Urban Maps

[EPG]

Good.

I can't upload files yet, but I will contribute once I can.

[EPG]

MALMÖ -2010 General Election

What is mega-SD-land to the east of the centre?

[EPG]

Dublin population density. The major suburbs and eastern commuter towns are labelled.

The map shows the four administrative counties of County Dublin. Observe that scattered apartment schemes on the southern fringe comprise some of the highest-density parts of the county, and that density falls off quickly to the south-east of the city, which (as followers of the Irish demographic maps thread will remember) is a distinctive part of Ireland with high rates of wealth, education, Protestantism/irreligion, social liberalism, etc etc.

Dublin City is notable for the big, empty areas of the Phoenix Park to the west and North Bull Island to the east.
Fingal to its north expanded its population rapidly in the last twenty years. Consequently, it has a younger and more non-Irish demographic profile than the rest of Dublin, let alone other counties. Swords and Dublin haven't grown into each other thanks to an airport and motorway in between. Blanchardstown and Balbriggan also grew quickly. The other seaside towns have an older profile.
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is relatively low-density because that's where the rich people live, particularly west and east of Dún Laoghaire town itself. Unlike the other counties, its population hasn't grown much, and the average age is higher.
South Dublin is actually to the south-west of the city. The western part of the county has been urbanising since the 1970s, though all of the towns labelled grew up around older village cores. The eastern fringe is more like Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, well-off and older.

The map also includes parts of counties Meath (north-west), Kildare (south-west) and Wicklow (south). Bray has been an established town for centuries. Leixlip and Celbridge were small villages until the 1960s; Ashbourne until the 1980s.

There is lots of interesting data for this city, but I'm not sure whether to present it by small area (~260 people each) or electoral division (~3,000 people each). Small areas are more consistently-sized and less misleading for density, but perhaps harder to read.

[EPG]

Yeah, the Fingal - South Dublin boundary is the River Liffey.

The Minister at the time said that the South Dublin - Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown boundary was "the watershed which divides South Dublin naturally into east and west sectors".

The 1985 boundary reorganisation was before the construction of the M50 motorway. If they were to revise it today, they'd probably extend the city boundary unto that great road, which would still exclude Blanchardstown, and spin the other county boundaries clockwise.

As for Howth, Sutton, and Baldoyle in the far south-east of Fingal, Ray Burke described their move out of the city to the county as an "abortion of a proposal". There was doubtless some recondite political scheme behind it - Fianna Fáil claimed it was intended to strengthen Fine Gael on Fingal County Council, which certainly sounds plausible to me.

[EPG]

I meant they'd move the boundary west towards Blanchardstown, not south.

It doesn't matter whether Howth has its own ward or joins with somewhere else; the point was to join Howth to an otherwise strongly Fianna Fáil area.



We have to go to ED level to look at changes in population density since 1981. The reorganisation was in 1985, so the earliest sub-county level data we have are from the 1986 census.

The most obvious phenomena: the population of the western fringe of the county, the increased population density visible in even the large northern/southern areas, big falls in population in formerly high-density parts of the inner suburbs and the repopulation of what in 1981 were extremely run-down areas of the city centre, mainly through modern apartment construction.

[EPG]

Now It's part of the Malahide, or rather Howth-Malahide, ward and that voted differently in 2009 - with a strong Labour vote (which suggested that in these ummm... not so deprived areas of Dublin Labour picked up a lot of the votes that had originally gone to the Greens. Need to explore this).

Yep, or more generally, Labour took the floating, high-standards middle-class vote that was lodged with Greens/PDs in 2004 and will inevitably go somewhere else this time.

Heck, they got 3/6 seats in the richest City Council ward. Though this pattern didn't hold true in DLR or South Dublin, where Fine Gael took that vote instead.

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The main growth areas in the City Council area: new developments in Cherry Orchard, Islandbridge, Meakstown, Ashtown and Clongriffin, and redevelopment in the city centre, including the Docklands but also Dublin 1/2 generally, Smithfield and HSQ.

