The Urbanization of Iceland

Iceland is not unique when it comes down to urbanization, what is interesting though is to see that most of the flux has been towards a single city, Reykjavik. 300 years ago, there where virtually no cities in the country, a century ago the country was still one with a very strong rural population. Throughout the last century we have however seen a steady and strong influx of people from countryside to the capital, whereas other areas have lost their share og the overall population. Now, if we let the area of each circle represent the population of each region in 1911, then this is what we get:

Iceland in 1911

The raw data goes like this: Capital Area:15469 Reykjanes:2541 West Iceland:10351 Western Fjords:13169 North-West: 9103 North-East: 11911 East: 9617 South: 13500. A Century later, the situation is quite different:

Iceland in 2011

Here we have stacked up the circles, giving the years with positive growth a blue color, and the ones with population decrease a red one. The corresponding numbers can be found in the the following Excel sheet: popice_pbmp. Finally, here is a video showing the entire animation. http://youtu.be/OqFIL4w1POs The underlying map can be found on wikimedia commons. The data is taken and compiled from hagstofa.is, the Statistical Office of Iceland.