Iceland’s Urbanization (1901-2009)
As a part of our development efforts we’re experimenting with different types of data and ways to represent them.
Currently we’re mainly working with Icelandic economy and society data. We decided to try to put the urbanization that happened over the last century or so in perspective by creating an animation of municipalities and their population. The animation also happens to show activity in municipalities’ splitting and merging, especially in recent years.
Each bubble represents a single municipality and the size of the bubble (its area to be exact) represents the population.
Click the video to play the animation. I recommend full screen viewing for all the details:
About the project
The population data we’re using comes from Iceland Statistics. Location data comes mainly from Geonames, with a few additions and corrections of our own. Data about mergers and splits of municipalities comes from Iceland Statistics and Wikipedia.
As municipalities’ population data was only gathered once per decade until 1980, we’ve had to extrapolate some values to fill the gaps, so the map should not be seen as scientifically accurate. The idea is to show the big picture in the urbanization process.
Thanks to Samsýn for the map we used to make the background, and to Gísli Sverrisson (also known as “dad”) for help with the map projection algorithms.
The coding was done in Processing.
Representing the population of – what may be a relatively large – municipality as a single point is not entirely accurate, but will nevertheless give a decent picture of the development in the country as a whole. A more fine grained (and fully accurate) population projection would involve plotting single farms and addresses, will involve a lot more data and preparation work and will await another day … maybe.
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For other DataMarket projects, see our portfolio.
