Based on data from five Austrian censuses, researchers from the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital reconstructed Vienna’s demographic structure by age, sex and religion between 1971 and 2011. Their research project WIREL addresses the role of religions in shaping the social and demographic structure of the population of Vienna (I already reported on that in an older metropop post).

The increasing religious diversity of Vienna since 1971 was visualised by Ramon Bauer, Tina Frank, Anne Goujon and Clemens Schrammel. Their data visualisation connects the city’s changing demographic and religious landscape by highlighting changes in the religious composition as well as population size and age structure. The visualisation also shows how secularisation, migration, fertility and marriage patterns are linked to religious and demographic change in Vienna.

Try it yourself  by hovering over the chart area to change the period. Click on the four forces to see how they affect the population structure over time. Or even better, visit the webpage of the dataviz at www.wirel-project.at/dataviz – where you will find loads of additional information, as well as a more pleasant layout (compared to the slightly distorted iframe-version below which I had to squeeze into the slim metropop layout).

According to Anne Goujon, head of the WIREL research group, the aim of the reconstruction of the city’s religious composition is to produce a sound data basis for population projections of Vienna by age, sex and religion. Goujon and her team are already working on the scenarios for these projections which are planned to be published by the end of 2014.

Additional information

The WIREL dataviz website www.wirel-project.at/dataviz provides loads of additional information on the research project, the reconstruction of the religious composition, as well as links to a poster version of the data visualisation, the WIREL dataset and also to the source code of the interactive online visualisation at Github.

After Austria’s national election round in September 2013, it took the new (old) government a while to come up with a new five-year government programme in late December 2013. Some say it’s substantially vague, I say it also includes at least one fundamental mistake with respect to the percentage of the population living in rural areas. Here is the translation of the original quote on page 20:

“A focus of the Austrian government is to strengthen rural areas,
where 66 per cent of the population live.”

… see also: screenshot highlighting the demonstrable error, and original PDF (in german).

It is well-known that around 2010 planet Earth became predominately urban, with more than 50 per cent of the global population living in urban areas. It seems that this escaped the notice of Austria’s political elite. Accordingly to the government’s working programme for the period 2013 to 2018, only one third of Austria’s population is urban. In fact, already by the 1950s the proportion of Austria’s urban population reached more than 60 per cent, and further increased since then.

In order to separate guesstimates from evidence, it is necessary to consider different definitions of urban and rural areas. On top of that, these definitions vary from country to country – see national definitions of “urban” (collected by the UN). In the case of Austria, at least three different approaches of “urban” should be considered:

1. Communes of more than 5,000 inhabitants
   … a definition that is, in the case of Austria, also used by the UN.
2. Urban regions … as defined by Statistics Austria, taking into account population density as well commuting flows from the outer zones to the urban core.
3. Degree of urbanisation … accordingly to the OECD-Eurostat definition, which is distinguishing between three types of area by using a criterion of geographical contiguity in combination with population density based on grid cells of 1 km².

No matter how one might distinguish rural from urban populations, the majority of Austria’s population is certainly urban. In 2013, about 57 per cent lived in communes with more than 5,000 inhabitants and more than 66 per cent lived in urban areas (core and outer zones) – and not the other way round (in rural areas), as incorrectly stated in the government programme. Accordingly to the OECD-Eurostat definition, only 40 per cent of the population of Austria lived in thinly populated areas (i.e. rural areas), while almost 60 per cent lived in urban areas: 30 per cent in densely populated areas (i.e. cities or large urban area) and 29 per cent in intermediate populated areas (i.e. towns and suburbs or small urban area).

Well, I always hoped that politicians don’t get everything wrong – and still do hope so. However, since the government programme was published more than a month ago, it makes me a little bit worried that this odd error has not been corrected by now, i.e. by the end of January 2014.