Other Materials

Fun with Maps!

I love maps. They are like graphs, but can pack so much more information. I've recently been mapping access to different types of amenities in selected Swedish urban areas. It's work in progress, but I thought I'd display here what I've produced so far, focusing on Stockholm.  Amenities were obtained from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and refer to 2025. Contact me if you are interested in earlier years or other urban areas. Stay tuned for more maps that use register data dating back to the 1980s!

The technical details. Accessibility is measured using walking distances from 100x100m grid cell centroids to urban amenities within a 15-minute radius. The analysis uses actual street network routing (via R5R and OSM data), assuming a walking speed of 4 km/h. Access is calculated using a gravity model that applies exponential distance decay (β = 0.002) to weight amenities by their network walking distance, where closer amenities contribute more to the overall accessibility score than distant ones. The final accessibility value for each grid cell represents the sum of distance-weighted amenities reachable within the 15-minute threshold. Reach out if you'd like to know more.