We are moving to a new home: Urban Demographics 2.0

NOTE: This website has moved to a new address at urbandemographics.org. This content has not been updated since April 2020.

After 1530 blog posts and 471 thousand pageviews over a period of 9 years and 10 months, we are moving to Urban Demographics 2.0, at urbandemographics.org. I will keep a frozen version of this blogspot website online for the record, but I won't be updating any content.

Blogger has been a good companion for a long time, but I felt it was time to move on to a more flexible and versatile platform. Urban Demographics 2.0 is entirely written from within R using blogdown and Hugo. You can find more info in the 1st post of the new website :)

If you follow UD updates via RSS, I am trying move our feed to the new website so you don't have to do anything. I hope this won't break things, but this is our new feed if you want to make sure not to miss any new posts. The Twitter and Facebook channels remain unchanged.

See you on the other side

Photo by Toa Heftiba

Soundtrack:

9th Anniversary of Urban Demographics !

Today is the 9th Anniversary of Urban Demographics. I must say the blog has never been as quiet as in the past year. This is due to various reasons. I focused a lot of my time over the past year in finishing my PhD, getting back to work on project/paper collaborations that had been on hold for a long time and perhaps I spent too much time travelling. Sorry, family. Sorry, planet. Personally and professionally, though, it has been an incredible year. I've finally became a doctor (1st in the family, Mom was very proud), I received awards from the AAG and the ITF/OECD, got a few studies published, I've met a bunch of incredible people, and started a few new projects that I'm very excited about and which I'll be sharing here in due time.

Nowadays, I spend less time  procrastinating  working on the blog than on Twitter, which I find an increasingly rich source of dog pictures information and interaction with other researchers. In the end, the blog has been a bit quite but I still find it incredibly useful to share interesting studies, data, links etc. By the stats of the blog, I'm glad to see a few people still find it useful too. Here are just some quick stats that show a summary of the blog over the past year.

• 84 posts, an average of ~1.6 posts per week
• 20,948 visits, an average of ~57 visits per day (large drop from previous year)
• 9,175 followers on Twitter
• 3,188 likes/followers on Facebook
• 725 RSS feed subscribers

The 5 most popular posts:

1. Assorted R Packages for Spatial Analysis
2. 3D interactive map of population densities across the globe
3. Mapping the diversity of population ageing across Europe with a ternary colour scheme
4. Visualizing transport mode share using a ternary colour scheme
5. Travel time to closest healthcare facility in Rio de Janeiro

and 10 of my favorite posts:

1. The day I became a Doctor
2. PhD thesis officially available for download
3. The geography of Manhattan distorted by travel-times
4. Racial inequity in who pollutes and who gets exposed to pollution
5. Creating a simple world map of cities in R
6. A 195 gigapixel Urban Picture of Shanghai
7. The race for the largest city in the world over the past 500 years
8. Why you should probably share your preprints
9. How complete is OpenStreetMap data coverage?
10. Using GIFs to explain what various causal inference methods

Where do readers come from? (140 countries | 2,598 Cities)

1. United States (32.3%)
2. Brazil (13%)
3. United Kingdom (6.3%)
4. Australia (3.5%)
5. Canada (3.4%)

Code for this map available here

8th Anniversary of Urban Demographics Blog!

Just a few days ago, the Urban Demographics blog had its 8th Anniversary. I have reduced the activity in the blog quite a bit over the past year because I moved houses twice (from Oxford to Cambridge the other place, and then from the other place to Brasilia), and also because I've tried to procrastinate less focus on my thesis writing (more news on this soon). Still, this has been a great year, specially because I've had the chance to meet in person a few dozens of people who told me the blog had been actually helpful in pointing out useful study references, data sources etc. Please, feel free to drop me a line with suggestions on how to improve the blog.

Here just a few quick stats that show a summary of the blog over the past year. 

