Uber and the Headline of a Newspaper in 2030

 How Uber is gaining the headlines in the year 2015:

• Stunning pictures of Paris in chaos as anti-Uber taxi drivers ambush cars and set fires
• Uber backlash: taxi drivers' protests in Paris part of global revolt
• London streets blockaded as taxi drivers protest against Uber

... and how things might change in the future.

MT @lmonasterio Headline of a Newspaper in 2030: Protesting Uber Drivers Attack self-driving taxis #uber #automatedvehicles

— Urban Demographics (@UrbDemogrphics) June 28, 2015

5th Anniversary of Urban Demographics !

On this 25th of June I celebrated the 5th Anniversary of Urban Demographics blog. However, only now I found time to post our annual review because of other commitments.

Here are some stats that show a summary of the blog over the past year. Please, feel free to drop me a line (email or comments) with suggestions on how to improve Urban Demographics blog. If you have any criticisms, please direct them to this other blog here.

• 169 posts
• 58,452 visits by 37,533 visitors 
• 2,681 followers on Twitter
• 1,553 likes on Facebook 
• 311 rss subscribers 

The most popular posts:

1. The Oligopoly that is Academia
2. Listen to Durkheim delivering a talk
3. Population Density Maps
4. Real-time map of 202 transit systems worldwide
5. Average Commute Time Worldwide

and 5 of my favourite posts:

1. Mapping the Transit System of Rio with GTFS data
2. Solving a problem as a PhD student
3. Geographical Variations in Equality of Opportunity
4. Modeling Transport accessibility with GTFS and OpenStreetMap
5. The Density of Manhattan 1910 x 2010

Where do readers come from? (180 Countries, or 5,433 Cities)

1. United States (34.3%)
2. Brazil (10.7%)
3. United Kingdom (9.5%)
4. Canada (3.7%)
5. Germany (3.3%)

Assorted Links

1. Tyler Cowen on Who benefits most from Uber?
   
   
2. Volcano urbanism
   
   
3. Which chart should you use to show this data?
   
   
4. The LSE Cities program is hiring a spatial analyst. The closing date for applications is 12 July (ht Juliano Spyer)
   
   
5. Where are the World's Straightest Roads?
   
   
6. Paul Roemer on Urbanization versus GDP per Capita
   
   
7. Environment Agency makes LiDAR data open in the UK
   
   
8. Robot opera singer premieres in Berlin
   
   
9. Length of the average master’s thesis in different fields of study (via Nathan Yau)

[image credit: bckmw]

How Gay Marriage Became Legal in the US, State by State, Year by Year

Quick post: Gay Marriage became legal in all of the US states today!

The Supreme Court on Friday said that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry, effectively requiring that the 13 states that prohibit such unions reverse those bans. Over the last two years, the number of states authorizing gay marriage had expanded rapidly because of legislative decisions, referendums or court orders.

[image credit: Haeyoun Park for the NYT]

Urban Picture

Morning walk on Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, 1905

[image credit: Detroit Publishing Co., Colorized by Sanna Dullaway]

Dubai at High Speed

Rob Whitworth is among the most prominent film makers and with some of the most amazing time lapse videos. I first got to know Rob's work thanks to Aaron Renn, who gathers a great collection of time lapse videos on his website, The Urbanophile.

I try to follow Rob's work since I watched his great video on the frenetic traffic in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) in 2011, one of my favorites. 

Traffic in Frenetic HCMC, Vietnam from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

Since then, Rob has made some beautiful videos of Shanghai, Barcelona, Kuala Lampur and ! Pyongyang, in North Korea. More recently, he came up with a stunning video of Dubai at high speed. Best viewed full screen and in high definition.

Dubai Flow Motion from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

The Growing and shrinking populations of Europe, 2001-2011

Jonn Elledge (editor of the great website City Metrics) points out to this amazing map showing the population changes of every European municipality between 2001 and 2011. The colors represent average annual population variation, where red gradients represent growth rates between 0 and 2 per cent or over, and blue gradients represent depopulation rates of the same magnitudes. Yellow areas are stable.

Despite converging trends of low fertility and mortality rates in European countries, the map shows a tremendous diversity in the population dynamics of European municipalities, mostly driven by migration trends. A common trend in almost all countries, though, is the population growth in cities and suburban municipalities. This population shift to cities also present remarkably different patterns in different countries, what probably gives some good material for researchers working on spatial demography and urbanization. There are plenty other interesting things to comment on this map but this would go beyond my capacity and my procrastination time limit .

The maps was created by the German Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR) and you can check a high definition version of the map here.

Population Growth Rates of European municipalities, 2001-2011

[image credit: BBR]

Related links:

• Urban Growth Trajectories
• Urban Primacy
• If Christaller had Google Earth

Mapping the migration of displaced people

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published this month their annual report on Global Trends of forced migration and refugees.

Sergio Peçanha and Tim Wallace have done a terrific job in mapping the data and summarizing some of the key findings for the NYT (ht Harvey Miller). 

The figures are staggering.

"Nearly 60 million people are displaced around the world because of conflict and persecution, the largest number ever recorded by the United Nations. About 14 million of those fled in 2014, according to a report released this week." 

"About 11.6 million Syrians have been displaced, nearly half of Syria’s entire population."

