Arup, the global consulting firm, has an interesting publication out called Cities Alive: Towards a walking world. The report highlights 50 benefits of walking and then 40 actions that city leaders can take today to transform their cities. The entire study was informed by examining 80 international case studies.
As I was going through the report, the following diagram caught my attention. It compares journeys on foot vs. journeys by car for a collection of global cities.
The turquoise circles represent % of journeys by walking. On the left is Los Angeles at 4%. And on the right is Istanbul at 48%.
The red circles represent % of journeys by car. On the left is Miami at 79% (with Los Angeles right beside it). And on the right is Kolkata at 2%.
The map in the middle of the circles represents pedestrians killed in traffic crashes per 100,000 people.
I’m not sure where the data was drawn from, but it’s not all that surprising to see a few North American cities clustered towards the left (less walking; more driving). Still, I wonder how “journey” is defined.
To view the full report, click here. Arup also produces a lot of other great content that you can download for free, here.
The 2015 edition of The Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI) was just released last month. It is often used as one of the sources for ranking financial centres.
The index – which is now in its 18th edition – is created using two main ingredients. The first is an analysis of 5 broad areas of competitiveness: 1) business environment, 2) financial sector development, 3) infrastructure, 4) human capital, and 5) reputational & general factors. And the second is an online survey given to financial services professionals. The 2015 edition includes responses from 3,194 professionals.
Below are the top 25 financial centres in the world according to the GFCI (the full list has 84 cities).
Here are a couple of things to note from this year’s index:
London has overtaken New York for the top spot – but both remain more or less at parity if you dig into the numbers.
Dublin is performing particularly well in Western Europe.
The leading centre in Eastern Europe is Warsaw (38th), with Istanbul just behind it.
Toronto is now second in North America, only to New York.
Sao Paulo remains the top Latin American centre.
And, Los Angeles (49th) and Liechtenstein (60th) join as new entrants this year.
If you’d like to see the full report and ranking, click here.
More and more people are moving to cities. This much we know. But in our fast paced world, census data is becoming increasingly limited in its ability to tell us exactly where and how people are moving.
Thankfully we now have Facebook.
I just discovered a fascinating study conducted by the Facebook Data Science Team called “Coordinated Migration." What they did was anonymously analyze every Facebook user that has inputted both a hometown and a current city to see where people of a particular hometown are most likely to live, today.
But more specifically, the study is looking at coordinated flows, rather than just total flows to a particular city. A “coordinated migration” is defined as an instance where “a significant proportion of the population of a city has migrated, as a group, to a different city.”
What the study found (perhaps not surprisingly) was that the vast majority of coordinated migrations are happening in countries that are in the midst of rapid urbanization. It’s a case of people moving within the country to its largest city.
Here are the top coordinated migration destinations:
If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of how they actually computed the coordinated migrations, check out the original post by the Facebook Data Science Team.