We made a list of the things that needed to be explored;
- Food
- Transport
- Death/Birth Rate
- Wealth
- Weather
- Education
- Salary/income
- Class Breakdowns
- Main industry/ employment
- Waste Disposal
We decided to split our research among the three of us.
Ryan took the cultural aspect, Eoin the everyday things and I went for the more mathematical statistical approach.
Population
Searching online I found that Rome (the city itself) has an estimated population of 2,646,000. It has an estimated 2,100 people per square kilometer (5,300/square mile). Roman’s population growth is declining the most recent years, with only 2.5% increase estimated by 2030 (a population of 2.7 million).
Vatican city (which is situated in Rome but considered a separate city entirely) has a population of 840 people. It is regarded as the smallest independent state operating on Earth.
Demographics of Population
An estimated 9.5% of the population is non-Italian, though half of the immigrant population have European Origins, including Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish and Albanian. This immigrant population counts of 4.7% of the 9.5%. The other 4.8% consists of the non-European migrants including Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Peruvians and Chinese.
Death/ Birth Rate
Finding the individual birth and death rates for Rome alone was proving hard so I decided to have a look at Italy as a whole.
In 2013 it was noted that there was a huge dip in births in Italy, 8,000 less children were born in the first three months of the year than those in 2012. The also found there were more deaths than births, with 10.01 deaths per 1,000 population and 8.94 births per 1,000. This was blamed on the overall ‘happiness’ factor of the city, Italy’s giving a rating of 5.8 on the satisfaction scale, which is a lot lower than the average 6.6.
The consensus for Italy in 2014 showed the below breakdowns with population, again showing a low population growth of 0.3%.
Wealth
Italy’s income stands at $1.769 billion. Below are some the figures I gathered after reading the paper “Top incomes in Italy 1974-2004” by Fecund Alvaredo and Elena Pisano. It shows the break down of the individuals in the society, the average income per age group, what the taxes taken by the country are taken from and include an article on the increased contribution to the higher society class in Italy.
Social classes exist in all societies and are how the population is divided based on social science and political data. The most common three being lower, middle and higher class. In recent years Italy has seen its middle class struggle in wealth due to increased taxes and previous depression. An article on thisisitaly.com stated there was a “loss of 4 percent of overall available income per year, while families with less than 15,000 euros per year have lost 0.2 percent.”
Income
I wanted to explore the split up of income through some popular jobs in Italy.
Cost of Living
The cost of living in Rome stands at, for a single person, at 547.32£ (716.62€) and for four person family at 1,941.91£ (2,542.61€) (without rent). This is 24.08% lower than London. I found an interesting website that showed the average cost of items, from food to leisure, to have a look at how the population live. The pie chart also shows the divide of how money is spent in each household. Interestingly, Rome has the most expensive milk in the whole of Southern Europe.
dabbling.in.creativity. 