The results were featured in the Observer this weekend (though sadly our namecheck hit the cutting room floor – an error we have asked them to correct).

The study found that areas of Great Britain with the highest densities of gambling machines were on average poorer than the rest of the country, with higher levels of economic inactivity, low-status occupations and both the youngest and oldest sections of the adult population.

Geofutures mapped zones surrounding all venues licensed to offer gambling machines, weighted them according to industry information on the number of machines per venue, and then used a statistical distribution to define what constitutes ‘high’ density – more than 1 machine per hectare. The results were then used to characterise the highest density zones according to census-led economic and social data on their local populations.

The research was timely, as debate continued on the growing presence of bookmakers’ shops on the high street including comments by Harriet Harman, but it will have wider application in informing future research on the potential for gambling harm.

The benefits of mapping and spatial analysis in simply defining where the most machines are found were noted by all those involved: this is baseline evidence which has been lacking so far, and there’s nothing like a map for revealing what’s going on and where.

The gambling industry is regularly accused of targeting poorer populations, and robustly refutes this claim. The machines research does address this question directly, but together with the headline results, it suggests a more complex picture.

Bookmakers’ shops are highly visible and host higher-stakes machines but these are limited to four per shop, so in terms of absolute machines numbers they are not contributing greatly to the densities found.

Many low-income areas have low machine densities, and the greatest clusters were found in suburban centres, ‘satellite’ towns outside major cities, New Towns and in many of the expected tourist locations by the coast, though not all.

Understanding the significance of these findings for gambling regulation will need deeper insights. It’s likely that a lack of alternative leisure amenities will increase the presence of machine arcades in less vibrant locations, but this may reflect long-term economic issues which would need addressing alongside any direct changes to gambling regulation.

Our thanks go to all involved in a stimulating and worthwhile project.

See the NatCen and Geofutures press release here with accompanying FAQs:

18 Nov 2011 press release: Geofutures and NatCen gambling machines research for RGF/RGSB

18 Nov 2011 FAQs Geofutures and NatCen Machines research report

And who won the Mystery Map competition? Find out here.

It’s what makes us at Geofutures tick, of course: the fact that presenting information visually on a map makes it totally accessible. It works with the way our minds work.

And so we had great times discussing mapping with all kinds of interesting people – and it started some interesting thoughts flowing about the kinds of data people need and the forms they need it in. More on that soon.

The map illustrates a unique index relevant to long-term sustainability, created by Geofutures by processing selected published data. We asked delegates to guess what they thought the index was.

And the answer is… it’s a measure of economic diversity. Taking inspiration from E H Simpson’s method for measuring biodiversity, first published in Nature in 1949 and used to assess ecosystem diversity ever since, our measure takes data from the Annual Business Inquiry and applies the same approach.

Dark areas therefore have a greater diversity of industry type than the lighter ones. You’d expect that in the larger towns and cities, but interesting peaks emerge which certainly had our conference-goers chewing their pencils.

Larger dark areas around the Salisbury Plain area may point to diversity of employment type which is all ultimately linked to military activity; the M4 and M5 both seem to define corridors of greater economic diversity. As to what’s going on in South Molton, Chard and Callington in Cornwall – there we need some local insight please.

Geofutures’ latest online insight tool, The Knowledge Garden, lets you annotate and comment on maps with local insight and expertise within one seamless application. To request a preview of the beta version on release, please contact us.

Afraid you can’t win the gorgeous office treats hamper if you weren’t at the show, but you can still comment on the map below. In fact there was no perfectly correct guess despite the many lively debates which took place around the stand. The many incorrect guesses were interesting in their own right and have even inspired us to think how we could create commercially valuable data surfaces defining solar power use, for example, or proximity to business parks.

We’ll also be refining the economic diversity index and gathering insight on the results. How useful a measure is this as a means of predicting economic resilience? Will the most diverse locations thrive best in difficult economic conditions, or in response to rising fuel prices?

The closest entrant at the Environmental Trade Show was Dr Andrew Wray, Enterprise and Knowledge Exchange Programme Manager at the University of Bristol, who guessed it was an index of biodiversity. Since this is part of the approach used and no-one guessed anything closer, we judged it close enough and a tasty office hamper is on its way to Dr Wray – congratulations!

