Put a dot on the map for each data point, or colour regions if that's how the data is.
Given this is effectively one piece of data (% of income on rent) you can colour it on a scale. A red dot is 100% on rent. A green dot is 0% on rent. Colours in between represent middle states.
I actually prefer this though, easier to see detail instead of having to compare shades of colours, our brains have issues with that sometimes. (This can be avoided with a good colour scheme I guess?)
Greatly prefer this as well. It's a lot easier to tell the difference between 50 and 75% with a pie chart than it is with your eyeballs looking at how similar or different two colors are.
Scrap the pie charts. It's a lot easier to see the difference between 50 and 55% when it's represented as the coloured part of a column representing 100% Pie charts only work when the difference are big enough.
Do you have an example? For me, it would be very difficult to tell the difference between a single color that's a mix of 50% blue, 50% green, vs 45% blue, 55% green, and have any kind of idea what value they corresponded to. But with a pie chart, it's easy.
Are you talking about this kind of bar chart kind of thing?
(picture attached)
For me, this wouldn't work as well on a map because a pie chart is kind of like a big point, but the rectangular shape of the column would look weird on a map. You wouldn't know where the center of the column was supposed to be as easily as the pie chart is clearly directly on top of the city it's talking about.
But most of this seems like it is about subjective tastes rather than peer-reviewed studies on what kind of map is more useful.
I probably would not even make a map of the data in the first place. I would just have a bar chart like you drew, because the amount of data is so low, and their geographical position does not offer much additional information or context.
But most of this seems like it is about subjective tastes rather than peer-reviewed studies on what kind of map is more useful.
Funnily enough, I am actually taking a cartography class at uni right now, and a map (on the left) almost like this is in our textbook. The author then showed a redesign (on the right) where he uses columns for representing the statistics as bars instead of numbers.
I'm aware it's not an exact 1-1 example, but I think you'll agree that the one on the right is more successful in communicating the differences between states (which I am assuming is the purpose OP's map as well). This book is as far as I know peer-reviewed and the most authoritative guide on map design in Denmark at least. The author Lars Brodersen is well-respected in his field. According to him, there are certain guidelines when it comes to visual design, that make for better, more useful maps.
Definitely. Believe it or not, I am also a cartography student, although in America, the map on the left in your textbook has way too much data that it's trying to communicate, but the map that OP posted since it is just one point on the map for each city. I think it's okay.
To your point about should it really be a map for us non-Europeans, the map contains so much more information than just a list of cities. We have the context of how close places are to each other, what countries the cities are in, etc. I think the map is way more useful to me rather than just a list of cities and their bar charts.
I really like the type of column that the map on the right has where you can tell that the base of the column is the geographical point on the map based on the 3D effect. In the amount of time I've spent in class I haven't learned how to make an effect like that, but I would know how to make a pie chart as a point.
I've read both are true. Tourism + digital nomand, because Portuguese weather is good and lisbon is relatively affordable, but i'm sure a local could give you a better answer.
That I don't know for sure, but they have a short term rental registry and the units are labeled as such and there are signs in some places and a general information campaign warning tourists against "illegal listings." Every place we stayed (4 total) was on the official registry. My understanding is that airbnb tends to play ball with these laws so as to not get banned, and most of the illegal listings are through scummy travel agents and smaller apps, which has kind of always been an issue.
It's the construction restrictions, VAT over construction materials and a big influx of immigration on the last four years or so that are aggravating the housing bubble.
Hate that word "expat". "I hate immigrants but I'm a white man with money living in a country I wasn't born in", or better worded, "immigrant, but also an asshole"
Investment funds hoarding all houses on the market.
Entire buildings getting purchased and people evicted, just to transform them in to another boring AirBnB or hostel.
This is, quite possibly, the most useless map I've seen.
Not only is it using average salaries, it's also only looking at country capitals, where executive salaries are notoriously obnoxious.
For this to have any real-life use, it should be using the median salary, at the very least, and use the average apartment price based on data from, I don't know, top-10 cities.
It would look VERY different. The median salary in Poland in 2024 was around €1550. The average monthly rent for an apartment in Warsaw in 2025 is €1440. The average price of groceries for a month in Warsaw is around €220.
Assuming you work from home and your water/heating/electricity/Internet costs are somehow zero (they aren't), you're still -€110 per month, instead of having half your salary left.
Poland did come across as a hard-to-exist-in eastern country on this map as well. The numbers would of course be different, but I'm not sure the pattern would be.
What do you mean? According to this map, you need to spend around half of your salary for accommodation, which puts it near the middle of the stack. And, considering the average salaries, would allow you live very comfortably.
Housing is pretty bad in Poland overall. Cheapest apartments are also 2+ hours away from any work opportunities. I don't know enough about the Turkish or russian markets to have an opinion, though.
