Plotting Choropleths from Shapefiles in R with ggmap – Toronto Neighbourhoods by Population

Introduction

Background

Analysis

# Read the neighborhood shapefile data and plot
shpfile <- "NEIGHBORHOODS_WGS84_2.shp"
sh <- readShapePoly(shpfile)
plot(sh)

This just yields the raw polygons themselves. Any good Torontonian would recognize these shapes. There’s some maps like these with words squished into the polygons hanging in lots of print shops on Queen Street. Also as someone pointed out to me, most T-dotters think of the grid of downtown streets as running directly North-South and East-West but it actually sits on an angle.

Okay, that’s a good start. Now we’re going to include the neighbourhood population from the demographic data file by attaching it to the dataframe within the shapefile object. We do this using the merge function. Basically this is like an SQL join. Also I need to convert the neighbourhood number to a integer first so things work, because R is treating it as an string.

# Add demographic data
# The neighbourhood ID is a string - change it to a integer
sh@data$AREA_S_CD <- as.numeric(sh@data$AREA_S_CD)

# Read in the demographic data and merge on Neighbourhood Id
demo <- read.csv(file="WB-Demographics.csv", header=T)
sh2 <- merge(sh, demo, by.x='AREA_S_CD', by.y='Neighbourhood.Id')

# Set the palette
p <- colorRampPalette(c("white", "red"))(128)
palette(p)

# Scale the total population to the palette
pop <- sh2@data$Total.Population
cols <- (pop - min(pop))/diff(range(pop))*127+1
plot(sh, col=cols)

And here’s the glorious result!

Cool. You can see that the population is greater for some of the larger neighbourhoods, notably on the east end and The Waterfront Communities (i.e. condoland)

I’m not crazy about this white-red palette so let’s use RColorBrewer’s spectral which is one of my faves:

#RColorBrewer, spectral
p <- colorRampPalette(brewer.pal(11, 'Spectral'))(128)
palette(rev(p))
plot(sh2, col=cols)

There, that’s better. The dark red neighborhood is Woburn. But we still don’t have a legend so this choropleth isn’t really telling us anything particularly helpful. And it’d be nice to have the polygons overplotted onto map tiles. So let’s use ggmap!

ggmap

#GGPLOT 
points <- fortify(sh, region = 'AREA_S_CD')

# Plot the neighborhoods
toronto <- qmap("Toronto, Ontario", zoom=10)
toronto +geom_polygon(aes(x=long,y=lat, group=group, alpha=0.25), data=points, fill='white') +
geom_polygon(aes(x=long,y=lat, group=group), data=points, color='black', fill=NA)

Voila!

Now we merge the demographic data just like we did before, and ggplot takes care of the scaling and legends for us. It’s also super easy to use different palettes by using scale_fill_gradient and scale_fill_distiller for ramp palettes and RColorBrewer palettes respectively.

# merge the shapefile data with the social housing data, using the neighborhood ID
points2 <- merge(points, demo, by.x='id', by.y='Neighbourhood.Id', all.x=TRUE)

# Plot
toronto + geom_polygon(aes(x=long,y=lat, group=group, fill=Total.Population), data=points2, color='black') +
  scale_fill_gradient(low='white', high='red')

# Spectral plot
toronto + geom_polygon(aes(x=long,y=lat, group=group, fill=Total.Population), data=points2, color='black') +
  scale_fill_distiller(palette='Spectral') + scale_alpha(range=c(0.5,0.5))