Vienna went to the polls yesterday (on 11 October 2015). The city’s electorate had to cast its vote twice, for the city council as well as for the city’s 23 district councils.

We mapped the 2015 Vienna election results of the citywide elections (left) as well as the results of the district councils (right) in each of the city’s 23 districts. Both maps show the winning party as well as the second party in each district.

One city, two political landscapes?

Two factors might have contributed to the slightly different results at the city council elections and the district councils elections. First, at the citywide level only Austrian nationals older than 16 years are eligible to vote, while at the district level also EU citizens are enfranchised. Second, many seem to have split their votes strategically at both levels of representation.

*Addendum 2016-09-21:
Almost one year after the 2015 elections, a rerun of the district council elections in Vienna’s 2nd district took place on 18 September 2016. Surprisingly, this time the Green Party gained the most votes in the district relegating the Social Democrats to second place.

Data source:

• City of Vienna (MA62)

See also:

• Interactive data map of Vienna’s electorate gap, district by district (2015-09-17) – Data visualisation by Ramon Bauer, Tina Frank, Michael Holzapfel and Clemens Schrammel.
• Vienna electorate – A collection of Metropop contributions to the topic of Vienna’s shrinking electorate.

University courses in social sciences that deal with data traditionally have a strong focus on quantitative methods but do not consider how data-based evidence should be communicated, especially to a non-academic audience. Since most academics are not trained in communication, it is hardly surprising that there is a general lack of mind and skill sets to do so. However, graduates of the 4cities Master Programme are working on urban topics in sectors such as urban policy advising, planning, research, teaching, media and arts. Being a professional in these disciplines makes it a necessity to be an urban storyteller. In the digital age, which is also the age of data, a promising way of communicating quantitative information to a wider audience is data visualisation.

Besides data handling and analysis (which is the foundation of quantitative research) the course focused on the meaning of data and how data can be communicated and visualised. Since this is quite a lot for one semester we did not go into great detail, neither theoretically nor methodologically. The aim of the course was rather to enable students with different backgrounds to analyse urban data in order to communicate it visually. Well, considering the students’ feedback as well as my impression on the course, I can clearly say that teaching how to make sense of data and how to communicate quantitative information matters – and it is also rewarding.

To give an idea how the 4cities students approached the task of visualising a data-driven urban narrative of Vienna, find below a selection of projects elaborated during the course. The assignment given was to develop a draft for an interactive data visualisation or to deliver a static infographic (this particular assignment is obviously borrowed from Alberto Cairo‘s MOOC Introduction to Infographics, Data Visualization – a great course, which I attended in 2012). That means it was not required to actually code the interactive parts or to come up with a final design, but rather to elaborate und present a mock-up of the actual data visualisation project that represents the concept, the background of the story and the data used, as well as an idea about the interface functionality and design. For example …

Vienna in Squares – mapping Vienna’s building stock

by Bálint Halász, Elina Kränzle, Hala El Moussawi and Guillén Torres

A map of Vienna by sub-district level shows the proportions of private-owned residential buildings; a tree map illustrates the distribution by building period. Data source: Open Data Wien

Vienna in Squares is a visualisation that explores the spatial distribution of Vienna’s building stock. A gorgeous map based on squares (hence the title) displays three different levels (city, district, sub-district) along four characteristics (building type, property type, building period, amenities). When elaborated in detail and coded, this draft for an interactive data visualisation would definitely be a great online project alongside other visualisations that cover the characteristics of building stock – for example: Urban Layers, Block by Block – Brooklyn’s Past and Present or Buildings in the Netherlands.
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Bike Woes Wien – reporting, sharing and mapping pitfalls for cyclists

by Lorena Axinte, Sonja Dragovic, Lucie Rosset and Devon Willis – coded by Bojan Cincur

 Screenshot from bikewoeswien.com shows all reported woes on a map and also as a list.

Bike Woes Wien is an online platform that enables cyclists in Vienna to share their problems (“woes”). The project goes beyond a static draft for a data visualisation (i.e. the original assignment) and became a full website with an interactive map as a central tool (see also the neat heat map version). The original data comes from RadKummerKasten, an initiative of RadLobby that collected more than 1,000 complaints in Vienna since 2012. The website invites users to report and share their observations and experiences (see also promotion video), which makes Bike Woes Wien and related projects such as You Are Here or Bikenapped great examples for bottom-up initiatives that respond to urban needs and demands.

