I recently did some mapping on my other blog which showed the urban footprint of English cities, which seemed to strike a chord with lots of people. I had already extracted the data for Scottish cities and made it publicly available, so I thought I'd do something similar here. The images below show what you might call the urban footprint of seven Scottish cities - Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Stirling and Perth. These are settlements with official 'city' status though some places have more people than the smaller Scottish cities. The first image shows the seven Scottish cities mapped at the same scale. Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee are all local council areas in their own right so I've shown the urban footprint of those areas within their administrative boundary. The other three smaller Scottish cities sit within much larger local authority areas so I've tried to show the core urban areas of these places (i.e. the continuous urban fabric of the city).
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| Click here for larger version |
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| Same as above, but with scale bar - big version |
In order demonstrate how Glasgow's council boundary 'under-bounds' the urban area, I've also extracted an image showing the wider Greater Glasgow urban area (and a bit beyond) with the boundaries of all council areas overlaid on top. This does of course raise the question of what a 'city' is, but that's a debate for another time. The purpose of this little mapping experiment was just to provide a visual comparison of the size of the seven Scottish cities in relation to their built up areas.
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| Greater Glasgow urban area - bigger version |
If you want these images in higher resolution versions, I've uploaded them in this zipped folder - the first image in full size and half size, in addition to the Glasgow image at full resolution. I know there is a lot more to Scotland's urban places than the seven 'official' cities, but I've just focused on them for now in these simple graphics. Maybe I'll come back to this in future.
Addendum: after the original post I added in a revised first map with a scale bar, just to provide a little more context for those unfamiliar with the places I've mapped. To provide a bit more information, the populations of the cities are as follows: Glasgow - 599,000; Edinburgh - 495,000; Aberdeen - 212,000; Dundee - 142,000; Stirling - 46,000; Perth - 47,000; Inverness - 57,000. For the final three cities, these populations equate to the urban areas I've shown but are not precise. I've written about this issue before, in a blog post from a few years ago. The Greater Glasgow area - comprising the contiguous built-up area - has a population of about 1.2 million and the wider Glasgow City Region has a population of about 1.7 million.
Addendum: after the original post I added in a revised first map with a scale bar, just to provide a little more context for those unfamiliar with the places I've mapped. To provide a bit more information, the populations of the cities are as follows: Glasgow - 599,000; Edinburgh - 495,000; Aberdeen - 212,000; Dundee - 142,000; Stirling - 46,000; Perth - 47,000; Inverness - 57,000. For the final three cities, these populations equate to the urban areas I've shown but are not precise. I've written about this issue before, in a blog post from a few years ago. The Greater Glasgow area - comprising the contiguous built-up area - has a population of about 1.2 million and the wider Glasgow City Region has a population of about 1.7 million.