• 109 posts, an average of ~2 posts per week 
• 37,532 visits, an average of ~104 visits per day  (massive drop from the previous year)
• 7,235 followers on Twitter
• 2,959 likes on Facebook 
• 416 RSS feed subscribers

The 5 most popular posts:

1. How much residential space could you rent with $1,500 in 30 global cities?
2. The long-term effect of slavery on inequality today
3. Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods
4. Heads up for some useful R packages
5. Making a geogif with QGIS

and 10 of my favourite posts:

1. Bicycles empower women: evidence from a quasi-experiment in India
2. The urban footprint of the largest metropolitan areas of Europe
3. Visualizing space-time networks
4. Using R to Predict Route Preferences in Bike Sharing
5. The health and economic benefits of cycling network expansion in 167 European cities
6. Globally consistent estimate of carbon footprints of 189 countries and 13,000 cities
7. Why you should always visualize your data
8. The creative process lollipop chart
9. Political populism and the revenge of the places that don’t matter
10. New tool to get population estimates for any user-defined area

Where do readers come from? (164 countries | 4,217 Cities) 

1. United States (32.9%)
2. Brazil (8%)
3. United Kingdom (7.4%)
4. Canada (3.8%)
5. Germany (3.5%)

7th Anniversary of Urban Demographics !

Today is the 7th Anniversary of Urban Demographics. I hope the blog has been a valuable source of  procrastination  information for you as much as it has been for me. Thanks all the readers for the support \o/

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

• 152 posts, an average of 3 posts per week 
• 148,370 visits, an average of 406 visits per day 
• 5,060 followers on Twitter
• 2,413 likes on Facebook 
• 388 RSS feed subscribers

The most popular posts:

1. How Brazil compares to other countries in terms of area, population and human development
2. Mexicans didn’t cross the US border. The border crossed them 
3. The people who keep us company throughout our life cycle
4. Comparing house price trends worldwide
5. The world’s most violent cities

and 10 of my favourite posts:

1. How much of the world is covered by cities? not much
2. The impressive expansion of subway systems in China
3. Distributive justice and equity in transportation
4. The cost of every Olympics Games since 1960
5. Creating an animated world map of life expectancy changes from 1950 to 2100 in R
6. Mapped history of population expansion in the US
7. Income segregation at the block level
8. Measuring exposure to air pollution using mobile phone data
9. Map of Population Density Lines in R
10. Visualizing the space-time geography of flow data

Where do readers come from? (202 Countries - 4,482 Cities) 

• Brazil (44.6%) 
• United States (17.9%) 
• United Kingdom (4.6%) 
• Mexico (2.8%) 
• Russia (2.7%) 
• other countries (27.4%) Not many readers in Siberia nor Greenland, though

Getting updates from Urban Demographics blog

This week we have crossed the milestone of 5000 followers on Twitter. If anything, this means there are a lot of procrastinators out there. If you're not on Twitter but you would like to  procrastinate  receive automatic updates when there is a new blog post, there are two options:

(1) You can subscribe to our RSS Feed in a reader . I'd recommend using Feedly. (2) Or you can get updates from our Facebook page.

if you like this blog, recommend it to your friends. If you don't like this blog, recommend it to your enemies. That's also fine.

6th Anniversary of Urban Demographics !

On this 25th of June I celebrated the 6th Anniversary of Urban Demographics blog. It has been a really valuable resource  of procrastination  as a personal repository of papers, maps and texts I find interesting. Thanks for all the readers \o/

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

• 153 posts, an average of 3 posts per week 
• 40,088 visits, an average of 11 visits per day
• 3,865 followers on Twitter
• 1,834 likes on Facebook 
• 275 rss subscribers

The most popular posts:

1. World Population Distributed by Latitude and Longitude
2. Creating tilted and stacked maps in R using ggplot2
3. Testing Jane Jacobs's ideas on urban vitality using mobile phone data
4. Data visualization with R: geographic networks
5. Where to find high spatial resolution data on population distribution

and 6 of my favourite posts:

1. Build and they will come, or The Black Hole Theory of Highway Investment
2. ReDesigning the Global Map of Refugees
3. How much faster you could travel today compared to 1914
4. Brazil Racial Dotmap
5. Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion to 2030
6. The hidden inequality of who dies in car crashes

Where do readers come from? (170 Countries, or 4,513 Cities)

1. United States (29.1%) 
2. Brazil (14.3%) 
3. United Kingdom (9.6%) 
4. Germany (3.4%) 
5. Canada (2.9%) 
6. India (2.7%)
7. other countries (38%) Not many readers in Siberia no Greenland though

Getting updates from this blog

Dear readers, if you like this blog, recommend it to your friends. If you didn't like this blog, recommend it to your enemies. That's fine also.

