Sunday 27 March 2011

English Indices of Deprivation 2010 - A North-South Divide?

I've been looking at the new Indices of Deprivation a bit more since my last post. Despite the headline-grabbing fact that England's most deprived area is in Essex - in the south of England - the overall patterns remain dominated by the North. This map highlights the least and most deprived areas in England and also notes some important exceptions (click map for full size image)...


I've also put together an animation showing the 1%, 2%, 3%, etc. most deprived areas all the way up to the 10% most deprived - and then the 10% least deprived (as in the map above) in order to demonstrate the general north-south divide. Notice how the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in particular dominate these patterns. If you want to control the animation, you can hit pause then move the slider along the time bar yourself (the video may take a moment to load).

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This version is just a small blog size version - I've also posted a larger version on my University of Sheffield pages. So, in contrast to the headlines, it seems clear that deprivation remains more firmly entrenched in the north than in the south (with some exceptions of course).

Thursday 24 March 2011

Indices of Deprivation 2010

The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 were published this morning. Previous Indices were published in 2000, 2004 and 2007. I've decided to do a few posts on this because I find it very interesting and it does have real implications in relation to policy. In this post, I've done some basic mapping and analysis (click on any map to view it full size).

A quick snapshot first: the most deprived LSOA is in Tendring, Essex. It used to be in Liverpool. Overall, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Knowsley, Hull, Hackney and Tower Hamlets remain the most deprived local authorities. So, no major surprises.

Overview for the whole of England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Overview cartogram for England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Detailed map showing location of the most deprived LSOA in England.


A zoomable google map version of the above, for good measure.


View Tendring 018A in a larger map

A more focused map of Merseyside, showing Liverpool, Sefton and Knowsley.


Note: The Indices of Deprivation 2010 are produced for small areas called LSOAs. These lower layer super output areas are not 'neighbourhoods' in a formal sense but they often have a high degree of internal similarity. The average population of an LSOA is about 1500 and in total there are 32,482 of them in England. The data used in the Indices are mostly from 2008 but you can read more about this in the technical report.

Wednesday 16 March 2011

World Population and Projections

I've been thinking about the future a lot recently because I've been working on a proposal involving scenarios and visions for the future of Europe. So, time to post a couple of things on population change and projections. The first thing is that if you type 'world population' into google, you'll get the following results:

Clicking on the graphic will take you to the google chart where you can turn different countries on and off by ticking the boxes. This makes it easy to compare data on population change from 1960 to 2009 (as below).

The data are from the World Development Indicators of The World Bank. But what if you want to know about the future. Well, there are lots of projections for different countries, but I don't think there are any that go as far as the 2004 report from the United Nations, entitled World Population 2300. Yes, the year 2300.

This is a 254 page report by the Economic and Social Affairs division and they firsst consider projections to 2050 and discuss assumptions and long-range possibilities. Part 2 looks at different scenarios and different areas of the world (e.g. Oceania). Other parts look at country rankings, population density and ageing. The world population projection for 2300 is projected to be about 9 billion. This has already been covered in a Worldmapper map, so no map here. That's all for now...


Friday 4 March 2011

Repeating Shapes in ArcGIS

It's been a while since I wrote about a GIS tool. Sometimes when I'm working with geographic data the need arises to create a set of repeating shapes and I look for tools to automate it. In ArcGIS, the best I've found is Repeating Shapes for ArcGIS by Jeff Jenness.

Very easy to download and install and then you can get started. Some example images below based on hexagons and the documentation pdf.