Monday 26 November 2012

Population growth in Manchester city centre, 2001 to 2011

Manchester city centre experienced a population explosion between 2001 and 2011. In the area covered by the map below the population increased by nearly 400% - from 5,957 to 23,295; a rise of 17,388 people.  In 1991, the same area (roughly) had a population of 2,887, as you can see here. Anyone who knows Manchester will know about this but possibly not about the scale of the change. A lot has been written about these changes (e.g. Centre for Cities in 2006, Manchester Evening News in 2012) but it is clear that much of the growth experienced in Manchester has been driven by a new phase of city centre living. Click an area on the map to find out more about it and zoom in to the larger version of the Google map to see it in more detail.



But who are these new residents? Chris Allen, writing in 2006, said they might be a mix of 'counter-culturalists' from the new middle class, 'city centre tourists' from the service class and 'successful agers', who tend to be over 50. Whoever they are, they're living in the new apartment buildings that began to sprout in the perforated urban landscape of central Manchester over a decade ago.

The map above contains a total of 15 small areas known as super output areas. If you click on any area you can find out how many people now live in each. The map also tells you the total land area of each small parcel and how many households are in it. You can find more of this kind of information via the Guardian datablog and also by clicking through to the raw data on the ONS web pages. It was only released on Friday but I've been looking at it now because I'm writing a short paper on small area population change in the English core cities. Central Manchester has grown the most but other cities have also experienced rapid expansions.

A note for spatial analysts: the 15 LSOAs you see in the map above are new. They are just 15 of the 229 new LSOAs across the core cities and this makes change over time analysis a little more tricky. Manchester's total population growth during this period was just under 20% (or 80,000) so the growth in the centre accounted for just over 21% of the increase.

Friday 23 November 2012

Premier League Poverty?

The financial health of the English Premier League is a regular topic of discussion. No matter how you look at it, the sums of money involved in the operation of Premier League teams are immense and it looks even more striking when you consider the locations of their stadia - typically in the most deprived areas of England. This is related to a number of factors (e.g. history, land values), but in my work on neighbourhood deprivation and mapping I've noticed a common trend over the years so I decided to look at the location of all 20 current Premier League teams in England and how deprived their local area is, using the Government's official measure of deprivation (the IMD*). The maps below show each team and its area's deprivation rank within England, where 1 = most deprived and 32,482 = least deprived. Shading: red = poorest 20% of areas in England, yellow = next poorest 20%, and so on... Liverpool is most deprived and Fulham least. See below for more.

Arsenal - IMD 4,432 
Aston Villa - IMD 479

Chelsea - IMD 5,483

Everton - 1,070

Fulham - IMD 19,076

Liverpool - IMD 219

Manchester City - IMD 599

Manchester United - IMD 10,235

Newcastle United - 18,570/6,582 (split)

Norwich - IMD 12,253

Reading - IMD 6,843

Southampton - IMD 855

Spurs - IMD 950

Stoke - IMD 2,171

Sunderland - IMD 6,291

Swansea - WIMD 374

West Brom - IMD 1,619

West Ham - IMD 3,593

Wigan - IMD 429

QPR - IMD 7,848

In Newcastle, the stadium is split between two areas, so I have given the deprivation ranks for both areas. The English Indices of Deprivation obviously only cover England so I have included a map for Swansea which uses the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation figure from 2011. More on that in a previous post. Similar patterns exist in Scotland, as you can see from the bottom part of this 2009 post. What does this tell us that we didn't already know? Not much, but it does provide some hard data and an overview of the contrast between the wealth of clubs and the poverty of many local areas they are located in.

* The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 are used here. They rank each of the 32,482 Lower Layer Super Output Areas of England from most deprived (a rank of 1) to least deprived (a rank of 32,482), taking into account such things as income, employment, education and health. There was a similar piece of analysis in Regeneration and Renewal in 2009 but this looked at the local authority areas only and not the specific location of stadia.

Sunday 18 November 2012

US Election 2012 County-Level Results

I've been experimenting with the 2012 US election results at the county level* published on the Guardian Datablog and comparing percentages for Obama and Romney. One of the most striking things is how Obama won in DC (over 91.4% of the vote) and in the Bronx, NY (91.2%). The highest percentage for Romney was in King County, Texas where he won 95.9% of the vote. The image below shows these patterns and also includes some information on race, with % Hispanic and % African-American mirroring, to a large extent, the percentages of voters choosing Obama. It's not really that simple of course, but there is a correlation. One interesting nugget here is the difference in total votes won in counties with the highest voting percentage for each candidate. In the 5 counties with the highest Obama percentage, almost 850,000 voted for Obama. By contrast, in Romney's top 5 counties the total was just under 20,000 voting for him.



What does any of this mean? It means that the Republican Party probably need to think about how to do better in cities, with Hispanics and with African-Americans, but they already know that. Romney was very successful in areas where not many people live but not successful enough in major cities. It's all pretty obvious but it stands out more when you look at it on a 3D map!

*(for the continental United States, so no Alaska or Hawaii for now)

Monday 12 November 2012

Shannon County, South Dakota: Democrat Stronghold

I've talked about 3D mapping here before, and why I like it, so I thought it was about time for another one. Since the US presidential elections have just taken place I thought I'd look at some of the data and make some maps. I'll post some more when I have time but for now I thought this 3D map showing the ratio of Obama to Romney voters at the county level was pretty interesting, not least because it identifies an interesting high point in South Dakota. 

Click here for a full screen version

South Dakota is a Republican stronghold but Shannon County is the exact opposite. In both 2004 and 2008 it had the highest Democratic voting percentage in the United States (over 85% both times) and in 2012 more than 93% voted for Obama. This might not come as a surprise when you discover that Shannon County is located entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and that out of around 8,700 registered voters, 6,500 are registered Democrats. 

One advantage of using a 3D choropleth is that you can often differentiate between places within the same class in a way that is impossible with a normal 2D choropleth. It usually makes it very easy to see places that stand about - such as Shannon County - and it is a powerful way to visualise this kind of data. There are down-sides too (visual occlusion being one of them) but the continental United States is a nice shape with nicely divided counties, so it works well there.

Beyond Shannon County, the Obama strongholds with real weight in terms of population are DC and the Bronx. In both cases Obama voters outnumbered Romney voters by more than 10 to 1 - 222,332 to 17,337 in the case of DC and 264,568 to 24,430 in the Bronx.

More on this kind of thing coming in the near future...