The "gravitation-centre" of Istanbul

The Center of Istanbul

This Mapping is showing the „Gravitation“-Citycentre of Istanbul, according to the population of the districts and there position. The positions of the districts are also points. In this calculation the whole population of a district is in one point, which also can be seen as the gravitation centre of the district. So the question is: where is the emphasis of Istanbul?

To answer this question, a not really difficult calculation must be done. You need a city map for tracking the districts into a xy-coordinate-system and the populations – the masses of the gravitation. After that, a really interesting answer occurred:

The (gravitation) Center of Istanbul is in Fatih, near the golden Horn - a little bit West of Atatürk Boulevard

This is interesting, because it looks like the gravitation-centre hasn’t changed a lot since the last 2000 years, although developments of the last decades have changed the urban structure of Istanbul a lot.

There are also weaknesses in the model. The location of the district-gravitation-points where found by estimation. For the bigger districts the points are less exact, but these districts have also less population. The bigger remaining question is how the population of Istanbul really distributed, because the Statistics which are used are just showing the official population.(circa 13 mill.)

This kind of mapping is a statistical tool to give an overview of the spatial distribution of a population. Often it is interesting to map the change of this population-emphasis. For example the map below is showing the population-gravity-point (Bevölkerungsschwerpunkt) in the history of the United States. It is a constant drift towards the south-west.