Tag Archives: population

The Real World at Night

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The night view of the earth has become a very popular depiction of this planet. Although the NASA itself says that “The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated” many people mistake this view as a representation of the inhabited places on the globe. Our gridded population cartogram can help to get a better understanding of the relation of people and light. The following map is a reprojection of the earth at night that shows the nightview in relation to the population distribution. The gridlines are kept in a light colour and thus allow to identify those areas where the lines converge (representing the unpopulated regions). In contrast, the populated areas are given the most space, so that one can easily see which populated areas are literally illuminated at night – and where there are people living in darkness. The resulting map is an impressive picture of an unequal world, with large parts of Africa living in darkness, and the affluent countries in Europe and North America glowing in the dark:

The Earth at Night projected on a gridded population cartogram(click for large image)
See here for an updated and more detailed version of this map

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British General Election Results 2010

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Decision day is gone – and no decision on the future administration yet. The British General Election will be keeping us (and the politicians) busy for a while, so there is plenty of time for an analysis of the election results. This map shows the winning parties in all constituencies (the results from Thirsk & Malton where added on May, 27) mapped on the gridded population cartogram of Great Britain.

Winners of the British General Election 2010 mapped on a gridded population cartogram(click map for larger view)

Technical notes: This cartogram reflects the real population distribution in Great Britain and thus the total number of people living in an area. Each grid cell thus represents the same physical area, but is resized according to the number of people living in this area. We used the British National Grid as a reference projection. More gridded cartograms and further information on the techniques that we used to create these maps can be found on the worldmapper website at http://www.worldpopulationatlas.org/.

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

Brits abroad

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Gordon Brown warned against ‘scaremongering’ over immigration today, but few has been said about those who leave the United Kingdom. For the BBC, the Sasi Research Group had a look at migration into Britain, and there has also been a feature on Brits abroad. These two dimensions assembled together give a quite good view on the patterns of the United Kingdom as a crossroad of migration flows, and questions, what we should be more worried about: Those that are coming, or perhaps those, that are leaving the country. In fact, in equal number to those arriving, Britains move abroad, and the countries linked to these flows are widespread. The following map shows an extract of these flows, that we recently mapped by using new flow mapping techniques (different to the choropleth maps at the BBC features):

Immigration and Emigration flows of the United Kingdom on a globe(view large map)

The following map draft shows the whole picture of these flows which are shown above:
Immigration and Emigration flows of the United Kingdom(view large map)

Please note that the maps are still a work-in-progress. Details on data and techniques, as well as better designed versions will be available when the work on it has been completed. These maps were also featured in a talk given at the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution: “Preparing for “Peak Population”: The United Kingdom within the world’s demographic change” (the full slides for this talk are available on Slideshare).
And also good to know: Ten reasons why migrants are not the problem.
The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The Population of the Island of Ireland

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This map is not yet shown in worldmapper’s collection of country cartograms, as we don’t show maps of larger islands there if they are politically divided. As the Irish Islanders are all celebrating their culture today, here is how the full island’s population distribution looks like in the worldmapper gridded cartogram style:

Happy Paddy’s Day…
Update 2011: See a new version of this map using a NASA satellite image here.

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The United Kingdom within the world’s demographic change

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Population growth in Britain? Decline in Europe? Where does the UK stand, and what implications does this have for politics? A population crash and an ageing population require political action. This slides by Danny Dorling and me, presented at the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, provides an insight into the current trends:

Update February 2011: Read more about the release of the Royal Comission’s final report on Demographic Change and the Environment (for which this presentation was prepared for)

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

Map meets cartogram

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Population densities can of course be mapped differently – obviously using common density maps. They can give a better clue where densities are highest, but they can hardly show what is behind those numbers: What does a certain density really mean? How many are the many that are living in the more dense areas? And how do those compare to other populated areas? This is what a cartogram can show far better – and also show more true, when mapping human-related figures.
The following map shows a density map compared to our UK population cartogram. None of these maps is worse or better, it all depends on the purpose what you want to show, so that our new maps do not supersede traditional mapping approaches…
UK maps compared
The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.