New tool for evidence-informed urban planning

On 27 March, the Housing Barometer, developed by housing researchers at Uppsala University and free for all to use, will be launched.

“We have built a tool to present very complicated statistics in a simple way. Animating data makes it much easier to understand,” says Mattias Öhman.

He is a researcher at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF), a national resource for research on housing, segregation and urban development.

“As a national resource, our role is not just to do research, it is inherent in our remit that we are expected to contribute to policy and public debate in a broad sense,” he says.

Incredibly good register data

In Sweden, researchers have extensive access to register data on the population via Statistics Sweden. There is data on income, education, family formation, vehicle ownership and much more. Information on where people live can be linked to other data via personal identity numbers, although the information is of course completely anonymised.

Until now, this data has been difficult to access, even for researchers, Öhman observes.

“We have incredibly good data but it is very poorly presented so I thought that given our remit we should do something better. The idea arose of presenting data in a different way, inspired by the presentations Hans Rosling used to do.”

Cooperation with Gapminder

The Housing Barometer has been developed in cooperation with the Gapminder Foundation, founded by researcher Hans Rosling to make statistics accessible. The project is funded by the LF Research Foundation (Länsförsäkringars forskningsstiftelse).

The tool presents data visually, in colours and shapes instead of lists and tables. The interface is easy to use and there are a variety of parameters to choose from.

Öhman shows, for example, how income levels in the district of Danderyd have increased significantly in relation to other districts in Stockholm from the 1990s to the present.

He also shows which regions in Sweden have the highest number of inhabitants with post-secondary education – with university cities standing out.

“We want to contribute to the public debate by presenting some of the statistics available to researchers in a way that everyone can understand,” says Öhman.

“We now have a tool with statistics and are waiting for even more data. We hope to democratise access to statistics and contribute to evidence-informed policies.”

Easy to detect anomalies

The tool makes it easy for journalists, researchers and interested members of the public to spot anomalies and interesting patterns. But it can also be used to challenge preconceptions and prejudices.

“For example, what are the poorest areas in Sweden? Well, they are student areas, with high levels of education and low incomes and of course that is obviously not a problem. If you don’t see this, which you can see quite quickly with our tool, you might draw completely the wrong conclusions,” Öhman explains.

Annica Hulth