I feel there is a distinction between, let's call them 'original inhabitants', being xenophobic towards refugees and those inhabitants being economically unable to live in their own country due to rich folks buying vacation homes
Local politicians seem to be more interested in "unicorn factories" and WebSummit show off events than solving the issues of the people that elected them. Twice. So the voters may not be too bright either.
It's also become "Europe's China", the place where all manufacturing goes from companies that want a "made in EU" label.
So there's a huge influx of workers, driving up the housing demand.
a concept a lot of cities actively refuse to believe is possible by their obsession with limiting development.
for rents to be stable you need 6-7% of available units vacant. almost double that vacancy if you want to drive prices down.
the vacancy rate in many places is like 1%. hence the rents going up super fast YoY. in my city people bid up rent because there are so few apartments available. so it lists for 2800/mo and the person that gets it is paying 3200/mo.
my city builds like 5000 new apartments per year. the population is growing by like 25,000 people per year. so the rent is skyrocketing. we keep adding lots and lots of jobs. every new development is like 5000 jobs, and 100 apartments. where are the other 4900 people going to live?
unfortunately there is no amount of wage that prevent high rent.. on the contrary. All
the city with low relative rend have rent control laws.
And they must be updated often since landlords try to sneak their way.
For exemple, in Paris, there is a fashion trend of building offering " coworking rent", where they rent you a 10m2 for exuberant price, and they justify it by having a "PC room " in the building or something. So the city is in the process of banning thoses "coworking" place, which are just a way to bypass rent control law
I can't speak for the other countries, but HOW IN THE FUCK would you even find a 1 bedroom apartment in Berlin?
Also, the average salary isn't what someone living in a 1 bedroom apartment would earn.
I'm over 40, working as an IT sysadmin, and just recently started making an average salary for Germany.
The average is skewed heavily by the top 10% who make a lot more than everyone else.
If you want to discuss housing prices, compare with the median instead.
Looking at this map and its indecipherable piecharts made me go "huh most of the capitals are actually livable" ... then I compared them with the only place where I have an idea of the rent, Copenhagen, and WTF?
I wouldn't even move to Copenhagen, how the fuck are y'all affording these other prices? Undisclosed income? WTF?!?
Average salary is a useless metric. A small number of people make so much money that it raises the "average" to much more than what the "average" worker earns.
This is a bad "map". The pie charts add clutter to the image, and it's not immediatly obvious how two cities compare. The country borders offer no additional information other than vague context for those who know what countries are located where. Since there is only one datapoint per country, it might as well have been a line of columns showing percentage of salary used by colouring part of the column red. The map medium does not help in anyway to provide the information.
What part of tiny pie charts was necessary? Just make a heatmap but in dots.
Right? Is this a revival of dataisugly?
All I see is the two colors. If I wanted to have to look closely I would have just opted for a list.
How much sense does a heatmap make if you have one data point per country? Also, I don't know what you mean by dots? (Asking to understand)
Put a dot on the map for each data point, or colour regions if that's how the data is.
Given this is effectively one piece of data (% of income on rent) you can colour it on a scale. A red dot is 100% on rent. A green dot is 0% on rent. Colours in between represent middle states.
I actually prefer this though, easier to see detail instead of having to compare shades of colours, our brains have issues with that sometimes. (This can be avoided with a good colour scheme I guess?)
Greatly prefer this as well. It's a lot easier to tell the difference between 50 and 75% with a pie chart than it is with your eyeballs looking at how similar or different two colors are.
Scrap the pie charts. It's a lot easier to see the difference between 50 and 55% when it's represented as the coloured part of a column representing 100% Pie charts only work when the difference are big enough.
Do you have an example? For me, it would be very difficult to tell the difference between a single color that's a mix of 50% blue, 50% green, vs 45% blue, 55% green, and have any kind of idea what value they corresponded to. But with a pie chart, it's easy.
Are you talking about this kind of bar chart kind of thing?
(picture attached)
For me, this wouldn't work as well on a map because a pie chart is kind of like a big point, but the rectangular shape of the column would look weird on a map. You wouldn't know where the center of the column was supposed to be as easily as the pie chart is clearly directly on top of the city it's talking about.
But most of this seems like it is about subjective tastes rather than peer-reviewed studies on what kind of map is more useful.
I probably would not even make a map of the data in the first place. I would just have a bar chart like you drew, because the amount of data is so low, and their geographical position does not offer much additional information or context.
Funnily enough, I am actually taking a cartography class at uni right now, and a map (on the left) almost like this is in our textbook. The author then showed a redesign (on the right) where he uses columns for representing the statistics as bars instead of numbers.
