A foto da favela de Paraisópolis

This is a blog post about a famous photograph by Brazilian photographer Tuca Vieira, but also about how emotion and imagery can often be much more powerful than 'data'. I'm just posting it here as a round up of various tweets on the topic I have posted previously so that they have a more permanent place on the web. But first, here's the photo. It was taken from a helicopter above São Paulo in 2004 as part of a newspaper piece on the 450th anniversary of the city. The favela of Paraisópolis is on the left, with the much more affluent area of Morumbi to the right.

Tuca Vieira's famous image

The photo has been used to illustrate many different things, but usually it serves as an exemplar for urban inequality. I have used it to highlight how in spatial analysis near things are not always necessarily more alike (i.e. Tobler's First Law of Geography doesn't always hold) as well as to talk about inequalities. I wanted to use it in a new GIS book so I got in touch with Tuca and he agreed that we could use it (for a very reasonable fee). He also sent some of the other images he took from the helicopter that day, from slightly different angles. Very powerful stuff.

There is a separate story here about how the image took on a life of its own, detached from the photographer, and how hardly anyone credited Vieira or even acknowledged how much effort taking an image like this is. There isn't too much about the image or Vieira's thoughts on it online but see this short interview for more. By the way, Paraisópolis means 'Paradise City'.

Anyway, once I discovered that the city was on street view, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the exact spot, and I eventually found it. It's taken from a spot roughly above Avenida Giovanni Gronchi, which you can see on the ground in this Google street view image.

My original tweet on this from 2016

 

The little street to the left separates the areas

You can also read a bit more about it on Tuca Vieira's website, though more recently I have only been able to find this via the wayback machine. The page tells a story about an exhibition in London in 2007 where he was invited, but apparently not so much included. This is how Google translates what for me is the key statement in his piece:

"this photo may make me achieve what should be the great goal of an artist: to provoke a reflection on the world and not on the work and its author".

You can of course now see the scene in 3D in Google Earth, as shown, below. Nowhere near as interesting or as powerful as the original picture but still pretty useful.

Direct link to this 3D view on Google 

Anyway, what really prompted me to look again at this recently was the arrival of Google Earth Studio, a fantastic new tool for creating pretty realistic, smooth animations of 3D scenes around the world. I decided to make a fly-to and orbit type animation of this in Google Earth Studio. The full resolution version is on my web server but I've also embedded a version below (which may not look so crisp).

Notes: as I said at the start, I'm posting this here so that all the information is in one place and not spread between various tweets. This also makes it easier for me to find the information as I'm always forgetting where I put stuff. The image itself also prompts wider questions - e.g. are we only outraged/impacted by this kind of image because the contrast is so stark and so geographically close together? Is it the proximity of wealth and inequality that is so shocking, and if so, would more distance make it more 'acceptable'? Is it only so alarming because we can see it? People will have different answers to these questions, and many more, but it is clear that the image continues to have power and relevance. Type in terms like 'urban inequality' and look at the images and this will probably still be at the top, or very near. Finally, it looks like there is another, newer version of this image on a different Brazilian website. The original seems to be this iStock one by C_Fernandes from 2016.

Crowdsourced City Boundaries

One Friday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, while putting off something more important, I felt the sudden need to see if I could successfully crowdsource some city boundaries. I'd been doing this kind of thing with housing market boundaries for a few years but I thought it would be interesting to see how many shapes I could get people to draw, so here are the results - for fun more than anything else but I think they are also pretty interesting. If you want to download the raw data, you can go back to the original page and click the Download Data button in the bottom right. I've kept it very simple. First of all, the maps are overlaid on a black and white map and the brighter shading shows where more shapes overlap. For places in the UK, I've also overlaid local authority boundaries to give a sense of how the drawn shapes compare to administrative units. The code for this tool was written by Nick Martinelli (thanks a lot) - I just modified it slightly. You should be able to see the detail in the maps when you click on them.

Yes, this is definitely Birmingham

100% Edinburgh - that's it settled

Someone thinks Glasgow is pretty big!

This seems pretty sensible to me

Let's claim a bit of sea while we're at it

This seems big, but is probably not far from the truth

London's functional reach really does go far beyond the boundary

Yes, 'Manchester' is still the classic 'underbounded' city

Now for some US cities - I've just added the ones which had the most shapes drawn for them, starging with Chicago. I see someone has very carefully added in what looks to be an almost exact representation of the actualy city boundary - impressive!