If you want to receive our updates, you can do this using 3 different alternatives:


1 - Twitter: Follow @UrbanDemog


2 - Facebook page:  

3 -  Subscribe to our RSS Feed in a reader. I'd strongly encourage you to use Feedly

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%)

Other ways to follow Urban Demographics

You may want to follow us on Twitter! There are many more interesting things going on there than I could possibly post here.

Follow @UrbDemogrphics


You may subscribe to the blog on a reader using our RSS feed.  Feedly is by far the best alternative to Google Reader so far.
Subscribe in a reader


You can also get our updates on Facebook:

4th Anniversary of Urban Demographics !

Today marks the fourth anniversary of Urban Demographics Blog! And blogging still makes up for an important part of my procrastination learning !

Here are some stats that show a summary of the blog and its readers over the past year:

• 190 posts
• 306 subscribers  
• 31,898 visitors 
• 51,249 visits
• 1,085 likes on Facebook 
• 1,572 followers on Twitter

The most popular posts:

1. Making 3D Maps in Excel
2. Subway systems of Rio and Shanghai 1993-2013
3. The most cited authors in Sociology
4. Urban Density Patterns in 9 Global Cities 
5. Population Density Maps

and 5 of my preferred posts:

1. 200 years of Urban Expansion
2. IPUMS-International and Brazilian census microdata
3. Accessibility Observatory + GTFS data
4. Global Innovation and Diffusion in Public Transport
5. If Christaller had Google Earth

Where do readers come from (Top 5)? (175 Countries, 4,665 Cities)

1. United States (29%)
2. Brazil (16%)
3. United Kingdom (8%)
4. Germany (4%)
5. Canada (3%)

And the Top 5 sites that sent visitors here:

1. Google (24%)
2. Direct traffic to the blog (24%)
3. Facebook (20%)
4. Twitter (9%)
5. Feedburner (3%)

Thanks everyone for the support and suggestions via comments and emails !

Blog Updates

Dear readers,

if you like this blog, recommend it to your friends. If you didn't like this blog, recommend it to your enemies. That's fine also.

If you want to receive our updates, you can do this using different alternatives:


Twitter: @UrbDemographics   Follow @UrbDemographics



Facebook page:  

And via our posts RSS Feed:  

Subscribe in a reader

3rd Anniversary of Urban Demographics Blog

Yesterday (on June 29th) we have completed the third anniversary of Urban Demographics Blog! During this third year we have reached a total amount of:

• 267 posts 
• 26,151 visits 
• 20,373 visitors 
• 393 subscribers 
• 766 likes on Facebook 
• 445 followers on Twitter

These were the most popular posts during this third year (based on the nº of page views):

1. The Education Gap in american metropolitan areas 
2. The most cited authors in Sociology
3. Population Density Maps
4. Urban Primacy
5. Travel Time Maps

and 6 of my prefered posts:

1. Average Traffic Density of US Highways (1944)
2. Densification vs. De-densification of Manhattan
3. Applied Demography Toolbox
4. Global forecasts of urban expansion
5. Urban Centrality: A Simple Index
6. Crowdsourcing road congestion data

Where do readers come from? (157 Countries, 3,784 Cities)

1. United States (34.61%)
2. Brazil (17.7%)
3. United Kingdom (6.0%)
4. Germany (3.9%)
5. Canada (3.4%)
6. Spain (2.2%)
7. France (2.1%)
8. Australia (1.8%)
9. India (1.6%)
10. Mexico (1.6%)

Thank you for all your support and suggestions via comments and emails !