The main declining areas: Kilbarrack, Coolock/Artane, Donnycarney, Ballymun/Finglas, Cabra, Ballyfermot, Drimnagh, Crumlin. These are all areas of high social housing, most of which were built in the 1940s and settled by former tenement residents, suggesting that the life cycle is starting to take their toll.

[EPG]

Pembroke-Rathmines is significantly studented and is more, how should I put this, generally more 'urban' than most places further South. IIRC the percentage of people renting privately is v. high for Dublin. Also Ruairi Quinn has a big personal vote in Rathmines proper.

Pembroke-Rathmines is indeed full of students, but we all know how disinclined students are to vote, let alone to vote in their college constituency rather than their family's one. Similar factors apply to the other transient apartment-dwellers in Rathmines. In this manner, the Pembroke-Rathmines electorate somehow manages to be even more well-heeled than its population as a whole - so political party types say, anyway. As for Labour's relative weakness where the far-left was strong, that can be taken as another sign that its class profile was not very skewed in 2009, since these other people peeled off worker support.

This was discussed in the demographics thread. Unusually large numbers of old owner-occupiers, as well as council housing (which is more concentrated in the Finglas, Ballymun and Ballyfermot and less in Kilbarrack and the likes). Presumably property prices can be part of the explanation here - close enough to the city to be more expensive than, say, Clonsilla or Swords but too far to be 'city centre' with it being mostly private housing rather than flats so less of a demand to rent (most of these areas also not being proximate to a university also being a factor here).

Kilbarrack, Donnycarney, etc. don't rank up there with Ballymun or Ballyfermot for social housing (in leagues of their own), but they are still areas of high concentration compared to the rest of the city. As you mentioned, the same demographic effect has happened in areas of high owner-occupancy but middling incomes like Beaumont, Walkinstown, etc. Whereas the higher-income owner-occupancy areas didn't shrink much (Clontarf, Drumcondra) or grew (Sandymount).

Oh - The biggest percentage increase was in Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart. Its population was only 68 in 1981, 1,085 in 1986 and 3,866 in 2011. It must have been built on by the time of the 1985 reorganisation, then developed further during the boom. Blanchardstown-Tyrrelstown has a similar story; another near-empty area turned into suburbia. The areas you mention had too many people in 1981 to give them the #1 spot, but certainly grew extremely quickly after that.

Glencullen's population went from 3,343 to 17,381. As you're no doubt aware, but for the benefit of other readers, Glencullen combines the high-density areas misleadingly labelled "Sandyford" on my initial map (Sandyford proper is north of the label), and a huge mountainy area to the south all the way to the county boundary. It's one of those electoral divisions that makes you glad that sub-breakdowns by census small area exist.

[EPG]

Since so much of this discussion now hinges on social conditions, time to present a summary.



This shows the proportion of workers in Census social classes 1 and 2, which are professional and managerial/technical workers. "Professionals" include the so-called higher professions like science, medicine and the law; nurses, teachers and so on are in the "managerial and technical" group, along with assorted managers, farmers of large farms, sales assistants, artists, surveyors, librarians, hovercraft officers. Don't ask me why.

The overwhelmingly class 1/2 areas is what you might call Stereotypical South Dublin, essentially Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown plus Pembroke and Terenure in the city as well as Templeogue and Rathfarnham in South Dublin. There are also strong class 1/2 areas in Castleknock (west of the Phoenix Park), Clontarf (north of Dublin Port), Malahide (east of Swords) and rural Howth (though not Howth town). Somewhat less pervasive are Lucan and the Meath/Kildare exurbs where our old friend, the detached house, dominates.