Well done for the detailed city boundary drawing

Los Angeles County (pop c.10m) comes out a bit here

People seem to have mostly drawn the boundary of the 5 boroughs

For New York (and across the US), Jen Nelles helpfully pointed out to me on Twitter that the term 'city' has a different meaning and perhaps I should have used 'urban' or 'metro', which is a good point. When I did this I was only really thinking about the UK but then I got drawn cities coming in from all over the world, so keep that in mind when interpreting these.

Some detailed shapes were drawn for Philadelphia

I find Seattle particularly interesting - nice commutersheds here

Some evidence of people drawing the administrative boundaries here

And now some other cities from different parts of the world - I would have added more but some cities (e.g. Auckland) only had a couple of shapes drawn.

I've left a couple of nearby places in here too

There weren't that many shapes here but it's still quite interesting

Lots of blocky shapes in Tornoto, which I found interesting

And finally, three more images, one of which includes one of the rude shapes drawn by several scoundrels who defaced my map! 

Someone drew a giant knob over Wales - very naughty

A full size GB/IRE version 

I particularly like the way Munich has been drawn here.

And that's all I have to say about this little adventure in crowdsourced procrastination. Thanks to everyone who drew a shape or shared the link online. I've found it very interesting. Feel free to use any of this if you find it of interest. Now time for me to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place.

Notes: I'm did this as a little mapping experiment after seeing Colin Ross do it for Western Sydney (which was inspired by earlier Bostonography work). Earlier work by people such as Kevin Lynch and Patrick Abercrombie is also relevant here. Edinburgh City Council also ran a project like this in 2014 called 'Natural Neighbourhoods' and there are countless other examples across the world. A deliberately prettified/extreme pink example of some earlier stuff I did with this (using housing market data) can be seen on the Rightmove blog. That example involved millions of shapes, whereas we're only just into the thousands for this blog. If you want to see some of my academic work on this, in relation to housing market geographies, take a look at this paper (open access) - an example image is shown below. 

This was generated using data from Rightmove's 'Draw-a-Search' tool

Where is the Northern Powerhouse?

Depending upon how you look at it or who you've been listening to, the 'Northern Powerhouse' is a 'programme', a 'proposal', an 'idea', an 'area', a 'thing' or - for some - a bit of a dog's breakfast. It's definitely something, but where is it? That's what I set to find out and this is my attempt to understand it. First things first though. The government officially don't define its area, as you can see from the Hansard extract below that says 'The exact extent of the North in the context of the Northern Powerhouse is not prescribed by the Government'.

This seems pretty clear-cut - original source

So, obviously it's just the north of England, right? Wrong. Look at the gif below and see if you spot anywhere that isn't in England. Okay, so North Wales is in and that makes sense. The cross-border economic connections between Cheshire and Flintshire/Wrexham and beyond are very important and long-standing so shouldn't be ignored. Now it's time to look at some maps.

It comes from this lovely video

I attempted to turn the list of areas above into a map, which you can see below. It's a pretty wide definition but of course there is value in not being too specific about what is in or out as you can then be a bit flexible about things round the edges. One example of this would be the parts of Sheffield City Region that are actually in Derbyshire so not in the areas listed in the gif above. But of course this looks pretty big and the Northern Powerhouse is often put into an English, urban context. So the next map adds urban areas into the mix. A third map adds in the parts of Sheffield City Region I just mentioned. As you can see, this then leaves High Peak encircled by the Northern Powerhouse but I don't think that is deliberate.

This is one way of looking at it

This helps highlight the core urban areas (in England)

Now with added Sheffield City Region areas - High Peak left out?

What about connections? An important part of all this agglomeration and city productivity talk is how places connect together to help produce stronger economic growth. That's a big part of why much of the Northern Powerhouse work so far has centred on transport, and why they used my original flow lines map on the front of one of the reports. So I've also attempted to map those here again, in a more colourful way. The final map shows this. I've coloured some of the major urban areas differently and used darker shading for 36 local authorities that seem to me to be at the heart of the Northern Powerhouse idea.

