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:
Tag Archives: londonmapper
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
Londonmapper goes #geomob: Visualising London with Cartograms
Today I was invited to give a presentation at the quarterly #geomob meetup for location based service developers which this time took place at the Google Campus in East London. In my talk I gave a short preview of the Londonmapper project that I am working on with my colleagues and the Trust for London. Unfortunately technology played some tricks on us and some of the animated bits and content did not show up during the presentation, so that I promised to put these on my blog alongside the slides of the talk. Here we go…
This first animation was an introduction into showing how cartograms work in general. I used a gridded population cartogram animation for Great Britain which I created years ago, demonstrating the approach of using a gridded cartogram to allow other layers being used in the transformed map. The following map (which is rather drafty as it was only a conceptual exercise) shows Great Britain overlaid with a topographic layer indicating the land elevation, as well as some key rivers and a selection of the motorway network. During the animation this map transforms from a conventional land area map into a gridded population cartogram where each grid cell is resized according to the total number of people living there. While the grid cells change their size, the other geographic layers are changed accordingly, so that the final cartogram shows these layers in relation to the population distribution, i.e. at which elevations do people live and how are people linked to major roads. The animation also demonstrates the magnifying lens effect in the most densely populated areas. Motorways and even the curvy shapes of the river Thames become visible now which at such a scale cannot be seen from a normal map. Gridded cartograms hence help to highlight details in these areas that are most relevant in the transformed space.
Megacity London: ever growing, ever more unequal?
What is it about London? Population growth is slowing across most of Europe – people are having fewer children and, it could be argued, steps are being taken to try to reduce social inequalities. But London is unusual. London continues growing, and London is becoming more youthful. The middle aged and those who are poor, but not desperately poor, are being squeezed out. Graduates from the rest of Britain and the rest of the world flow in ever greater numbers and require ever higher degrees of optimism. Many fail to achieve their aspirations. Above them a few are becoming ever richer. Below them, as private rents and social housing becomes too expensive for huge numbers of lowly paid families and many leave, a new poor may be growing, less well documented, less well protected, with even less to lose.
With a population of currently 8.2 million (according to the 2011 Census), London is not only unique for one of the old world’s megacities by being projected to continue rising significantly in population size over the forthcoming decades, but also by its specific demographic structure. Like many large cities, London has a large share of people in the younger age groups – over 20% in the cohorts from 25-34 – but also a significant share of the youngest with around 7% of its population being 0 to 4 years old. Here is a population pyramid of London compiled from the 2011 Census data that has been released recently:
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A Tale of Two Cities: London’s Health Inequalities
“London is a special city, London is incredibly diverse and London has its own unique health problems. In 2012 the London Deanery, in partnership with the British Medical Association, is hosting a series of seminars that look to provide […] an opportunity to debate some of the key healthcare issues that face the capital in 2012.” This extract from the announcement of the Metropolitan Medicine 2012 seminar series highlights the need to take a closer look at London’s position within the United Kingdom, as the challenges that the city faces are probably not different, but certainly unique to the problems that currently exist in the health sector of the country.
A tale of two cities: London’s health inequalities was the title of my contribution to the seminar series. In my presentation I highlighted some of the problems that are part of that issue, explaining how social and health inequalities are inevitably intertwined. London is unique in the social landscape, but also part of the processes that shape the UK, which I demonstrated in a series of maps in my slides that accompanied my talk: Continue reading