How to understand a place

A site, a catchment, a district you are about to build in or sell to. This guide gets you a profile of the people who live there, what sets them apart from the rest of the country, and what the surroundings are like. The profile is one call to describe_area, for 1 credit.

Point at the place, and check it

By name, when it has one:

Describe the people who live in Södermalm, Stockholm.

Or by a point and a radius, when it is a site. Right-click the spot in any online map, copy the two numbers, and paste them in:

Who lives within two kilometres of 48.137, 11.575?

The radius can be from 0.5 to 100 km. One to three kilometres is a walking or cycling catchment, ten to twenty a driving one.

The answer leads with the place it used and its population: "Södermalm, Stockholm (district): 77,647 people". If other places share the name they are listed, so a wrong match is easy to spot. Add the city or country to switch.

Read what is particular

Every figure is set against the rest of the country, so you can tell what is local from what is national.

Demographics. Median age, typical education and employment, children per household. Södermalm: median age 45, two years above the rest of Sweden, long tertiary education, typically no children at home.
Economics. Median household net income and wealth in local currency, with the gap to the national figure. Södermalm's income is 43,500 kronor above the rest of Sweden.
Values. The attitudes on which the place differs notably from average, or a plain statement that it doesn't.
Media. The dominant media diet and the level of digital engagement.
Lifestyle. What households there spend their budget on, against the national average, what they eat, and what they emit. Södermalm puts 1.8 times the Swedish share of its budget into public transport, taxis and flights and 0.8 times into running a car. Its households emit 23.9 tonnes of CO2e a year, 1.6 times the national figure, and 5.7 of those tonnes are flying.

Ask about the surroundings

The population also knows what each neighbourhood is like to be in, and your assistant can ask for any of it as an average over the place:

What is the daytime presence in Södermalm, and how many restaurants and cafés are within walking distance of a typical home?

Daytime presence is the ratio of people present by day to people who live there. Södermalm comes back at 1.15: it fills up during the day. Below 1 is a dormitory area. It is a modelled estimate that tracks office density closely, so use it to compare zones and not as a footfall count.

Also available: retail, office and nightlife density, grocery and clothing shops nearby, public transport stops, green space, and distances to the city centre, rail, motorway, healthcare and EV fast chargers.

Going further

A specific audience inside the place. "How many households with children under ten live within three kilometres, and where exactly?" is sizing a market with a radius. Inside a city it returns the 1 km² cells where they cluster.

Two sites on the same terms. Describe each and put them side by side, or compare them on one audience.

For planning and development. Tenure, housing cost burden, household composition, heating systems, car ownership and commute mode are all available, so "what share of households within a kilometre rent, and how many have no car?" is a fair question.

Worth knowing

A small place gives a good profile and a rough figure. A district of 77,000 sits in the low confidence tier: fine for comparing, not for quoting to the last digit. A place with fewer than 100 people is answered for the area around it, and the answer says so. Religion, origin, health and political leaning are only answered at region level, never for a neighbourhood. Describing an audience explains why.

You know who lives there. Plan reaching an audience works on a place with no audience at all, and returns the channels and values of everyone in it.