Tag Archives: slides

Inequality and Sustainability

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“We should … dethrone the idea that maximising the growth in measured prosperity, GDP per capita, should be an explicit objective of economic and social policy.”
Adair Turner, Chair of the UK Financial Services Authority, 2007

Today I gave a talk at the meeting of the Sustainability Knowledge Alliance and the Environment Audit Committee (EAC) of the UK Parliament at the British Academy in London. The event aimed at discussing the relationship between growing inequality and sustainability. As the meeting’s announcement explains, “in so many ways inequality is a backdrop to many features of modern political, economic and social arrangements where structures of self-reinforcing power and influence combine to buttress non-sustainability. We see this in the lobbying for the perpetuation of a carbon economy, in the promotion of the “war on terror”, and in the huge biases built into the interweaving connections between business, politics, regulation and consumerism.”
In my talk I explained how inequality and a consumption correlate. I looked at the issue mainly from a global perspective, using evidence that Danny Dorling and I compiled to find out to what extent inequality and (un)sustainability correlate. The following series of charts give in insight into how the level of inequality and a range of indicators related to consumerism and consumption compare:

Inequality and the ecological footprint
Inequality and the ecological footprint Continue reading →

Londonmapper goes #geomob: Visualising London with Cartograms

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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.

Gridded Cartogram Animation of Great Britain
(click for larger version)

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Into the big wide open: Think (twice) before you map!

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A little bit from my archives which I never got around putting online before…here it comes: Last September I was invited to do a keynote at FOSS4G, OSGeo’s Global Conference for Open Source Geospatial Software. The event is the annual gathering of Open Source Geospatial Developers, Users and Leaders and was held at Nottingham’s new East Midlands Conference Centre, 17th to 21st September. The conference motto was ‘Geo for all’ because, as the organisers explain, “many people who work with geo software and maps find themselves becoming passionate advocates for the power of geography to make a difference: in government, business, travel, environment, crime reduction, social justice and communications to name just a few domains. Open Source Geo software makes this possible.”
So how does a geographer, working with geospatial software but being less so a developer, address a huge crowd of people who are little reluctant to see themselves as geeks and nerds? Instead of pretending to be as clever as most of the audience I took a slightly different stance, trying to bridge the gap between those on the programming side and those on the applied side – two groups which sadly rarely speak to each other. Traditional cartographers often see their field of work undermined (and threatened) by computerised methods to generate mapping products, while coders very often find the obsession with minute detail and ‘artisan’ cartography annoying. If the two worlds would come a bit closer together, and both sides speak a bit more with each other, the world of cartography and geospatial visualisations could benefit so much more. Addressing a more technical audience, I concluded that we should all think a little bit more before we start mapping, and that we should give a good mapping project a little bit more time than we often do these days – but more importantly of course: We should never stop mapping. These are the slides of my talk, of course including many maps:

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From geovisualisation to neocartography: Maps in a digital world

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The ICA Commission on Neocartography
Changing technologies have always had a considerable impact on cartography and continue to do so. Several technological revolutions marked important steps in the practice and process of creating maps. Mechanical, optical and photo-chemical technologies changed the way maps were produced. Then, the discovery of electronic capabilities made a new dimension in map production accessible: Not only most of the design techniques were transferred to digital platforms, used at some step in the production of almost all maps created today, but also the possibility to deal with huge amounts of data that can hardly be analysed by a single person enables cartographers to find ways to automate data processing for cartographic visualisation. This is where the term neocartography comes into play, which gives credit to the most recent trends in the field of map-making. Continue reading →