State of the Cities Databasehttp://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

Philippa RobinsonNeighbourhoods, Cities and RegionsCommunities and Local Government4 July 2007

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

• The historical context to SOCD

• Data content and functionality of SOCD

• Geographical content of SOCD

• Presenting data on the geographies in SOCD

• Launch of Town Centres Data

• Possible future developments of SOCD

• On line demonstration of SOCD, focusing on cities in the North

Content of presentation

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

A brief history……

• In the Urban White Paper of 2000, the government made a commitment to

publish a report on the progress and performance of English cities - State of the

English Cities report, published in March 2006

• The report included a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the largest 56

cities in England

• To inform the analysis in the report, an Excel based database was created by

Sheffield University – State of the Cities Database (SOCD)

• A commitment was made to make SOCD publicly available and since March

work has been going on to produce a fully functioning system

• An updated and modified version of SOCD, with added functionality has been

developed and was published on the Internet on 29 November 2006

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

• SOCD has a key set of around 60 indicators for the 56 largest cities in England

• Data are presented on the following subjects: Crime, Demography, Economics, Education, Environment, Health, Housing, Political, and Population and Households

• Data are available for the most recent periods (e.g. 2001 - 2006) and the positions at the middle and at the beginning of the 1990s, this is to give a good time series (some indicators, e.g. Census, are available for earlier periods)

• Cities can be compared with: other cities; Local Authorities and Wards within the city; National and Regional figures; and different calculation methods can be compared.

• Reports on cities can be created and charts and maps included to enhance the reports

What is SOCD…...

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

• City boundaries are determined by their physical extent – the built up area or metropolitan area – rather than administrative boundaries (e.g. LA)

Urban Area of a city

• A set of 56 Primary Urban Areas (PUAs) were created using a population threshold of 125,000

• PUAs are larger than LAs and frequently contain several of them

How the 56 cities are

defined…...

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http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

• For each of the 56 PUAs there is also a Travel to Work Area (TTWAs)

• TTWAs have been used to approximate City-Region boundaries, this is to help put the urban areas into a wider context.

• TTWAs have been defined using the ONS definition: “of the resident economically active population, at least 75% actually work in the area, and also, that of everyone working in the area, at least 75% actually live in the area”

And city regions…...

© Crown Copyright. All rights reserved Licence Number: 100018986. 2006

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

Cities in the North

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

-Travel to Work Area (TTWA): City region as explained in the previous slide

-Primary Urban Area (PUA): Metropolitan area as explained in the previous slide

- Local Authority District (LA): Municipal

-ATCAs: Areas of town centre activity, defined through a statistical methodology

- Wards (not shown): the base unit of UK administrative geography

- Tracts (not shown): aggregations of wards, designed to be comparable over time

An example of SOCD geographies…

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

PUAs/TTWAs can be approximated using geographical building blocks and SOCD contains a variety of options – Accuracy of approximation v Availability of data:

1. TTWA (LA) & PUA (LA) – More data, but less accurate as large building blocks;

2. TTWA (Ward) & PUA (Ward) – Less data, more accurate, but boundary changes;

3. TTWA (Tract) & PUA (Tract) – Tracts created by Sheffield University to address Ward boundary changes and create stable geographies which are of a similar size;

3 approximations of TTWA and PUA within SOCD. Choose the most appropriate depending on your requirements

Presenting statistics on SOCD geographies…

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

Areas of Town Centre Activity• We aim to update the 2002 pilot Town Centre and Retail Core data currently

held on the SOCD in the next few weeks, this will include data for 1999 to 2004.

• Employee data from the Annual Business Inquiry (ABI) and property data from the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) feed in to a geographical model, the model defines boundaries for Areas of Town Centre Activity and provides the following data for each Town Centre and Retail Core:

• Commercial office employees

• Public service employees

• Comparison retail employees

• Convenience retail employees

• Service retail employees

• Arts, culture and entertainment employees

• Restaurants and licensed premises employees

• Retail and Office property floorspace

• Retail and Office property rateable value

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

Is SOCD being used?

From the 2nd May to the 3rd July:• 1,516 people visited the database (a

total of 3,397 visits)• The average length of visit was 3

hours• The most popular day of the week for

accessing the database was Monday

So far users have been very impressed with the database, comments include: “I have just run two or three very illuminating reports comparing 2 PUAs, and am blown away by the tool - fantastic.” “This is clearly a very important resource, and I will certainly bring it to the attention of students.”

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

• It is essential to keep the database up to date, so we are using a rolling programme of data updates (we have recently added some 2006 data)

• SOCD will continue to be refined: we are looking at adding new datasets, updating the boundaries used, extending the number of cities included and extending the functionality of the web-site

• We will be using the database for more in-depth analysis

• We are keen to ensure that the data are comparable to that from other benchmarking (international and regional)

Next steps for SOCD……

For any further information or if you have any queries please contact us at: SOCD@communities.gsi.gov.uk

http://www.socd.communities.gov.uk/socd/

On line demonstration of SOCD:

• Overview of welcome screen;

• Producing a report on a single city;

• Introducing comparators for that city;

• Producing charts for a single city and comparator;

• Producing a report for a selection of cities;

• Downloading data for further analysis.

What can SOCD do for you?