Where do people move in Barcelona?
Cities are considered to be the greatest complex systems we have, with an unusually large set of interrelated variables. Although the study of cities, also as complex systems, using different methodological approaches has a long tradition in urban geography and planning, there are still many unknown factors and we are far from a comprehensive theory.
That's why I love to play with data and understand what is happening in cities: How do they work? What determines the behavior of its inhabitants? Where and why do they move? Where do they buy? Where do they have fun?
In particular, I have been playing for a while trying to explore my city: Barcelona. This is just a sample of some results.
That's why I love to play with data and understand what is happening in cities: How do they work? What determines the behavior of its inhabitants? Where and why do they move? Where do they buy? Where do they have fun?
In particular, I have been playing for a while trying to explore my city: Barcelona. This is just a sample of some results.
Where do they move?
Apart from how do people move, another interesting question is "where do they move?". Every trip in an urban system has three main elements: origin, destination and the series of spaces that are passed through on the way from one to the other. In another article I have talked about measuring passing-through movement, so here I will talk about origins and destinations.
Unfortunately, measuring origins and destinations in urban systems is not an easy task, mainly because of data availability. However, we can explore some patterns using widely available data like census. Barcelona is divided in 10 districts and 73 neighborhoods with X people living and moving from one neighborhood to another one. Here I have plotted movements from 2014 to 2015 for different neighborhoods in Barcelona (Image 1):
Unfortunately, measuring origins and destinations in urban systems is not an easy task, mainly because of data availability. However, we can explore some patterns using widely available data like census. Barcelona is divided in 10 districts and 73 neighborhoods with X people living and moving from one neighborhood to another one. Here I have plotted movements from 2014 to 2015 for different neighborhoods in Barcelona (Image 1):
Image 1: Census movements between neighborhoods
I use this kind of visualizations as a way to see how people move between neighborhoods. People from Barcelona will notice that movements are usually between neighborhoods of the same district, instead of movements between neighborhoods of different districts. One possibility is that socio-economic characteristics of districts are preventing people from moving to higher or lower income neighborhoods/districts.
Besides this macro-destinations, we can also try to find areas of the city (microdestinations) with high gravitational influence to attract visitors. For example, here I have used EIXOS database to map all bars and restaurants in Barcelona:
Besides this macro-destinations, we can also try to find areas of the city (microdestinations) with high gravitational influence to attract visitors. For example, here I have used EIXOS database to map all bars and restaurants in Barcelona:
Image 2: Bars (green) and restaurants (red) in Barcelona
As you can see, we are experts in having fun. Barcelona is full of bars and restaurants, in fact both are the economic activity with the highest presence at the street level: more than 8.000. Of course, this distribution changes from one district to another one. Depending on the socio-economic status or the presence of touristic attractions, some districts have a good equilibrium of bars and restaurants while others have much more bars than restaurants.