Do-It-Yourself

In this session, we will practice your skills in mapping with R. Create a new quarto document you can edit interactively, and let’s do this!

Data preparation

Polygons

For this section, you will have to push yourself out of the comfort zone when it comes to sourcing the data. As nice as it is to be able to pull a dataset directly from the web at the stroke of a url address, most real-world cases are not that straight forward. Instead, you usually have to download a dataset manually and store it locally on your computer before you can get to work.

We are going to use data from the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) about Liverpool, in particular an extract from the Census. You can download a copy of the data at:

Important

You will need a username and password to download the data. Create it for free at:

https://data.cdrc.ac.uk/user/register

Then download the Liverpool Census’11 Residential data pack

Once you have the .zip file on your computer, right-click and “Extract all”. The resulting folder will contain all you need. Create a folder called Liverpool in data folder you created in the first Lab.

library(sf)
lsoas <- read_sf("data/Liverpool/Census_Residential_Data_Pack_2011/Local_Authority_Districts/E08000012/shapefiles/E08000012.shp")

Lines

For a line layer, we are going to use a different bit of osmdata functionality that will allow us to extract all the highways. Note the code cell below requires internet connectivity.

highway <- opq("Liverpool, U.K.") %>%
   add_osm_feature(key = "highway", 
                   value = c("primary", "secondary", "tertiary")) %>%
   osmdata_sf()

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = highway$osm_lines, color = 'darkorange') + theme_minimal()

Points

For points, we will find some POI (Points of Interest) : pubs in Liverpool, as recorded by OpenStreetMap. Note the code cell below requires internet connectivity.

bars <- opq("Liverpool, U.K.") %>%
   add_osm_feature(key = "amenity", 
                   value = c("bar")) %>%
   osmdata_sf()

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = bars$osm_points) + theme_minimal()

Tasks

Task I: Tweak your map

With those three layers, try to complete the following tasks:

  • Make a map of the Liverpool neighborhoods that includes the following characteristics:

    1. Features a title

    2. Does not include axes frame

    3. Polygons are all in color #525252 and 50% transparent

    4. Boundary lines (“edges”) have a width of 0.3 and are of color #B9EBE3

    5. Includes a basemap different from the one used in class

Note

Not all of the requirements above are not equally hard to achieve. If you can get some but not all of them, that’s also great! The point is you learn something every time you try.

Task II: Non-spatial manipulations

For this one we will combine some of the ideas we learnt in the previous block with this one.

Focus on the LSOA liverpool layer and use it to do the following:

  1. Calculate the area of each neighbourhood

  2. Find the five smallest areas in the table. Create a new object (e.g. smallest with them only)

  3. Create a multi-layer map of Liverpool where the five smallest areas are coloured in red, and the rest appear in grey.

Task III: Average price per district

This one is a bit more advanced, so don’t despair if you can’t get it on your first try. It relies on the London data you used in the Lab. Here is the questions for you to answer:

What is the district with the highest housing prices in London?

Answering this questions involve 3 steps:

1. Performing a spatial join (st_join) between the district layer (polygons) and the households (points).

2. Aggregating the data at district level: group_by & summarise()

3. Figure out the district with the highest price

Really try not to open the answer below right away.

Spatial overlay between points and polygons

housesales_districts <- st_join(districts, housesales_clean)

Aggregate at district level

housesales_districts_agg <- housesales_districts %>% 
  group_by(DIST_CODE, DIST_NAME) %>% # group at district level
  summarise(count_sales = n(),  # create count
            mean_price = mean(price)) # average price
`summarise()` has grouped output by 'DIST_CODE'. You can override using the
`.groups` argument.
head(housesales_districts_agg)
Simple feature collection with 6 features and 4 fields
Geometry type: POLYGON
Dimension:     XY
Bounding box:  xmin: 515484.9 ymin: 156480.8 xmax: 554503.8 ymax: 198355.2
Projected CRS: OSGB36 / British National Grid
# A tibble: 6 × 5
# Groups:   DIST_CODE [6]
  DIST_CODE DIST_NAME           count_sales mean_price                  geometry
  <chr>     <chr>                     <int>      <dbl>             <POLYGON [m]>
1 00AA      City of London                1        NA  ((531028.5 181611.2, 531…
2 00AB      Barking and Dagenh…          38     91802. ((550817 184196, 550814 …
3 00AC      Barnet                       83    169662. ((526830.3 187535.5, 526…
4 00AD      Bexley                       82    119276. ((552373.5 174606.9, 552…
5 00AE      Brent                        49    174498. ((524661.7 184631, 52466…
6 00AF      Bromley                     124    142468. ((533852.2 170129, 53385…

Once that’s done, create a map using ggplot and if you’re feeling adventurous the function scale_fill_viridis() to make your map look especially good.

# map housesales by wards
map3 <- ggplot()+
  geom_sf(data = housesales_districts_agg, inherit.aes = FALSE, aes(fill = mean_price)) + # add the district level housing price 
  scale_fill_viridis("Price", direction = -1, labels = scales::dollar_format(prefix = "£"), option = "magma" )+ # change the legend scale to £ and the colour to magma
  xlab("") +
  ylab("") +
  theme_minimal() # choose a nicer theme https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/ggtheme.html
map3