Tag: Hong Kong

Hong Kong Water Flows

Sometimes I get a little nostalgic… Here is a Sankey diagram of water flows in Hong Kong. My guess is that it pre-dates 1997, so this would be the former British colony Hong Kong. Originally published in Worldbank’s Eco2 Cities book (Hiroaki Suzuki, Arish Dastur, Sebastian Moffatt, Nanae Yabuki and Hinako Maruyama. Eco2 Cities: Ecological Cities as Economic Cities. 2010), it is pictured in this guide(link currently broken) on page 41.


Flows of water are shown in 1.000.000 m³ of water (difficult to see, but I read this as 10 to the power of 6). Obviously hand drawn, so flows are not fully to scale.

Hongkong receives an average 2.000 Mm³ of precipitation (per year?) on a land area of 1.046 km² (interesting: todays area is 1.108 km²). Most of the water directly evaporates, and a large chunk goes into the sea.

This is considered an early example of a material flow analysis (MFA) visualization, and also of an urban metabolism study.

SOPA 2013 Award: Wiring the City

Simon Scarr has won a SOPA 2013 Award for Excellence in Information Graphics (PDF, see p. 13) with this Sankey diagram titled ‘Wiring the City’ originally created for the South China Morning post.

It shows energy flows and energy use in Hong Kong

On his blog he writes: “… we took a look at Hong Kong’s power consumption. Who uses all the electricity in our city and what is it used on? (…) Data set was provided by the government’s Electrical and Mechanical Services Department. (…) This type of chart is known as a Sankey diagram. The thickness of each line reflects a value. In this case, an amount of electricity in terajoules. All of the lines add up to give subtotals and totals by users (grey) and end use (coloured).”

Congratulations, Simon!