I'm aware it's not an exact 1-1 example, but I think you'll agree that the one on the right is more successful in communicating the differences between states (which I am assuming is the purpose OP's map as well). This book is as far as I know peer-reviewed and the most authoritative guide on map design in Denmark at least. The author Lars Brodersen is well-respected in his field. According to him, there are certain guidelines when it comes to visual design, that make for better, more useful maps.
Definitely. Believe it or not, I am also a cartography student, although in America, the map on the left in your textbook has way too much data that it's trying to communicate, but the map that OP posted since it is just one point on the map for each city. I think it's okay.
To your point about should it really be a map for us non-Europeans, the map contains so much more information than just a list of cities. We have the context of how close places are to each other, what countries the cities are in, etc. I think the map is way more useful to me rather than just a list of cities and their bar charts.
I really like the type of column that the map on the right has where you can tell that the base of the column is the geographical point on the map based on the 3D effect. In the amount of time I've spent in class I haven't learned how to make an effect like that, but I would know how to make a pie chart as a point.
It's great for detail, but bad for getting a general look. Could get busy with more data points.
I think it's a good choice for this particular map, but I could imagine a different map with more cities which would be a bad choice for pie charts.
Dot heatmaps font represent accurate numbers the same as this. Which size is 70%? Which is 50?
Nah that's a bad choice.
A histogramme would have been great. The map doesn't bring much.
Weird choice to not include cities as big as the capitals. Milan, Zurich and Barcelona would definitely have been interesting.
It's only capitals, not that weird a choice
Geezus Lisbon, get your shit together.
"Wow can't be fun to live in Tiran- holy fuck Lisbon!"
Tirana got crazy quick. 2 years ago we rented a 3 bedroom in the center for €850/month. Now you frequently see 1 bedrooms further out for €1200.
Isnt it the expats that are driving up the prices
Iirc it's not immigrants but Airbnb. I've read articles about it, but it might be somewhere else
I've read both are true. Tourism + digital nomand, because Portuguese weather is good and lisbon is relatively affordable, but i'm sure a local could give you a better answer.
Lisbon has pretty strict airbnb regulations though
How well are they enforced?
That I don't know for sure, but they have a short term rental registry and the units are labeled as such and there are signs in some places and a general information campaign warning tourists against "illegal listings." Every place we stayed (4 total) was on the official registry. My understanding is that airbnb tends to play ball with these laws so as to not get banned, and most of the illegal listings are through scummy travel agents and smaller apps, which has kind of always been an issue.
It's the construction restrictions, VAT over construction materials and a big influx of immigration on the last four years or so that are aggravating the housing bubble.
That's a pretty easy to avoid saying you're an American immigrant
Hate that word "expat". "I hate immigrants but I'm a white man with money living in a country I wasn't born in", or better worded, "immigrant, but also an asshole"
RIP Lisbon
Waddahell goin on in Portugal. How are they not dead from starvation or is food just that cheap?
Investment funds hoarding all houses on the market. Entire buildings getting purchased and people evicted, just to transform them in to another boring AirBnB or hostel.
This is, quite possibly, the most useless map I've seen.
Not only is it using average salaries, it's also only looking at country capitals, where executive salaries are notoriously obnoxious.
For this to have any real-life use, it should be using the median salary, at the very least, and use the average apartment price based on data from, I don't know, top-10 cities.
Came here to see if it was median or not.
Bern filled with rich people making housing cheap I guess. /j
That would be better, although I'd guess it would look similar in the end.
It would look VERY different. The median salary in Poland in 2024 was around €1550. The average monthly rent for an apartment in Warsaw in 2025 is €1440. The average price of groceries for a month in Warsaw is around €220.
Assuming you work from home and your water/heating/electricity/Internet costs are somehow zero (they aren't), you're still -€110 per month, instead of having half your salary left.
Large cities are notoriously expensive in Poland.
Poland did come across as a hard-to-exist-in eastern country on this map as well. The numbers would of course be different, but I'm not sure the pattern would be.
What do you mean? According to this map, you need to spend around half of your salary for accommodation, which puts it near the middle of the stack. And, considering the average salaries, would allow you live very comfortably.
I guess you're right. It's not Vienna, but it's not Kyiv either.
Do you think housing would come out worse in Poland than places like Russia or Turkey if it was measured correctly?
Housing is pretty bad in Poland overall. Cheapest apartments are also 2+ hours away from any work opportunities. I don't know enough about the Turkish or russian markets to have an opinion, though.
Policies that are too welcoming to expats with high incomes and foreign remote workers that like sunny weather and cheap everything.
Also: air b&b’s and cheap ryanair flights
I suppose Portugal could do with a couple more cities with over a million inhabitants. It goes huge Lisbon, then relatively small Porto.
But Portugal should be for the Portuguese, I feel like the Algarve is mostly Brits and Dutchies
I feel like "X should be for the X-people" is maybe not the best phrasing, considering how that tends to play out throughout history.