The areas without many professional, managerial and technical workers are those we discussed earlier: the north-east inner city, Darndale/Coolock/Priorswood to the north-east, Ballymun and Cabra/Finglas in the north-west, Ballyfermot/Irishtown/Clondalkin in the west and Tallaght in the south-west. The areas where this is true to a lesser extent are Blanchardstown in the west and Crumlin in the south-west of the city area. The Phoenix Park contains a hospital for dependent older people, which is why it appears red; on the other hand, the UCD campus on the city-DLR border appears red because of all the students.

[EPG]

Are these percentages by property or by number of residents?

[EPG]

Tenure by household in Dublin.

In general, owner-occupiers are rare in the city centre and pervasive in rural areas, and these two categories of tenure tend to be found in the same places. "Mortgaged owner-occupiers" are concentrated in the new semi-detached, private housing estates around Donabate, south of Swords, west of Blanchardstown/Castleknock villages, south of Lucan, Firhouse/Ballycullen/Ballyboden and Stepaside, as well as in the commuter towns like Ashbourne. "Outright owner-occupiers" are more common in traditional residential areas, such as the belt of well-off, older areas from Templeogue to Dalkey, the north Dublin suburbs (apart from council housing estates), Castleknock on both sides of the M50 and Malahide/Portmarnock, while being much rarer in the new private estates and commuter towns.

Local authority housing is distributed in a very skewed manner. Lots of areas have none, or just a couple, whereas there are substantial amounts in the predictable places that we've already discussed on this thread - which overall gives Dublin less local-authority housing than the typical European city. Private and voluntary-body rental is strongest in the city centre, especially the triangle between Trinity College, UCD and Rathmines, a suburb which has been associated with private rental for decades, but also in the new suburban housing estates in the west, the new urban apartment developments in the city centre, and around Maynooth, a university town in County Kildare, just visible to the extreme west of the map.

[EPG]

maybe it means renting from your employer then?

Good intuition!

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http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/a-century-of-home-ownership-and-renting-in-england-and-wales/short-story-on-housing.html

[EPG]

This is the last map I found interesting, posted simply because it's pretty funny. Spot the commuter rail, DART and Luas lines.

[EPG]

Malheuresement, we don't have terraced/detached/etc. housing types from Irish census data. But we do have two other factors to work with: average number of rooms per dwelling and average share of houses among all dwellings (as opposed to flats or caravans). Houses are generally larger than apartments in Ireland. So we can use these data to great advantage!

We can overlay these two in a single map. Plot average number of rooms per house (to proxy house size) as blues, and share of houses as oranges, each becoming darker per quantile. Then white areas have small dwellings and few houses, i.e. your typical apartment. Conversely, dark areas have large dwelling houses. Orange areas have small dwellings, but these tend to include small houses more than the white areas. Blue areas mean big apartments, so I guess we shouldn't see too many of these.

To generate this map, I've taken the quantiles for Dublin county as a whole, and they are quintiles. White areas have fewer than 3.7 rooms per dwelling and 38% houses. The darkest areas, which are harder to distinguish, have more than 6.2 rooms per dwelling and 99% houses.

The CSO says rooms are "kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, conservatories you can sit in and studies, but excluding bathrooms, toilets, kitchenettes, utility rooms consulting rooms, offices, shops, halls, landings and rooms that can only be used for storage such as cupboards."



The dark areas (big houses) are wealthy: the southern suburbs, Castleknock, Drumcondra, Clontarf and Howth. The light areas (small apartments) are mostly urban cores: the inner city, the Liffey from Islandbridge to Connolly Station, Docklands, and the Dún Laoghaire waterfront, but also Pelletstown north of Ashtown, Santry Northwood and Grove Road flatland in Rathmines.

Recall that orange areas have relatively few rooms, and blue areas have relatively many rooms, given their number of houses. Observe the orange in certain deprived areas: Crumlin, Drimnagh, Ballyfermot, Cabra, Finglas, Donnycarney, and East Wall/North Wall, but not Ballymun and the north inner city, which are flatland, or Darndale, which has flats but also caravans/mobile homes. Concentrated blue areas are pretty rare because apartments don't vary in size as much as houses. Mostly, I think apartments outside the centre share their localities with houses to a greater extent than city-centre apartments, which drags up the average rooms per dwelling. I think this is what's happening in areas like the coastal fringe, which seems to have more blue areas than is typical.

