Saturday, November 10, 2018

Mapping Internal Migration


Internal Migration in the City of Barcelona 2016 is a simple but effective visualization of where Barcelona residents moved to and from within the city in 2016. The map provides an overall scale of the numbers of people moving between Barcelona's different neighborhoods without giving the precise figures of how many people moved between each district.

The scaled markers on the map provides a rough overview of how many people moved into or out of each Barcelona neighborhood from elsewhere in the city. If you can switch between the incoming and outgoing internal migration views the markers automatically change to represent the numbers for the selected view. If you then hover over a neighborhood on the map flow-lines show all the other districts where residents moved to or from.

These flow-lines are scaled to show the number of residents who moved between the different neighborhoods. Some of the flow-lines have numbers attached, which presumably represent the number of residents who moved between the two connected neighborhoods. However not all the flow-lines are annotated with the number of residents. The scaled neighborhood markers on the map also don't give the precise numbers of internal migrants. When you hover over the neighborhood markers the neighborhood's name is revealed. It would be nice if the number of internal migrants (incoming or outgoing depending on the view) was also revealed when you hover over a marker.

The Internal Migration in the City of Barcelona 2016 map is therefore an effective visualization of the general size of internal migration between different neighborhoods in the city. However it isn't much use if you want to know the precise number of residents moving between different neighborhoods in Barcelona.


The US Migration Flow Map provides a nice example of how an internal migration flow map can provide the actual numbers of people moving between different areas.

The US Migration Flow Map, like the Barcelona map, uses scaled flow-lines to visualize the numbers of people moving between different states in the USA. The size of the flow-lines on the map is representative of the number of people moving between two states. However, unlike the Barcelona map, you can also hover over the lines to view the total number of people moving between the two states. You can also hover over a state on the map to view the total number of internal and external migrants.

Migration in Latvia is another internal migration map which allows you to hover over the flow-lines on the map to view the precise number of people moving between two regions. Hover over a selected region on the map and you can also view details on the total number of people who moved in and out of the region.

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