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:
Tag Archives: population
Megacities on the Map
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.
Shifting Economies in the European Union
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:
The Human Shape of the Planet
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:
Counting the US population
Around the world countries are counting their people in the national censuses. The world’s largest country China aims to chart its shifting population, so does the second largest nation India (who also just released their latest tiger census results), Germany takes a deeper look into its shrinking population for the first time since 1987, while the United Kingdom looks at its still growing population. These are just some of the example for the currently ongoing latest rounds of censuses around the world which will also lead to significant updates of global socioeconomic data which has been used for the realisation of the worldmapper project.
The USA is one of the first countries to have completed their latest 2010 census and recently started publishing the figures from last year’s population count. Among the first numbers released are the population counts, which draw the most up-to-date picture of the US population distribution and does also allow to analyse the changes since the last census took place in 2000. The following map uses these figures and shows the US population in cartogram form based on the state level figures. The main map shows each state resized according to the total number of people living there, and colours the states by their relative change (in percent) compared to the 2000 population. The upper left map inset shows the same map, colouring the states by their total population changes in that 10 year period. The bottom right map inset resizes the states according to the total population changes that took place between 2000 and 2010, and colours the relative change on top of that:
Megacities and Earthquake Risk
Read more about this map:
Paper in the Journal of Maps: Gridded cartograms as a method for visualising earthquake risk at the global scale
The following map is a modified version of the earthquake vulnerability map published on this website last month (see that page for more details on the underlying earthquake map). The map itself does not show much new information, but includes an aditional layer containing the largest cities of the world, the so-called megacities (depending on the definition, these are cities with a population of more than 5, 8 or 10 million). The circles reflect the category in which each city belongs (based on 2015 estimations by the UN), and they are placed on the location of the city related to the total population distribution. As the map is resized according to the population (equal-population projection), the map also help to understand the setting of each city within the global population density, explaining why the artificial boundaries of a city do not always tell the full story of the urban population structure within a region. In some areas, such as Hong Kong and Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta, cities are just one of several centres in a highly urbanised region – an urban sprawl – while other megacities like Mexico City or Moscow are in a more solitary location (although even here the extent of the populated area goes beyond the urban boundaries, and certainly the population is far from solitude). Without the city labels the map already showed the relation between human settlements and earthquake risk. The following map now allows to better understand the underlying geography if one is not so familiar with that kind of map transformation.
On a more technical note, the following map feature also includes another jQuery feature (I experimented with the image slider applied to maps on the earth at night map): This map uses the Zoomy Plugin to reveal a more detailed version of the map using an interactive magnifier. Click on the map map to enable the magnifier and see more detail (or if you don’t like that, click here for the usual large version of the map).
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