Vienna’s Underground World – mapping births and deaths along Vienna’s metro lines

by James Furlong, Sandra Jurasszovich, William Otchere-Darko and Maëlys Waiengnier

Main screen allows to choose (1) a topic (births, deaths, or natural population balance) and (2) a metro station or line.

Vienna’s Underground World is a project that maps birth and death rates as well as rates of natural increase across the different metro stations and lines of Vienna. The project was inspired by Lives on the Line (showing life expectancy and child poverty in London as a tube map) and by the Inequality and New York’s Subway visualisation. Using data from Open Wien, this project demonstrates the magic of spatial analysis. For example, allocating small-scale population data by proximity to metro lines and stations reveals that there is not a single neighbourhood surrounding the stations of the U1 metro line that exceeds the average birth rate of Vienna (see image below).

Result for a particular station (left) or for a metro line (right) – originally displayed underneath the main screen – see above. Data source: Open Data Wien

The course was an attempt to make an interdisciplinary group of urban studies students familiar with different quantitative methods (including GIS). The results prove that digging into a data set does not necessarily yield boring results and bored students. Focussing not exclusively on methods but also on the meaning of data and how to communicate it visually seems to be a promising way to spark the interest of students to work with data. I am already looking forward to the next course starting in March 2015.

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.

Demographic topics are usually depicted as problems in the public media, often reduced to the negative implications of ageing, too low or too high fertility rates and migration. Of course, such a constrained way of viewing demography is unreasonable. But maybe such a biased representation of population issues must be also contributed to the way how, in general, people working in the wide field of population studies are presenting their research results? Yes, we all like population pyramids, but we also like great stories, especially if they are nicely told and illustrated.

I am in the great position to regularly enjoy some exceptional presentations of demographic city profiles, since I am lecturing a course in Basic Demography for students of the 4cities Erasmus Mundus programme in Urban Studies at the University of Vienna. The various backgrounds of the 4cities students cover the wide field of Urban Studies: from Geography to Economics, from Sociology to Architecture, from Planning to Journalism, from Politics to Performance Studies, and so on.

Like in any other university course, also my students have to prove the skills learned during the semester in order to earn their grades; in this course by presenting an urban demographic analysis and elaborating a final report. However, I encourage this truly interdisciplinary bunch of students to combine their newly acquired skills with their own creativity. In brief, their task was to embed personal professional interests – e.g. housing, integration, civil participation, spatial and social perception, urban culture and fabric, etc. – in the demographic analyses and to present it in a way that would attract their targeted audience, without being too much restricted by too many academic obstacles. In my opinion, this approach proved to be rather fruitful. A selection of demographic city profiles elaborated by this year’s 4citizens demonstrate that demographic information can (also) be conveyed by means of a smart graphic, short story, blog or piece of art.

Madrid – from boom to crisis

This presentation of Madrid by Nina Fräser and Elena Hernández Cuñat outline how the economic and demographic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s were intertwined and point out that the economic crisis might pave the way for a demographic crisis. The gains through net migration were plummeting in 2008 and population growth is literally stalling since then. But what might happen when the crisis persists and especially the young and well educated start to leave the city and country behind in even greater numbers? – a topic that was already addressed in a previous METROPOP post.
Thumbs up for the appealing hand-drawn charts and figures!

Berlin – another bear in the wall

This well-illustrated demographic short story by Alice Etropolszky and Agata Walny about two Polish bears (father and son) – yes! this is actually a cute story – strolling around Berlin in search for a cosy place to spend hibernation. In doing so, they discover the city’s demographic structural and socio-spatial particularities. Please note that population pyramids and trend charts, indeed, can be made with “Gummibärchen” (gummy bears).

Leipzig – a city beyond shrinking

Jonas Aebi and Vanessa Hünnemeyer used a blog to elaborate and present their demographic analysis of Leipzig – from a shrinking city to a globally competing city. Their work focuses on urban policies in response to the significant demographic changes in the aftermath of the German reunification. Special emphasis is placed on the restructuring of the housing situation: from privatisation to destruction and from destruction to reconstruction, highlighting the specific situation in Leipzig West.

Gaza – the refugee city

This ambitious analysis by Liam Duffy and Mai Kjølsen unveils the sheer impossibility of a city that is, as a matter of fact, the world’s largest refugee camp – an isolated and heteronomous high density territory that is populated almost exclusively by displaced persons and their children and children’s children. Social circumstances such as (un)employment, poverty and education are addressed and connected to relevant demographic topics such as fertility and conflict. The final report was submitted in the form of a “demographic cluster bomb”, filled with neatly rolled and bound papers for each chapter.