[EPG]

Not many surprises here. Maybe the weakness of the link between class profile and housing size in the north suburbs. I also learned that modern areas developed for below-average-income housing, like Kilbarrack/Donaghmede (west of Sutton and Howth) and Walkinstown (west of Crumlin bordering South Dublin), had bigger houses than their pre-50s predecessors.

[EPG]

Historically, those areas and their smaller-dwelling neighbours were the Dublin heartland of Fianna Fáil and, to a lesser extent of popularity, Labour. The stereotype was of the tenement resident rehoused in the suburbs, perhaps even purchasing his house from the Corporation, thanks to Fianna Fáil benevolence. They responded to their social franchisement with gratitude. Maurice Manning quotes a late 1960s survey that put party support in Dublin at 35/30/20/15 (DK/Others) among the middle class, and 37/14/31/18 among the working class. My judgement is that you should move about 10% from Others to Fine Gael to get more realistic figures. But the point is that Fianna Fáil was the most popular party among workers at the time.

[EPG]

Non-Catholic religion in Dublin. Executive summary: Apart from Catholicism, it's mainly due to immigration these days. Traditional Protestant communities are visible but smaller.

Unlike the census in the north of Ireland, the southern census doesn't break down non-Catholic religious adherence at small area level, but this data is now available through the All-Ireland Research Observatory. So it's now possible to distinguish between non-Catholic Christians and non-Christian adherents. The data are slightly flawed, which I'm sure would not be the case if it were an official release; nine small denominations including Protestants, Methodists and Lutherans are counted as "other religion" rather than "other Christian"; people who filled in Atheist or Agnostic instead of ticking the "No religion" box are also counted as "other religion".



In Dublin, if not the rest of the country, "non-Catholic Christian" no longer means the traditional Protestant communities. According to the latest census, non-traditional denominations linked to immigration, like Orthodox and Apostolic/Pentecostal Christianity, are slightly more numerous in the capital region than Church of Ireland adherents and other traditional Protestant sects. That's true for both the true data and the data plotted here. Of course, some immigrants come from Anglican and Presbyterian backgrounds, too.

The map reflects this bifurcation. Dún Laoghaire, the nearby countryside, parts of Howth and the southern city suburbs are still Protestant heartlands - albeit with just over 10% of the population declaring an affinity in some cases. But so are the new suburbs in Blanchardstown, Balbriggan, Lucan, Meakstown. These suburbs (except Lucan) have distinctly large numbers of Black and Black Irish respondents, almost half of whom follow these religions. Orthodoxy is the largest religion in this category apart from CoI/Anglican, but it's harder to locate on the map; probably the city centre and Blanchardstown/Lucan, since these suburbs have large non-Irish populations more generally.



This is a diverse group: 25k Muslims, 6k Hindus, 4k Buddhists, 12k members of small Protestant denominations, 4k non-religious respondents who didn't tick "No religion", and 7k others. The biggest densities are in the recently-built districts with strong non-Irish populations: south Lucan, west Blanchardstown, west Castleknock, north Balbriggan, west Tallaght. In so far as there's a strong Muslim contribution to the map, it's in the south city centre and Clonskeagh in northern Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, two neighbourhoods with mosques and third-level institutions.

In both religious super-groups, the weakest areas are the low-income, very Irish, very Catholic local-authority estates in the north and south-west of Dublin City.

[EPG]

Oh yeah, it's all online in Census 2011/2016 Small Area Population Statistics. You just need to find the fields, do the calculation, and get mapping software. The biggest gains I see in 2016 were in Citywest/Saggart, where they got a Luas extension.

[EPG]

QGIS because it's free. It is not so easy to learn, especially the print composer to make images, but we all have to start some time.