Origin-Destination Flows of Refugees

[image credit: Sergio Peçanha and Tim Wallace, NYT]

85 percent of all refugees are living in this area

[image credit: Sergio Peçanha and Tim Wallace, NYT]

Assorted links

1. Google is starting a new company to improve cities
   
   
2. paper - Why the racial gap in life expectancy is declining in the United States
   
   
3. Research Questions in Urban Ecological Sustainability
   
   
4. Einstein on Socialism (ht Pedro Souza)
   
   
5. The anatomy of urban social networks (ht Anna Hushlak)
   
   
6. What is the origin of the word ‘posh’?
   
   
7. Routledge has recently launched a new intriguing  peer-reviewed journal on porn studies
   
   
8. Nathan Yau has done a great job in recreating the 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States using the 2010 Census data
   
   
9. A great interactive data visualization of urban expansion in Las Vegas

[image credit: ProPublica]

NYC Subway From Above

Cameron Booth (who runs the great blog Transit Maps) points out to this beautiful map of the New York city subway as seen from above.

[image credit: Arnorian]

Soundtrack:

R Links

1. Using programming for data visualization: where to start?
   
   
2. An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R
   
   
3. Include a cat silhouette in your plot and you will never need to worry about complaints from journal  reviewers any more (packages rphylopic or cats)
   
   
4. An interactive simulation model of Ebola made with R and Shiny (via Robin Lovelace)
   
   
5. RStudio has some great Cheat Sheets that you might like 
   
   
6. Create maps using Hexagonal “Statebins” in R
   
   
7. A big catalogue with R Color Palettes and codes
   
   
8. Cohort analysis with R using “layer-cake graph” and heat maps

[image credit: AnalyzeCore]

Quote of the Day

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" , Pablo Picasso

[image credit: ?, via Mateus Andrade]

The London Underground In 3-D

Bruno Imbrizi is a  Brazilian web developer and programmer that moved to London three years ago. Using publicly available data from Transport For London, Bruno has created and awesome interactive 3D map of the London Tube that I think some of the millions of readers of this blog might find interesting.

Sophie Weiner has written a nice piece on Bruno's work and you can check it here. You can also check some other cool dataviz of London underground in the Related Links, below.

[image credit: Bruno Imbrizi]

Related Links:

• Visualizing Disabled Freedom Pass trips on the London Underground
• A day in the life of a city
• Oyster Card Touch Ins & Touch Outs

A personal note about Summer in the UK

[image credit: ?]

True story.

How far can you go from any European capital to anywhere else by train?

Stephan Franziskus runs an interesting blog where he has written a great post about the history Isochrone Maps. These maps use color gradients and contour lines to visualize the places one can reach from a single destination within different time windows (isochrones).

obs. We have already posted about these maps in this blog to show some isochronic maps of American railways in the 1800s, a similar map departing from Rome during the times of the Roman Empire, and a contrast between Old and New techniques of isochrone maps.

Stephan Franziskus shows a very precious map, created by Francis Galton (yeap, the same Galton who demonstrated the central limit theorem using a 'bean machine'), which shows the number of days to get to different places in the world if you were to departure from London in 1881.

More recently, Peter Kerpedjiev has applied the same idea to estimate the places one can reach from different European capitals within different time windows using only trains and walking. There is a very good piece by Lazaro Gamio published in The Washington Post covering Kerpedjiev's work. You might like it.

click on the image to enlarge it

[image credit: Peter Kerpedjiev, Lazaro Gamio, WP]

Assorted links

1. MOOC on Questionnaire Design for Social Surveys in Coursera, offered by the University of Michigan
   
   
2. More than half of Beijing’s residents live far from the city center, beyond the fifth ring road, and still Beijing is denser than Los Angeles (via Tyler Cowen)
   
   
3. Just added this to my Survival kit: map of the Breweries of Europe
   
   
4. Jennifer Lundquist has interviewed a number of demographersabout their careers, including big shots like Samuel Preston and Monica DasGupta
   
   
5. Pets outnumber children in Brazil
   
   
6. The world's most beautiful metro stations - in pictures
   
   
7. Beautiful Chemical Reactions Filmed with a 4K UltraHD Camera
   
   
8. The Soviet erotic alphabet picture book from 1931 - you might consider reprinting your research proposal
   
   
9. Measuring Brainwaves to Make a New Kind of Bike Map for NYC

Brazil's Income Inequality Compared Globally

Brazil is internationally famous for a few things, one of them is having one of the highest levels of income inequality. The good news is that inequality is falling in the country and in Latin America more generally. Here is a nice article on income inequality in Brazil and the relatively small but still important role of conditional cash transfer programms  (ht Renato Saboya).

Here are some more info on the historical evolution of income inequality in Brazil: An interactive chart (by Max Roser), and this interesting chart showing the relation between GDP and Gini index during each presidential term since the 1980s, published Alberto Cairo in his recent book.

image credit: Alberto Cairo

Related Links:

• The trend of income segregation in the US, 1970-2009
• Spatial income inequality in Brazil, 1872–2000
• "The Rich, the Affluent and the Top Incomes: A Literature Review" 

Glaeser on Cities, Development, and Density

The NYU Stern Urbanization Project has been organizing a number of great seminars that cover interesting speakers at the intersection of urban planning and economics (Check their YouTube channel here). In December last year, they had Edward Glaeser talking about Cities, Development, and Density.

In case you want a more academic reference, much of Glaeser's presentation is present in his recent paper on 'the causes and consequences of urbanization in poorer countries'.