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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T05:32:08+00:00

In case somebody doesn’t know: A cartogram is a type of map where some

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In case somebody doesn’t know: A cartogram is a type of map where some country/region-dependent numeric property scales the respective regions so that that property’s density is (close to) constant. An example is

Example cartogram

from worldmapper.org. In this example, countries are scaled according to their population, resulting in near-constant population density.

Needless to say, this is really cool. Does anyone know of a Matplotlib-based library for drawing such maps? The method used at worldmapper.org is described in (1), so it would surprise me if no one has implemented this yet…

I’m also interested in hearing about other cartogram libraries, even if they’re not made for Matplotlib.

(1) Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman,
Diffusion-based method for producing density-equalizing maps,
Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 101, 7499-7504 (2004). Available at arXiv.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There’s this, though it’s based and a different algorithm (and though it’s on the ESRI site, it doesn’t require ArcGIS). Of course, once you have the cartogram you can plot it in matplotlib.

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