Google Reader Doomsday

If you follow Urban Demographcis via our Twitter or Facebook page, you don't need to bother with this post. However, if you read this blog using any RSS Feed Reader, this post may be useful*. 

[Image Credit: Feedly]

As you likely know by now, Google is shutting Google Reader down on July 1fst. Tyler Cowen has pointed out to a list of alternative options, showing that there's Life after Google Reader (no need to panic). By the way, I have tested myself a few of those alternatives (NewsBluer, Flipboard, FeddlerRSS, The Old Reader and Feedly). I'm sticking with Feedly, at least for a while.

Additionally, I'm not sure how Google Reader shutdown will affect the 'blogosphere' because some RSS readers are dependent upon Google Reader to work. Besides, it migh break a couple of links I have posted in the past. Anyway, here is our RSS feed, just in case you need to re-subscribe to this blog.

Based on previous experience though, things will sort themselves out.

* If you have the habit of reading blogs and websites AND you don't know what a RSS Feed Reader is....then you should consider taking 5 minutes of your time to learn how it works. It can give a big boost to your productivity  procrastination .

Pop-Up Economics, by Tim Harford

Tim Harford has a new radio series on the BBC called Pop-Up Economics. It's highly recommended!

The next epidose will talk about Thomas Schelling. I'm looking forward to listening to it !

2nd Anniversary of Urban Demographics Blog

A few days ago (on June 29) we have completed the second anniversary of the Urban Demographics Blog! During this second year we have reached a total amount of:

• 220 posts
• 23,058 visits
• 18,809 visitors
• 239 subscribers
• 520 likes on Facebook
• 115 followers on twitter 

These were the most popular posts during this second year (based on the nº of page views):

• Parking Rates Worldwide
• Population Density Maps 
• World Population Distribution Map
• Urban Primacy
• Urban Africa

and some posts I like:

• What is on a Demographer’s Mind?
• Urban Mobility solutions 
• Regional Disparities in Brazil 
• Viva la Revolución (Industrial !)
• Urban Growth Trajectories 
• Fuzzy Logic explained 
• Urban Hierarchy of 590 cities (1950-2050)

Where readers come from (147 Countries)

1. United States (36.1%)
2. Brazil (11.8%)
3. Canada (11.5%)
4. United Kingdom (6.2%)
5. Germany (2.9%)
6. Australia (2.3%)
7. France (2.2%)
8. India (2.1%)
9. Russia (1.4)
10. Netherlands (1.3%)

From which cities do readers come? (3,517 Cities)

1. Brasilia (1.169) thank you mom
2. New York (674)
3. Toronto (619)
4. London (495)
5. Sao Paulo (321)
6. Los Angeles (314)
7. Calgary (284)
8. Washington (273)
9. Not set (aka 'WTF') (261)
10. Vancouver (250)

500 likes on our facebook page !

We have reached 500 likes on our facebook page!   thank you mom 

Soundtrack: Pastilhas Coloridas

SOPA

(via tudo ao mesmo tempo agora)

Urban Demographics is now on Twitter !

@UrbDemographics

Spread the words: we are now on Twitter ! @UrbDemographics

I'm still learning how to use it. You will have to be patient with me during this test period.

New blog on Brazilian demographics

My friend Ricardo Ojima and some other researchers have just started a new demography blog focused on the Northeast Region of Brazil.

The Blog is called "Demografia do Nordeste". Long live to the blog!

Assorted links

• Urban Network Analysis: A Toolbox for ArcGIS 10 (via @jmichaelbatty)
  
  
• G-Econ - Geographically based Economic data (via devecondata)
  
  
• ‘Middleweight’ Cities as Growth Engines
  
  
• NYT tool for Mapping the 2010 U.S. Census (via UPB)
  
  
• A fresh look at US population trends
  
  
• Mapnificent (via The Map Room)

Mapnificent from Stefan Wehrmeyer on Vimeo.