Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Academic sins

This is probably the most common sin committed by academicians. Let me emphasize it: "Impenetrable Fog"! (I saw it at Drunkeynesian).


Soundtrack: Samba a dois

Huge Chinese internal migration

The Economist magazine has posted a very nice video on Chinese internal migration: The largest migration in history.




I keep trying to identify some similarities to the Brazilian case (here and here). A first moment with rapid and spatially concentrated urbanization/industrialization driving long-distance migration -  predominantly rural-to-urban migration patterns (1920s to 1990s). I would say China is now going under a similar process.

A second moment with: highly urbanized country, relative geographic dispersion of economic activities (although still highly concentrated ), a consolidated urban system with short-distance migration -  predominantly urban-to-urban migration patterns (1990s onwards).  I wonder if (and when) China will start to follow the same trajectory.....

We already have famous 'Laws of Migration' and a not so famous (international) migration transition theory. There must be somewhere a similar theory about internal migration ... If anyone knows more about it, please let us know!

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Polycentric project for Moscow

The City Hall of Moscow has approved extending the city's borders to the south-west by 2014. According to the plan, the city territory will more than double. It seems they are seriously considering a more polycentric orientation (via Peter Gordon).

It is a curious remedy since Moscow is not highly monocentric when compared to other cities.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Time Lapse + Tilt Shift + Rio's carnaval

If you like either Rio de Janeiro, Tilt shift footage, Carnival or Timelapse videos, this is a must watch!


Sunday, February 26, 2012

Simulations from the Early Days



Michel Batty has gathered some really interesting Early Animations of Urban Models.

One of these videos shows Jack Dangermond (co-founder of Esri) and Allan Schmidt* talking about the 'Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis'. (more videos on GIS history here.)




*Allan Schmidt was responsible for what is probably the earliest "movie" of urban expansion. A SYMAP time lapse movie depicting growth of Lansing, MI 1850-1965.

 If you are unpatient to see it, skip to 3:17 or just click here

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

AfriPop Project

AfriPop: demography aims to produce detailed and freely-available population distribution maps for the whole of Africa . It provides "detailed gridded spatial population datasets showing age composition by 5-year groupings and gender." (via devcondata). 

obs. I have just added this project to our Online Databases List, on the right of this page.

Population Density
[image credit: AfriPop]

Soundtrack: Fela

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Urban Picture

Brasília from above (Beautiful microchip appearance. It is not really functional though ...)
soundtrack: Ray

Amsterdam's Frozen Canals

This is the kind of event that happens only once in a lifetime.  Beautiful urban scene.


(via Viral Video)

obs. If you are more of a night person, you might prefer this one.

Monday, February 13, 2012

The Naked City public lecture

Renowned sociologist Sharon Zukin discussed her latest book at LSE "The Naked City: the death and life of authentic urban places"

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Birth rate plummets in Brazil

A good article by The Washington Post on Brazil's Fertility Decline (via Ricardo Ojima)

excerpt: "The country’s fertility rate has fallen from 6.15 children per woman in 1960 to less than 1.9 today. That is a lower rate than in any other Latin American country except Cuba, which has state-sponsored family planning and legalized abortion. It is also lower than the rate for the United States, which at 2 per woman is just enough for the population to replace itself."

When I was a kid, people used to joke saying that some poor families would have more children because they didn't have television at home. Apparently some take this argument fairly seriously !


Image Credit: The Washington Post

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Visualizing Migration III

Even Westvang did this amazing short animation showing the patterns of 300.000 Norwegians moving house. He did it by cross-referencing 8 million tax records from 2006 and 2007 to track changes in postal codes.

This kind of dataset is rarely available for other countries (via information aesthetics). In Norway it is made public every year!* 

Deluge from even westvang on Vimeo.

*obs. Now you might be thinking "....mmm. I should have used Norway data in my PhD. Dammit"

!Related posts!

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Why some city streets are more crowded than others

The Economist Magazine has written two interesting articles on 'Crowd Dynamics' over the last two months (here and here). Very informative about the contribution of space syntax to urban planning.


[image credit: The Economist]

Friday, February 3, 2012

R mapping

It is possible to make some very cool maps in R !
  dammit !  I'm too lazy to learn it 
[Image credit: Spatial Analysis]
Soundtrack: Chet

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Chart Of The Day

Note that Brazil had experienced one of the fastest urbanization rates in the world during the second half of the 20th century. More here.

Source: The  Economist

Soundtrack: Mistério do Planeta