Natural Neighbourhoods

The council has worked with the Local Government Association to create the Natural Neighbourhoods tool which allows anyone to map custom areas built from existing standard geographies (wards, output areas, and lower layer super output areas) that better represent real meaningful areas. Once published, these personal geographies are shared as linked data, so everyone can benefit from the same precise definitions of areas.

The Research and Consultation team has an evaluation report which provides more information about the project.

Natural Neighbourhoods for areas frequently used by the council

• Settlements

• Children's Centre Footprints

• Local Area Partnerships

• Town and Rural Areas

The council is grateful to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) for funding which allowed this to happen. Funding was provided via the Open Data Breakthrough Fund, which aims to remove short-term barriers and enable open data release, enhancing the ability to access and make use of the open data.