Testing the donut hypothesis August 6, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, London, Maps, Regeneration.add a comment
An interesting project from Radical Cartography:
These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the “donut” hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the “revitalized” downtown, and the poor stuck in between.
This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds “wedges” of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.
Just from visual inspection, it also seems that poverty donuts all tend to have about a five-mile radius, regardless of the size of the city. Perhaps this is the practical limit for commuting without a car?
I can’t do a perfect comparison with London because we don’t have small-area income data available like they do in the States, but this map of unemployment might do the job:
How does this match the theory? Okay, I suppose, if you take the West End and the Square Mile as the ‘centre’ of London. The ‘poor’ band seems to be proportionally wider in London than in the American cities Bill looks at, perhaps because of the artificial limit imposed on London by the green belt – if you looked at the same data for ‘Greater Greater London’, including satellite towns beyond the green belt, you might get a picture more similar to the American one.
Beware the blob February 28, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in London, Maps.add a comment
There are some interesting presentations here (in pdf and audio format) from the LSE Urban Age held last November. My favourite is Ricky Burdett’s (big pdf), which includes the following series of images depicting London’s growth from, apparently, Roman times (judging by how straight those roads are, anyway).
I like the imagery: the Great Wen as a huge spreading darkness. Alan Moore would no doubt approve.
Commoncensus.org February 11, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, Maps.add a comment
Michael Baldwin is doing some fascinating work at Commoncensus.org to map the cultural or personal borders of communities in America, as opposed to the political or admininstrative. He simply asks people what they consider to be their local area, and using their physical location aggregates the answers up into maps like this (click to go to the site proper):
There’s variations on the theme, too, like the Manhattan Neighbourhood Map and, ingeniously, maps of sports team fan areas. Reading all this, I thought it would be interesting to ask people whether they identified themselves primarily in terms of their local community, or their state, or their country, but of course he’s already done that too.
It’ll be great to see how these maps develop as they fill up with more entrants. Also, I’d love to see the patterns of affinities this method produces for Ireland and England – according to the FAQ Michael intends to extend coverage to Europe, and has already been repeatedly pestered by English football fans presumably wishing to establish beyond doubt that all Manchester United fans come from London.
