Wednesday 22 December 2010

The Size of Countries: USA and China

There have been a few blog posts elsewhere recently about the size of Africa. Kai Krause was the original blogger on this with his 'True Size of Africa' map, which is very impressive. This was picked up by a couple of other blogs, including the Economist's take on it and the Spatial Analysis blog at CASA.


I've recently been looking at this kind of thing from a different perspective but still in relation to the size of countries. Some of this has involved playing around with regions, nations and population data. I thought it would be interesting to look at the USA and China since they are very similar in area but very different in population.

Some images below. Click to view them full size. This first one puts the USA and China side-by-side with population data included and the second one superimposes China on the USA's land area.




Sunday 19 December 2010

The Future for England's Cities...

A quick post today on some recent research by the Centre for Cities. Their report - entitled 'Grand Designs? A new approach to the built environment in England’s cities' takes a look at what the future might hold for England's cities in relation to regeneration and the built environment.

Some interesting findings and analysis of population data going back to 1801. One particularly encouraging view is that money urgently needs to be found to continue the work in housing market renewal areas across England.

There are also some interesting maps and animations. I'm not saying they're interesting just because I did them, but because of the patterns they reveal. Honest. The latter can be found on the Grand Designs web page and the former in the report itself. Regular visitors to this blog (if there are any!) may recognise the animations from previous work I've done.

Thursday 9 December 2010

MIT and Great Britain Regions

Some interesting news from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the BBC News website...

Analysts from the SENSEable City Lab have produced a new map of the regions of Great Britain using a novel approach. The new map is based on telecoms data of human interactions (i.e. phone calls) and it is based on a dataset of "12 billion calls over a one-month period, estimating more than 95% coverage of the Great Britain's residential and business landlines". They must have a big computer. What does it all look like? Check out this video:



There's a longer paper on this and it's worth also checking out the Network&Society pages related to the work. You can even download a zip file with all the maps and use them free of copyright (so long as you acknowledge the source). The main map to feature in the BBC story is shown below - interesting when you compare it to some of the flow maps for the UK that I've blogged on before...