arab World
(click for larger map)

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Megacities on the Map

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Megacities are major global risk areas. Due to highest concentration of people and extreme dynamics, they are particularly prone to supply crises, social disorganization, political conflicts and natural disasters. Their vulnerability can be high.

This quote from the IGU’s MegaCity TaskForce draws a quite bleak picture of what some believe to be the future of living for humankind. The UN World Urbanisation Prospects finally saw the urban populations surpassing rural living for the first time in human history in recent years, but we must not forget that these urban populations do not all live in what is referred to as a megacity.
A megacity basically is nothing more than a very large city. Widely used is a population of 10 million, but other definitions do exist, ranging from 5 or 8 million, and some people, such as German geographer Bronger are also including the population density of 2000 p. per sq km as a defining factor). The definition of a megacity should also be seen as a rather vague delimitation for a phenomenon that – despite it’s quantitative dimension – has a very qualitative nature: What happens, when extremely large numbers of people live in a very limited amount of space, and what happens, if these areas of very high density living even continue growing.
In the year 2000 there were 39 cities with a population of more than 5 million inhabitants, 2/3 of which were in the developing countries. This was a population of 225 million people, not even 5% of the world’s population. Today we have about 400 million people living in the largest cities on the planet – still far from the majority of the now more than half of the world’s population living in cities. And perhaps the majority of people on this planet may never live in one of these megacities. Why is everyone talking about megacities then anyway? The sheer size make these cities the ultimate examples for urbanization, and provide an insight to the diverse processes in such complex urban spaces. They are like a real-life laboratory for urban geographers who try to understand the impact and implications of urbanization processes, and may contribute to solutions how the urban future of humanity can be actively created and lead to a better and perhaps more sustainable life on this planet.
A gridded population cartogram can help to understand not only the locations of these largest of cities, but provides a look into their setting within the global population patterns by giving space to people and allowing to see where many people live in these large cities, and where people are in relation to these cities. A normal map (see further down) shows the high concentration of megacities especially in Asia, but we can see from the population cartogram that these are in those anyway very densely populated regions, while the megacities in South America appear more like (relatively seen) solitary bodies.

Cartogram / Map of the World's Megacities in 2015
(click for larger map)

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Shifting Economies in the European Union

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The European economic crisis has been part of some previous maps shown on this website. So far, all of these maps on Europe’s debt were based on national-level data which do not show the full picture of the economic structure of the European countries. A couple of weeks ago EUROSTAT published some more detailed economic data for the GDP output on NUTS 2 level, which allows to understand the subnational variation of economic output. The data only covers data ranging from 1997 to 2008 (so far), but it is the most detailed coherent picture of the shifting economic powers within the EU27 countries in over a decade and draws the picture of the European Union sliding into the global economic crisis.
I looked at the data in a series of maps that view the economic shape of the European Union from different perspectives. The first map displays the GDP distribution in the first year of the financial crisis (2008) and the NUTS2-areas are redrawn according to their total GDP output in that year. The colours indicate the GDP growth rate in that year, showing how well many parts still dealt with the approaching crisis, and as if the crisis followed a geographical path from its US origins, the UK and Irish economies were the first to be severely hit in their economic growth in the year of the Lehman collapse. Only Sweden shows a similar bleak picture, but on a much lower level. It is interesting to see that the initially collapsing banking sector in London is not only affecting the GDP development in the Southeast of the UK, but basically pulls the whole national economy into a downturn:

Map of the 2008 EU GDP on regional level in 2008 (with growth rates)

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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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Urban development in the city of Cologne (Köln)

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Mapping Cologne
In a previous post on this website I looked at urban mapping showing population changes in London. This time I dug up a different example for mapping cities from my map archive: The German city of Cologne (Köln) is one of Germany’s largest cities with a total population of approximately 1 million people. It its over 2000 years lasting history, its urban landscape changed considerably, and since the Prussian times in the 19th century fairly good mapping records cover the modern land use change from the pre-industrialised to the post-modern city. In a GIS mapping project some years ago, these changes have been digitized in full detail from some major topographic maps, covering the changes in the urban land use since 1850 (see bottom image of this page for the legend to this animation):

Map animation of the Land Use Change in the German city of Cologne / Köln

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