New York is the host city to this year’s AAG Annual Meeting. For my plenary presentation at the Population Specialty Group session I therefore decided to add a little bit of a local touch to the talk by including a new map of New York City in the slides. Continue reading
Tag Archives: people
London in Maps
London 2012 means a busy year for the British capital. Not only are the 2012 Olympics coming up, but also will London be part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and on the more serious side, the current economic crisis will continue to have considerable impact on the people living in a city that is heavily reliant on the global financial markets. Although London is “by far the richest part of Britain and the engine of the national economy [, yet] it also has the highest rates of poverty and inequality” (more on these issues are highlighted in the latest release of London’s Poverty Profile). In the dawn of all these events, Londoners are also electing a new mayor and assembly to decide whom they want to see in the driving seat for the next four years.
The world of cartography and maps is paying its own contribution to this city with the London Mapping Festival. Continue reading
Global Population Changes: From 2.5 to 10 billion in 150 years
The world’s population has reached the symbolic milestone of adding another billion to this planet. While 7 billion is a static number, the expansion and distribution of the world’s population is a very dynamic issue that a single map of where these 7 billion are living (as shown on this website back in July) does not do full justice of what is happening on the planet of people. A lot has changed from the 2.5 billion people that lived on the planet in the middle of the last century to today’s 7 billion, moving the gravitational centre of people considerably towards Asia. This has now started turning towards the African continent, which has not only been a considerable part of the global population growth over the last quarter of the century (and is therefore home to a large share of the world’s children), but is expected outnumber Asian population growth considerably in the decades to come.
The following cartogram-map animation shows these changing trends between 1950 and 2100. It is based on United Nations probabilistic population projections of total fertility from the 2010 Revision of the World Population Prospects. From the year 2010, the data is based on a future projection of expected population changed. “To project the population until 2100, the United Nations Population Division uses assumptions regarding future trends in fertility, mortality and international migration. Because future trends cannot be known with certainty, a number of projection variants are produced” (quoted from the WPP documentation). I used the data from the probabilistic median variant, in which the population is expected to grow to approximately 10 billion by the year 2100 (see below for a graph of the different scenarios produced by the UN). The animation therefore shows the changing distributions of population between the different countries (note that South Sudan is not included in the estimates; Sudan is therefore treated as one country in this map), with Europe losing large shares of population in total as well as in relation to the rest of the world, while the dominance of Asia slowly starts to be relativised by the increasing population shares on the African continent, making the changes in the Americas almost insignificant from a global perspective:
(click for larger map)
See also the (static) world population cartogram for this year
The Human Shape of Germany
Maps of Germany’s population have become a regular feature on this website, starting with the first version of a topographical display of the gridded population cartogram of the country in 2009 to the more detailed analysis of population densities and demographic trends at the 20th anniversary of the reunification last year. One year on, as one of the economic strongholds Germany is in the spotlight of the financial turmoil in the Eurozone. When following the populist media, Germany’s population itself appears to be more unified than ever, at least in the question of the euro bailout.
Putting politics aside, it’s time to look at the German population once again.
