Following on from the theme of the previous post, this post is all about population density. To cut a long story short, I took 1km grid cell data from the EU, joined it to population data for 2011 and did a little bit of 3D mapping - partly as an experiment with a dataset I'll use in our new MSc in Applied GIS and partly to see what spatial patterns it reveals. Entirely expected results, but the maps are quite striking. I've added some basic labels and a little bit of text to the first image. The second image focuses more closely on the North and East of Scotland and the final one is a close up of central Scotland. Click on the links below these smaller versions to see gigantic versions. Clicking on the thumbnails below will take you to a full screen size version.
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| Scotland - full size version |
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| North and East Scotland - full size version |
What else can we say about population density in Scotland? Well, the average population density across Scotland in 2011 was just over 67 people per square kilometre (411 in England, 6,500 in Hong Kong, 1,000 in Bangladesh and 407 in the Netherlands). However, this is an example of when an 'average' figure is pretty misleading because most of Scotland's people are crammed in to the Central Belt - more than two thirds of the total. As you can see from the second image above, the rest are concentrated in the towns and cities of the North and East of Scotland. The obvious point here is that on the face of it Scotland doesn't appear to be very densely populated but the experience for most Scots is one of living in a densely populated country - at least on a day to day basis. For example, Glasgow's population density is over 3,000 people per square kilometre.
The other thing to say is that the data is perhaps not 100% accurate. Some areas which are dark on the maps and apparently have zero population might in reality be populated, but this is the exception. If you're interested in finding out more about the data, take a look at the original source on the EU's data portal.
