The London borough elections were held on May 22nd. A total of 1851 council seats (and also four mayoralties) were contested in 32 of the 33 boroughs in the British capital. The following map series produced for the Londonmapper Project shows the distribution of 1843 of the seats in the local councils as published on the London Councils election website (five seats in Tower Hamlets were still missing from the results, while the remaining seats are elected at postponed elections in a few of the wards). The maps show the individual distribution for each of the five main parties, i.e. Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, UKIP and Green Party (in order of their total number of seats) as well as Others (which are independent candidates as well as groups that only stood in individual borough, such as Tower Hamlets First who won 18 seats there). These are the new political shapes of London after what has been a small political earthquake in the country:
Monthly Archives: May 2014
The European Union – Politics and People
Starting with the electorate in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom today, voters all across the European Union are going to the polls to elect a new European Parliament (while most of the EU member states hold their vote on Sunday after which the results will be announced). Continue reading
Hedgehogs and beyond: Introducing Londonmapper
Good things come to those who wait. Today we are officially launching the Londonmapper website, a project that I started working on following the completion of my PhD in 2011. Over the past 2 1/2 years we developed the scope of the project which aims to become a new Social Atlas of London, a project that has not been undertaken since Shepherd et al’s work in the 1970s. But it wouldn’t be me if this would be an ordinary mapping project. Londonmapper is a growing collection of all kinds of cartograms that map a wide range of data to give a comprehensive picture of the diversity in the city. Continue reading
Eurovision 2013 revisited
Year after year in May Europe meets to celebrate one common guilty pleasure: the Eurovision Song Contest. More important in the outcome than watching the singing performances is the voting procedure: It sometimes appears as if points are not always related to the performance, but a reflection of European history and current events. That makes it interesting for detailed analyses (such as this detailed one by students of the Technical University of Denmark) regardless of whether one agrees with the quality and style of the contributions. The upcoming song contest takes place in Copenhagen, as Denmark was last years winner which can be seen in the following map of the total votes that each country received in the 2013 contest (see the bottom of this post):
Total Points received by each country
(click for larger version)
But there is more to the results than the overall picture of the votes (Sidenote and warning: This blog post has a large number of maps embedded and may take longer to load up when viewing). Continue reading