The event is design to showcase the most up to date technologies, new approaches and collaborations, promote equipment and services and introduce companies committed to low carbon commerce (more details here). Geofutures MD Mark Thurstain-Goodwin is also speaking in a symposium session discussing fresh perspectives on energy efficiency, together with Dave Covell, principal at ENVIRON.

See you there!

Commenting on the latest release of shop vacancy figures from our old friends at the Local Data Company, she suggested that “the horse has bolted” from some towns – she simply cannot see a retail future for them. The Local Data Company evidence suggests these are mainly second-tier centres, and it’s the second-tier off-prime locations within them which are hardest hit.

The conclusion Mary Portas suggests is that some towns need to rethink the model entirely. If they cannot compete as retail centres, their only hope for rejuvenation is other uses. So far, where this has happened it has tended to be leisure-led, hence closed shops re-opening as bookmakers, cafes and bars. Better than vacant shops, perhaps, but a major change in mood which can have anti-social effects if not managed effectively.

Are there other potential ways that town centre regeneration could happen? I was pondering this as I looked again at the location of twelve new English Enterprise Zones announced by PM David Cameron in August.

This is the second round of new Zones, and the first lot included ex-industrial heartlands like the Black Country and Tees Valley, true. But these latest Zones are not designed for redistribution of opportunity: last I heard, Oxford, Lowestoft and Hereford were not high on the list of economic blackspots.

A quick mapping exercise backs up that conclusion. The Income Score is part of the Index of Multiple Deprivation, and the higher the score, the higher the deprivation – shown here in the brown shades.

As you can see, the areas surrounding the new Zones are not strongly characterised by below-average incomes, with the exception of Warrington.

So the Zones have been decided for other reasons, and my bet’s on “because they are most likely to be successful in bringing in new industry” and that will be counted as a win for the policy. Places where industries are already doing well attract other industries, and tend to be where skilled employees can be found. Locating them next to transport hubs is helpful, and a bit of government subsidy just adds to the mix that’s already there.

If enterprise is being encouraged where it’s happening already, what chance have second-tier retail centres have to be regenerated? Just maybe, the clue is in the question. Enterprise Zones are being given lower business rates, reduced planning controls and superfast broadband. Could this be achieved for smaller-scale ex-retail locations too – and would this be effort better targeted at genuine transformation?

I imagine that retail premises redeveloping as small business offices, live-work accommodation or even light industrial and distribution units might have a more balanced economic effect on a town’s economy than a night-time entertainment quarter. And if Dewsbury, Dudley, Hartlepool, Margate, Stockport and West Bromwich are the towns suffering the worst retail vacancies in England, I can think of worse places to start.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

And yes, working with corporate clients means there are fewer hours in the day to do things like our own sustainability research or write a blog, but in the end these things all connect.

I’ve long argued to anyone who’ll listen that adapting the established economy is at the very centre of achieving sustainability. Only by going mainstream and involving major companies will the important work of environmental researchers and campaigners have impact at the scale necessary to make a difference.

Ten years ago I helped develop an index of economic diversity for a government client. Taking inspiration from natural systems, it worked on the basis that a resilient economic system had greater diversity and hence ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

So it’s good to see that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has adopted similar thinking into their education aims. Sailing around the world alone is an extreme way of realising how we have to live within finite resources, but now Ellen MacArthur’s journey is all about bringing businesses and educators together to design an economy which treats waste as inputs and diversity as strength.

I like the neatness of the term the Foundation is using for this: the circular economy. Again mimicking natural systems, it suggests that intelligent upfront planning and design can ensure all waste products are treated as inputs to something else, and that ‘technical nutrients’ don’t enter the biosphere but are recycled or better still re-engineered.

There is no disconnect. Major corporates want to ensure their long-term existence as much as anyone, and some will act sooner rather than later. Third-sector organisations will benefit, and will circulate their knowledge and expertise back again. Natural systems will influence our thinking and help to bring us full circle.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

See the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website

We’re doing some fairly hard-core product development at the moment, and when the results hit the beta release stage we’ll have the details here. As the process continues, it’s interesting how every conversation we have with clients, would-be clients and partner suppliers seems to point to the same needs.

The core issue is how clients and consultants can work together in a way which maximises the value of the undoubted expertise of the consultant, and which enables the client to do something practical with the outcomes.

The villain of the piece? It’s the consultant’s report. Hours and hours of work collecting information, hours and hours more beautifully summarising and recommending, then whump! it lands on a few desks.

