I tried to use nested circles in a visual, using Flourish. A dataset about different types of roads in different cities in the greater Amsterdam area seems to lend itself for this type of visual.

The viz below is easy to make in Flourish:

But I did notice quite some flaws, that are issues with this type of chart. They are probably magnified by my specific dataset, and maybe there is also a bit of a flaw in how Flourish creates this specific one.

For example: The city of Amsterdam is actually the second in total size, but if you look at the circles it seems to be one of the smallest. The same thing happens again in the nested circles.

Fortunately it is very easy to change the chart type, in a treemap for example, as below:

this does show the proportion of the sizes much better already.  It’s also nice to be able to zoom in in a specific area to have a closer look at that area. It’s already easier to see here that there are differences in the number of cities within an area and the contribution of the different types of roads.

As a final attempt I tried a sunburst (because why not…). The zooming functionality works really nice here as well. I think the treemap does give a slightly better overview to start though..