I feel there is a distinction between, let's call them 'original inhabitants', being xenophobic towards refugees and those inhabitants being economically unable to live in their own country due to rich folks buying vacation homes
The best second best weather in Europe 🤐
How you doin Lisbon?
They can't answer. The internet money was used to tip the landlord.
Local politicians seem to be more interested in "unicorn factories" and WebSummit show off events than solving the issues of the people that elected them. Twice. So the voters may not be too bright either.
Using a pie chart to represent a single (scalar) data point ... Bad map! Bad map!
FTFY
Where is the supplemental data table and sources?!
No but seriously, Lisbon how?
demand
lots of people want to live there. rents go up.
And there are always openings because they all starve to death?
no, the demand is very recent. 10 years ago nobody know wtf lisbon was. now is i very 'hot' place to travel/live, hence the rents skyrocketed.
It's also become "Europe's China", the place where all manufacturing goes from companies that want a "made in EU" label.
So there's a huge influx of workers, driving up the housing demand.
isn't that because it's economically underdeveloped, hence cheap wages for such work?
yes
It's like 3,000 years old...
Terrible charts aside, Bern and Vienna were surprising to me. Good wages? Or rent control laws?
adequate housing supply for the housing demand.
a concept a lot of cities actively refuse to believe is possible by their obsession with limiting development.
for rents to be stable you need 6-7% of available units vacant. almost double that vacancy if you want to drive prices down.
the vacancy rate in many places is like 1%. hence the rents going up super fast YoY. in my city people bid up rent because there are so few apartments available. so it lists for 2800/mo and the person that gets it is paying 3200/mo.
my city builds like 5000 new apartments per year. the population is growing by like 25,000 people per year. so the rent is skyrocketing. we keep adding lots and lots of jobs. every new development is like 5000 jobs, and 100 apartments. where are the other 4900 people going to live?
one reason why vienna is better than other cities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau
they saw a problem and started building
lol one complex is even called karl marx hof
edit: chart is awful indeed it features capital cities only. Berlin is still cheaper than München. not for a lack of trying tho
unfortunately there is no amount of wage that prevent high rent.. on the contrary. All the city with low relative rend have rent control laws.
And they must be updated often since landlords try to sneak their way.
For exemple, in Paris, there is a fashion trend of building offering " coworking rent", where they rent you a 10m2 for exuberant price, and they justify it by having a "PC room " in the building or something. So the city is in the process of banning thoses "coworking" place, which are just a way to bypass rent control law
I can't speak for the other countries, but HOW IN THE FUCK would you even find a 1 bedroom apartment in Berlin?
Also, the average salary isn't what someone living in a 1 bedroom apartment would earn.
I'm over 40, working as an IT sysadmin, and just recently started making an average salary for Germany.
The average is skewed heavily by the top 10% who make a lot more than everyone else.
If you want to discuss housing prices, compare with the median instead.
lisbon 🥀🥀
Looking at this map and its indecipherable piecharts made me go "huh most of the capitals are actually livable" ... then I compared them with the only place where I have an idea of the rent, Copenhagen, and WTF?
I wouldn't even move to Copenhagen, how the fuck are y'all affording these other prices? Undisclosed income? WTF?!?
Average salary is a useless metric. A small number of people make so much money that it raises the "average" to much more than what the "average" worker earns.
they make more money than you.
This is a bad "map". The pie charts add clutter to the image, and it's not immediatly obvious how two cities compare. The country borders offer no additional information other than vague context for those who know what countries are located where. Since there is only one datapoint per country, it might as well have been a line of columns showing percentage of salary used by colouring part of the column red. The map medium does not help in anyway to provide the information.
#portugalsukablyat
Once again, Portugal is so far west it underflows into eastern Europe.
Is this 3D diagrams across a 2D map?
Someone do Japan
Outside of Tokyo and Osaka city center, housing costs aren't that bad.
Housing in Japan is an depreciating value. Unlike other cultures, Japan homes are not an investment.
Make sure you get only the largest, densest cities. Perfect.
Maybe a zoomable heat map would've been more fair.
How is Rome not all red?
The one for Zagreb doesn't look realistic. I wanted to find the source, but I guess my search skills aren't that great today.
Nothing like an infographic to immediately enrage nerds
Around 7% for a 5 bedroom house, including property taxes. I got lucky, landing a $106k purchase and then getting a $110k salary a few years later.
I hate my house, but it's mine and it's 7% of my base salary. It's lower than mine and my employers combined contributions to my rpp and rrsp.
I dread my renewal next summer..
Ain't no one renting in the center of Moscow unless they're approaching fuck-you money.
Seriously go look at pictures of Bern, Switzerland right now.
This isn't factoring in other factors, like how the tax rate in Bern is very high, or how the cost of living is very high
Or the % of home ownership.
This is so stupid. Just fucking use numbers