I selected Woleu as a subdivision within Woleu-Ntem, Gabon. Woleu-Ntem has a population of around 155,000. Almost half of that population (80,000) resides within Woleu. In order to define our own boudaries for the urban areas within this subdivision, we will need to first identify densely populated areas within Woleu.

A plot of the population within Woleu extracted from our shapefile data

The next two plots represent population density using color as a dimension.

Using clustering techniques to define boundaries around dense populations. Borders are not related to administrative boundaries from our shapefile data.

The next plot is the result of extracting health site and road data from the GSX website, then adding this data to the previous plot with our outlined urban areas.

We have defined 12 distinct settlements in our ‘urban areas’ data. The population of Woleu is almost 80000 while the population of the surrouding subivision, Woleu-Ntem, is home to 154000 people. Additionally, the entirety of Gabon has a population of 2.1 million.

Each urban area has a population density that ranges from 11 people per km2 to 30 people per km2. It seems the population density for this area is somewhat small for a such a large population, but The entire region has an area of almost 7000 km2. In the end, our highest density areas had around 35 people per square kilometer.

The roadways in this plot are comprised of many classifications of roads. Thicker lines represent greater use/bigger roads, which were defined as ‘primary’ or ‘highway’ in the provided data. The population density that we observed in our first plots match up well with the paths these roads take. The more dense highways lead through our most densely populated urban area, and the smaller roads are located around less dense populations. You will notice all highways connect to a single point, Oyem. Oyem is the capital of the surround administrative boundary: Wouleu-Ntem.

The green dots lining highways throughout Woleu are healthcare facilities. The distribution of facilities presents some issues for healtchare accessibility within the Eastern half of this subdivision (again, Woleu has a population of around 80k), but the placement of these facilities seems optimal as they line major highways and are located within our ‘urban area’ boundaries. The most densely populated urban area is displayed as the big red dot in the middle of our densest urban area. This is the captial of Woleu-Ntem. The hospital just to the East of this dot is called Centre Hospitalier Régional d’Oyem, the Oyem Region Hospital Centre, and is the main hospital in the region.