Online Atlas Shows 'People Maps'

people#topic

In a break with the 500-year tradition of cartography, new world maps showing concentration of people within a country give perspective on the population of a country relative to its size.

An online atlas of 200 maps shows the concentration of people in urban and rural areas, contrasting cities and the countryside to give "interesting insight into different countries".

The population maps have been created by researchers from the University of Sheffield as a part of the Leverhulme Trust project to extend the Worldmapper project.

Benjamin Hennig, a postgraduate researcher at the University's Department of Geography, was part of the team that developed the maps by using worldwide gridded population data from the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project.

Mr Hennig said: "The map of Afghanistan, for example, shows a country dominated by Kabul and a few other urban centres.

He said that the UK, as viewed on www.worldmapper.org/countrycartograms/, "is a tale of London and the other cities".

he added: "The United States, on the other hand, has much more variety to its human geography, while the new projection of China shows a sea of humanity bubbled up into a thousand cities in the Eastern part of the country."

Copyright © Press Association 2009

Related Links:

- Visit Discovery Channel's Atlas

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