February 11th, 2010 by admin
Vacant shops have been a tangible sign of recession – but now they are showing signs of recovery. The Local Data Company’s in-depth urban data, analysed by Geofutures and available via Town Centre Intelligence, suggests that the rate of vacancy growth has slowed considerably in Great Britain, with a few major centres seeing overall reductions.
It’s a great example of data made accessible and meaningful, no doubt the reason why so much of the UK’s media ran the story today. The Local Data Company have launched a report for the 2009 year end, Dawn of a Better Market, including a Geofutures retail vacancy rate contour map for Q4 2009, updating the one used by the FT looking at the first quarter of the year.
Side by side, the maps show a contraction in the area of highest vacancy rates in north east England and southern Scotland, though vacancies are still running high, with north Wales/Merseyside and the south Midlands also performing slightly better. The North Midlands and East Kent are still hotspots of high vacancies.
These results are based on over 149,000 shop premises in 700 town and city centres across Great Britain surveyed by LDC. More information about Town Centre Intelligence.
High street retail vacancies, Q1, 2009
High Street retail vacancies, Q4 2009
Posted in Mashups | Comment On This »
November 4th, 2009 by admin
Mark Thurstain-Goodwin writes: I like this map. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it’s strangely beautiful – everything a great data visualisation should be.
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 [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: data, mapping, town centres
Posted in Latest | 1 Comment »
October 27th, 2009 by admin
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 [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: clients, GIS, Sustainability
Posted in Latest | Comment On This »
October 7th, 2009 by admin
I can get enough of all that sporty-sounding business jargon. “Sweat your asset.” “We’re in the same ballpark.” “Let’s get on the fast track.” At the end of a meeting I feel like I’ve had a workout.
Yet here I am thinking about companies using geographic information science (GIS) and I can’t avoid those clichés. Our industry is certainly becoming more mature – maybe even mainstream – but talking to clients across every sector, it’s clear that many organisations could do much more with their data using GIS. Many could still take it to the max, as it were. Their data is just not feeling the burn.
So I’m going to take on the role of personal trainer (not an everyday experience) and explore why this is so, what most public, private and third sector enterprises are doing with GIS now, and how much more they can achieve.
It’s not generally a [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: data, GIS, technology
Posted in Technology Talk | Comment On This »
September 23rd, 2009 by admin
I spent an interesting day in Stratford ahead of the AGI conference this week, at an Oracle Spatial special-interest group organised by the Oracle User Group. Oracle Spatial is the mapping and spatial analysis add-on to the main platform from the database giant.
Oracle occupies an interesting position in the GI world: at once a significant challenge to established GIS vendors, and also challenged themselves by online mapping and data platforms. Would Release 2 of Oracle 11g make clear how they will move forward, I wondered?
The new spatial features in Oracle 11gR2 are certainly impressive. New functionality includes more complex network analysis including hierarchical shortest path analysis and a travelling salesman algorithm. It all felt good to me, perhaps because it makes the database technology seem more, well, GIS-like.
Enhancing usability
Speakers touched on some intriguing ways Oracle databases are powering applications with enhanced usability. Olivier Bucaille from Autodesk advocated using wizards [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: databases, technology
Posted in Technology Talk | Comment On This »
September 9th, 2009 by admin
As expected, the recent paper ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ (see earlier posts) has started stirring things up. An intriguing response comes from Colin Tudge, a director of LandShare CIC (co-funders of the research) and leader of the Campaign for Real Farming.
Colin’s thesis is that the food security issue is a simple matter of feeding the population as far as practical from local sources, recognising that some trade between specialist production areas will always be necessary. He argues that we simply need macronutrients (energy foods and protein), mainly in the shape of grains, and micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – and that by growing lots of wheat and encouraging more urban horticulture we can feed ourselves. I’m brutally over-summarising, of course, but he is keen to keep things simple.
This desire for simplicity makes him question the value of analyses like the land use mapping Geofutures did for this [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: food security, mapping, Sustainability
Posted in Sustainability | 1 Comment »
August 6th, 2009 by admin
Our friends at The Local Data Company have been busy analysing the data in Town Centre Intelligence (TCI), the all-singing all-dancing urban information tool we helped them develop.
You couldn’t move for stories about retail vacancies derived from TCI data last week, and no wonder – our high streets have a gap-toothed look about them just now, and the information from TCI is really too good to ignore. See how the BBC covered the story here.
TCI allows easy (and statistically robust) comparisons between town centres – defined consistently across Great Britain by the government boundaries defined by a Geofutures methodology.
This reveals significant regional variations in the vacancy rate – southern towns and cities are still faring much better than their northern counterparts, where vacancy rates have doubled since mid-2008, while Wales and the West are performing better than average with only a 25% increase in the same period.
A similar pattern [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: clients, products, town centres
Posted in Latest | Comment On This »
July 23rd, 2009 by admin
Fresh off the Geofutures GIS mashup assembly line is an interactive version of the maps we produced for the ‘foodshed’ surrounding Totnes and its neighbouring towns in Devon. This is a static image – please link through to see the functioning mashup.
These maps are the results of our food security analysis published together with the Transition Network this month – you’ll find details of our methodology and a link to the full report in our earlier post.
The analysis is based on Defra land classifications, a permaculture model and a ‘food zoning’ model based on perishability and labour intensity, which places fruit and vegetable growing areas closest to the town, followed outwards by cereals and other food crops, dairy and beef, and finally sheep farming on the poorest soils furthest from the town.
Have a play and see how you can zoom in to see the component parts of the foodshed. Doing [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: food security, mapping, Sustainability
Posted in Mashups | Comment On This »
July 10th, 2009 by admin
Mark Thurstain-Goodwin enjoys seeing Ipsos MORI put spatial data in front of local authorities
It’s nice to have your career choice reaffirmed from time to time. I did feel a bit of that special warm glow this month at a great event organised by our clients Ipsos MORI to launch their National Indicators Mapping Application (NIMA), developed by Geofutures.
What set me glowing? Being reminded that a picture is worth a thousand words (the bumper-sticker of GIS professionals everywhere). In fact it was two pictures, so maybe that’s two thousand words. Here they are:
Twin images of perception data in North London from Ipsos MORI's NIMA app show strong correlation
[/caption]
The audience, a who’s who of local authority research heads and their suppliers, got a whistle-stop tour of all Ipsos MORI’s work in this important market, and NIMA was centre stage. All authorities now have to poll their electors [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: clients, data, GIS, mapping
Posted in Latest | Comment On This »
July 10th, 2009 by admin
Town Centre Intelligence (TCI), the new urban data management tool we developed for The Local Data Company, reveals that UK retail vacancy rates rose from 4% to 12% in the 6 months to March.
We were chuffed to see that the Financial Times used this information as a source for a headline story on 16 May 2009, also using the data to highlight the worst-affected sectors – predictably perhaps, these are fashion, electrical, furniture DIY and jewellery retailers.
The application delivers constantly-updated data on 675 town centres across Great Britain, giving instant insights to planners, developers and investors into the retail mix and the health of the high street.
TCI highlights that the last two quarters have seen fast growth in the rate of shop vacancies, with particularly high levels in the north east of England and the West Midlands, as the contour map created by Geofutures for the FT illustrates.
Continue Reading…
Tags: clients, products, town centres
Posted in Latest | Comment On This »
