Characterising labour market self-containment in London with geographically arranged small multiples

cartograms
multivariate visualization
glyphs
economic geography
flow maps

Roger Beecham and Aidan Slingsby (2019) “Characterising labour market self-containment in London with geographically arranged small multiples”, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, doi: 10.1177/0308518X19850580

Authors
Affiliations

School of Geography, University of Leeds

Department of Computer Science, City University of London

Published

September 2019

Doi

Abstract

We present a collection of small multiple graphics that support analysis and understanding of the geography of labour-market self-containment across London’s 33 boroughs. Ratios describing supply-side self-containment, the extent to which working residents access jobs locally, and demand-side self-containment, the extent to which local jobs are filled by local resident workers, are first calculated for professional and non-professional occupations and encoded directly through geographically-arranged bar charts. The full distribution of workers into-and out-of- boroughs that underpins these ratios is then revealed via Origin-Destination flows maps (OD maps) – sets of geographically-arranged choropleths. In order to make relative and absolute comparison of borough-to-borough frequencies between occupation types, these OD maps are coloured according to signed chi-square residuals: for every borough-to-borough pair, we compare the observed number of flows to access professional versus non-professional jobs against the number that would be expected given the distribution of those jobs across London boroughs. Our geographically-arranged small multiples demonstrate potential for spatial analysis: a rich, multivariate structure is depicted that reflects London’s economic geography and that would be difficult to expose using non-visual means.

Important figure

Supply- side and deman-side self-containment for Coty of London.

BibTeX citation

@article{beecham_characterising_2019,
     author = {Beecham, R. and Slingsby, A.},
     title = {{Characterising labour market self-containment in London with geographically arranged small multiples}},
     journal = {{Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space}},
     pages = {1217--1224},
     volume = {51},
     number = {6},
     year = {2019}
}