International immigration became the undisputed driver of demographic growth in many European cities. A continuous influx of international migrants does not only affect the age structure, it also – often drastically – changes the ethnic and religious composition of urban populations. Although it is argued that religious self-identity is the most enduring trait of immigrant populations and their descendants (Baumann 2002), the importance of religion as a dimension of social diversity has yet gained only little attention in social sciences and in the public opinion – in sharp contrast to the often stressed ethnic dimension.

The rather under-researched topic of the role of religions in shaping the social and demographic structure of urban populations has been taken up by the research project WIREL, which aims to reconstruct, analyse and forecast Vienna’s religious composition over a period ranging from 1951 to 2051. First findings (see WIREL presentation and infographic) show that the religious diversity of Vienna has strongly increased over the course of half a century. In 1951, Vienna was a highly homogeneous city with respect to religious denomination, as can be seen in the figure below.

Source: Goujon et al. 2012 (based on data by Statistik Austria and Statistik Wien)

Vienna’s Catholic majority of more than 80 per cent in 1951 became a minority by the turn of the millennium, while the share of the secular population (no religion), which accounted for less than ten per cent in 1951, is already challenging the Catholics as the strongest “denomination” in the city. Beyond the significant trend in secularisation, the continuous influx of international migrants increased the city’s share of Orthodox and Muslim sub-populations. The two population pyramids below illustrate this emerging religious diversity, confronting the distorted age structure of the still catholic-dominated population of Vienna in 1971 (above) with the much more diversified and, literally, more colourful population of 2001 (below).

Source: Goujon et al. 2012 (based on data by Statistik Austria and Statistik Wien)

The researchers of the WIREL project (under the direction of Anne Goujon, and including also myself among others) clearly point out which forces are shaping the religious composition of Vienna:

“Secularization and international migration have been the main factors shaping Vienna’s changing religious landscape. More restrictive and selective migration as well as the resurgence of religion (Kaufmann 2010) may mean that the extent of fertility differentials by religious denominations and of exogamy could play the major roles in determining the future religious composition of Vienna.”

Vienna, which experienced no significant population growth, but rather decline and stagnation during most of the second half of the 20th century, literally became an old and monotonous society in the post-war decades – not only in terms of religious denomination. Various and continuous waves of international migration dramatically changed the age and religious composition of Vienna’s population (see pyramids). First arrived the so-called Gastarbeiter (“temporary workers”) during the 1960s, mostly from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey. However, only since the 1990s Vienna’s population also increased in size, when international migration gained even more momentum due to family reunification of the gradually settled (and definately not returning) Gastarbeiter, the opening of the former hermetically sealed communist countries behind the Iron Curtain (in 1989), the Yugoslav Wars (1991 – 1995), Austria’s accession to the EU (in 1995) as well as the European Union’s latest expansion to Eastern Europe in 2004 and 2007.

It remains to be seen how further secularisation and international migration will affect the religious composition of Vienna and other European cities that experienced similar developments. Certainly, and as assumed by the preliminary WIREL findings, the prevailing religious diversity of Vienna is already reflected in diverging patterns in demographic behaviour: some religious denominations show significantly higher fertility rates as well as distinct differentials in inter-religious marriage behaviour. On the one hand, such differentials might even increase in the future due to the inter-generational transfer of religious denomination and, by implication, a particular demographic behaviour too. On the other hand, a more accelerated social integration, which implicates an increase in inter-religious partnerships, might result in converging demographic behaviour and diminishing cultural differentials, at least in the second or third generation of the new arrivals.

Additional links, references and data sources:

• Baumann, Martin. 2002. Migrant Settlement, Religion and Phases of Diaspora. In: Migration. A European Journal of International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Vol. 33/34/35, p. 93-117.
• Goujon, Anne, Ramon Bauer & Richard Gisser: Reconstruction of the forces shaping the religious composition of the population of Vienna from 1951 to 2011 (presentation and poster)
• Kaufmann, Eric. 2010. Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. London: Profile Books.
• WIREL list of publications on “religion and demography”
• Statistik Austria (Austrian National Statistical Office)
• City of Vienna (MA23), Statistik Wien (German only)