Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Mapping the World's Urban Populations


The Urban Age project brings together ten years of research into the future of cities around the world. In partnership with the Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, the London School of Economics has been researching the diverse spatial, social, economic and political dynamics of global cities since 2005.

The Urban Age Project brings together all this research and provides access to data and data visualizations about cities around the world. If you want to start exploring this data yourself then a good place to start is the Populations of the Largest Urban Agglomerations interactive map. The map shows the world's most populated cities and their predicted population growth over the next fifteen years.

Interestingly this interactive map doesn't actually include a base map layer. However the data plots of the world's largest cities themselves is enough to provide a recognizable world map. The cities are represented on the map by proportional circles, with the circles scaled by urban population size. The circles are colored to show the forecast growth of cites from 2012-2030 (dark red indicates the fastest forecast growth).

Once you've studied the interactive map it is worth exploring more of the LSE's Urban Age project. The project includes many other static maps exploring urban populations around the world. These include a map showing decline & growth in German urban populations (almost every city in East Germany is experiencing decline), residential density in New York and the ethnic minority population of London.

These three maps are just a small sample. Urban Age contains hundreds of other maps & other types of data visualization exploring city populations around the world.

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