Then what? Who has time to read it properly? Who has the knowledge to draw relevant conclusions? How does the client implement recommendations?

If input information is collected in isolation from client stakeholders, and the process does not build capacity within that organisation to do something tangible with the outputs later, the insight is lost.

No matter how relevant, incisive and accurate, no matter the time or cost invested, the wisdom contained in the report is confined for the lack of a means to share and reveal it.

As seasoned GIS users will know, presenting data on maps does reveal key phenomena in a way that a paragraph of description doesn’t, and we know leading consultants in multiple fields who are waking up to the power of this.

Even this isn’t enough unless the maps, the data visualisations and the expert interpretation are exposed to multiple pairs of eyes. We need the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to drag all that valuable knowledge out into the world and make it work for us.

We need the tools to make this process simple and engaging, and both consultants and their clients will benefit.

Better get back to the coalface then. It’s reassuring to know all this work is in a good cause.

Ruth Keily

The socio-economic characteristics of the locations with highest gambling machine densities will be correlated and analysed as part of this work, helping to lay a robust data foundation for future research into problem gambling, vulnerable gamblers and possible causal factors.

The Responsible Gambling Fund (RGF) is a charity funding relief for those in need as a result of gambling and promoting education, treatment and research. As part of its objective to use the best available evidence from the widest possible sources with regard to prevention, treatment and research in problem gambling and its causes, RGF regularly commissions high quality research on problem gambling and the risk of harm from gambling.

NatCen, the National Centre for Social Research, is Britain’s leading independent social research institute. Having carried out the British Gambling Prevalence Survey, NatCen has undertaken a number of follow-up research studies into the social and financial context of problem gamblers. Their specialists will guide data specification, spatial analysis assumptions and modelling results interpretation in this research.

Geofutures and NatCen share an academic pedigree, and both organisations are committed to putting socially valuable insight into the public domain. Using spatial data analysis to relate areas of highest gambling machine density to the neighbourhoods is an ideal use of our technology and methods, and we look forward to the outcomes of this important study.

See RGF’s press release

More about NatCen

The analysis takes the number of individual shop premises in the town centres surveyed every six months by The Local Data Company, then visualises these numbers in three dimensions over a map of London’s West End and surrounds.

(Note that a similar analysis could also be done for total floorspace, but this one is for the number of retail units – giving rise to interesting peaks like the one for Brixton in the right-hand foreground).

We can see the highest peaks around Oxford Street and Knightsbridge, with notable neighbours going East to the City, north to Camden and Islington and a clear mountain range along the length of the King’s Road. Through the semi-transparent data layer we see the importance of the road network to peak retail locations, even in a city with a well-developed public transport infrastructure.

Also significant is the clear peak of retail density at the new Westfield shopping centre at White City, as new a feature as an Icelandic volcano emerging from the sea.

Not only are these peaks immediately identifiable by location, but the 3-D treatment makes a map legend almost unnecessary, and makes comparison of relative heights (i.e. retail densities) at different locations immediate and straightforward. The simple visual metaphor of ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ across a landscape perfectly complements our understanding.

The underlying data here, mapped and available online with vacancy rates, churn, multiple / independent mix, floorspace and more for 1,300 UK town centres via LDC’s Town Centre Intelligence (powered by Geofutures), is acknowledged to be the most up to date available.

But actually I like this map for what it shows us about all data – that if we put information on a map we reveal its highs, lows and hidden insights.

An exciting new project is underway for Geofutures: working with the Centre for Sustainable Energy, we’re modelling and mapping residential heat demand for Regen SW, the renewable energy agency for the south-west of England.

The aim is region-wide insight into the potential for renewable and low-carbon heat generation and distribution, with outputs at sufficiently fine scales to allow users to identify individual buildings and groups of buildings which could benefit from heat distribution installations.

It’s set to be the most advanced heat mapping exercise undertaken in the UK to date, building on CSE’s proven expertise in modelling heat demand in London, Bristol and West Sussex, with the addition of Geofutures’ experience in using GIS to analyse fine-resolution data, as well as simply visualising results.

An important benefit of starting with data at building level is the ability to aggregate results upwards without losing accuracy, still maintaining the ability to drill down to fine scales at chosen locations. Other studies have started with data generalised for hundreds of addresses, which can only output heat demand results for broad areas. For local heat distribution to become a reality, we need data for highly localised decision making.

See the website of the Centre for Sustainable Energy.