This gives you an idea of how everything connects

One other thing to say is that it's quite interesting if you look at the first mentions of the Northern Powerhouse in parliament. This is what the Chancellor said on 24th June 2014:

• "Today we have the very welcome news that Abu Dhabi will be investing £1 billion in building new houses in Manchester. That is a step towards it becoming the northern powerhouse I want to see, and it is a £1 billion vote of confidence in our long-term economic plan."

Note the use of 'it' shortly after 'Manchester'. To sum up, then, where is the Northern Powerhouse? My view is that the Northern Powerhouse is:

• In the North of England
• A bit in North Wales
• Has the biggest cities at the heart of it
• Inherently fuzzy (on purpose)

Not exactly lightning bolt stuff then. But I feel like I now know a bit more, which is always a good thing. Anyway, it seems that we might already have hit Peak Powerhouse.

I wonder what the little bumps were in 2008

Notes: Neil Lee at the LSE has written a good policy paper on the Northern Powerhouse that's well worth a read. Anyone with a decent memory will remember the previous incarnation of this, in Northern Way form, still available in small part online as archived content. I tweeted a version of the last map earlier in the week so I'm wrapping it up here, after a bit of further thinking and to and fro with Buzzfeed star Peter Matthews and expat Westphalian/north west near-native and spatial planning guru Andreas SchulzeBäing. If  you're really keen, go back and read the original Northern Way stuff from 2004. It's still available via the waybackmachine internet archive.

How Urban is Deprivation in England?

The answer to the question above is 'very'. However, it's not all about the big cities, and there are significant pockets of deprivation in rural areas that don't often get the attention they deserve. In this post I take a little look at the distribution of England's most deprived areas (the 20%) in relation to the 2011 Rural-Urban Classification - developed for the government by Paul Brindley and Peter Bibby here at Sheffield. The ideas is to try to shed more light on the kinds of places that we find among England's 'most deprived'. Let's take a look at this in overview first of all.

This maps shows the 20% most deprived, with rural-urban area types

Sometimes it's a bit difficult to tell from a map like this how it all breaks down by category, so I also did two sets of charts - one each for the % and total in each deprivation decile in England (where decile 1 is most deprived, 10 least deprived). In the % charts below (click to enlarge) you can see the nature of the distribution by rural-urban classification type, followed by the total number in each decile in the second set of charts.

Green for rural types, red for urban types here

By absolute numbers, the urban areas dominate

Given the nature of what is being measured, and the distribution of the population by socio-economic status, this is not particularly surprising. What I do find interesting is the extent of deprivation among non-'conurbation' areas (one of the types in the rural-urban classification). You can see these in the map below, coloured blue, followed by a zoomed-in map for Blackpool.

These areas seem to get less press than the more famous examples

All these areas in Blackpool are among England's 20% most deprived

In some areas there is more of a mix of area types on the rural-urban classification, with rural, town and conurbation areas all featuring. Two examples here are County Durham and Barnsley, as you can see in the maps below (green for rural, blue for town, red for conurbation). This reflects the industrial heritage of these places but it also raises the issue that the policy solutions (or responses) may need to be tailored to meet the needs of very different local contexts. Well, that's for another day but at least this typology helps us identify the different character of areas that are often lumped together.

It's easy to spot the coalfield areas here

Barnsley also has a mix of areas

One area of the country that often seems to be overlooked - at least from a national perspective - is Cornwall. It's a very large local authority and the patterns of deprivation here are much more dispersed and not in conurbations. So, I've extracted a couple of maps here too - one with place names and one without.

Significant areas of deprivation here, but less obvious on a map

This time with labels, for anyone not from Cornwall...

To highlight one further kind of deprivation in England I have also produced a map of East Lindsey, which helps identify some areas of deprivation on the east coast. As you can see, they are a mix of rural (green) and town in the rural-urban classification.

East Lindsey is the 5th largest local authority in England

So, the answer to the question is of course that deprivation in England is 'very urban' but also that we find pockets of deprivation all across the country and often not in the kinds of inner-city locations we hear most about in the news, in government reports and in my maps. So, I'm trying to draw a bit more attention to it with this post.

Finally, here's all the areas together in a single animated gif, just to highlight the variable geography of the most deprived 20% by area type.

If you're looking for a map of deprivation in your area, see my IMD 2015 resources page.