The delineation and growth of metropolitan areas in the world between 2000 and 2015

A talented team at the OECD and the European Union have developed a consistent method to delineate metropolitan areas – or functional urban areas (FUAs) – in the entire world. They recently published an open access paper where the explain the method and use it to analyze the population growth of metropolitan areas in the world between 2000 and 2015. You can find more info about the paper below and  a geopackage data set of  FUAs can downloaded from here. 

Moreno-Monroy, A. I., Schiavina, M., & Veneri, P. (2020). Metropolitan areas in the world. Delineation and population trends. Journal of Urban Economics, 103242. 

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to delineate metropolitan areas – or functional urban areas (FUAs) – in the entire world and assesses their population trends. According to the definition developed by the OECD and the European Union, FUAs are composed of high-density urban centres with at least 50 thousand people plus their surrounding commuting zones. The latter represent the urban centres’ areas of influence in terms of labour market flows. The proposed method combines a functional and a morphological approach to overcome the dependency on travel-to-work data to define commuting zones and allow a global delineation. It relies on a probabilistic approach and the use of population and travel impedance gridded data across the globe. Results show that around 3.9 billion people, making up 53% of the world population, live in 8,790 FUAs, out of which 17% live in their commuting zones. Between 2000 and 2015, population growth was higher in larger FUAs, highlighting a general trend toward higher concentration of the metropolitan population. Commuting zones grew faster than urban centres, though with heterogeneous patterns across world regions, income levels and metropolitan size.

Related posts:

• Plotting the metropolitan areas of Brazil in R
• Delineating Geographical Regions with telephone call networks
• The urban footprint of the largest metropolitan areas of Europe

The urban footprint of the largest urban areas of Brazil

All my procrastination energy led to me to create this nice little image comparing the footprint of the largest urban agglomeration in Brazil. I created this figure using R and geobr, a package that facilitates downloading official geospatial data of Brazil (a quick intro to geobr here). In our latest update, we included official data on the urban footprint of all Brazilian cities in 2005 and 2015.

[click on the image to enlarge]

Related post:

• The urban footprint of the largest metropolitan areas of Europe

The race for the largest city in the world over the past 500 years

In previous posts, I've pointed out to an incredible open dataset with comprehensive population estimates of human settlements and cities for the past 6,000 years. The talented John Burn-Murdoch used some of these data to create this nice animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 largest cities in the world since 1500. The full code for the animation is available here.

New project:

A “Bar Chart Race” animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500.

Fascinating to watch giant cities vanish after falling in conquests, and amazing that three UK cities were in the top 8 in the late 1800s. pic.twitter.com/KglMZbYobr

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 18, 2019

The urban footprint of the largest metropolitan areas of Europe

The largest urban functional areas in Europe, by Joaquin Dominguez/elOrdenMundial S.XXI, using data from the 2016 Urban Europe (Eurostat)

High-resolution data sets on global man-made impervious surfaces and urban extents

In 2012, we posted about a big research project on global forecasts of urban expansion and its environmental impacts, by Karen C. Seto and her lab at Yale. On a related topic, SEDAC (a NASA data center hosted at CIESIN in Columbia University) has released two new high-resolution data sets that some of you might find useful for your own research:

1. Global Human Built-up And Settlement Extent for the target year 2010, derived from global 30m Landsat satellite data
   
   
2. Global Man-made Impervious Surface for the target year 2010, derived from global 30m Landsat satellite data

Happy data crunching!

Related links:

• Where to find high spatial resolution data on population distribution
• 200 years of Urban Expansion
• Visualizing surface changes over time in every corner on Earth
• The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion

How much of the world is covered by cities? not much

Vinicius Netto asked this question a few days ago. Here is the answer I've found based on a paper by Seto and colleagues.

Proportion of Urban land-cover in km2
0.2% Africa
0.5% S America
0.5% World
0.7% N America
1.2% Asia
2.2% W Europehttps://t.co/qH1aQJrAbG pic.twitter.com/yfKO9Wv6Cz

— Urban Demographics (@UrbanDemog) 22 January 2017

An open dataset with 6,000 years of global urbanization

Patrick Gerland points to a new paper/open dataset that provides the first spatially explicit archive of the location and size of urban population settlements over the last 6,000 years. We have previously posted in this blog about the fantastic work of Karen Seto and her group at Yale at the Seto lab on Urbanization and Global Change (here and here). This one adds up to a great and continuous effort on improving spatially explicit models of population growth and urbanization, with important contributions to historical and prospective research.

Reba, M., Reitsma, F., & Seto, K. C. (2016). Spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000. Scientific data, 3.

Abstract:

How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional environments? In order to understand the current era of urbanization, we must understand long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns. However, to date there is no comprehensive record of spatially explicit, historic, city-level population data at the global scale. Here, we developed the first spatially explicit dataset of urban settlements from 3700 BC to AD 2000, by digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data previously published in tabular form by Chandler and Modelski. The dataset creation process also required data cleaning and harmonization procedures to make the data internally consistent. Additionally, we created a reliability ranking for each geocoded location to assess the geographic uncertainty of each data point. The dataset provides the first spatially explicit archive of the location and size of urban populations over the last 6,000 years and can contribute to an improved understanding of contemporary and historical urbanization trends.

credit: Reba, Reitsma and Seto

Brasilia, 32 years of urban expansion

Google Earth Engine has released new data for their project Timelapse, which combines over 5 million satellite images acquired over the past three decades and allows for a zoomable video of land transformations at a global scale. You can play around  procrastinate  on their website zooming in different areas. I find Dubai and Las Vegas particularly interesting. There is a good playlist on Youtube!

This is the timelapse of Brasilia (Federal District), my hometown. During this period between 1984 and 2016, the population of Brasilia went from approx. 1.2 million to 2.9 million. The video shows some very interesting transformations including the expansion of poor settlements largely undeserved by urban infra-structure in the south and southwest of the city, but also some illegal occupations of protected areas by middle- and high-income gated communities in the east and north-east parts of the city.

Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion to 2030

Karen Seto and her group at Yale have recently made available a dataset of Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion, which presents spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land cover change from 2000 to 2030 at a 2.5 arc-minute resolution. This is the dataset they used in their PNAS paper we have mentioned back in 2012.

Thanks Marcia Castro for the pointer.

The Pace of Urbanization in different regions of the World

This chart comes from the UN report on World Urbanization Prospects 2014. (I saw this via Conrad Hackett, great Twitter to follow btw)

Assorted links

1. Skype Translator is on the way via MR
   
   
2. Paris's history, captured in its streets (using R!)
   
   
3. Compare the actual size of countries
   
   
4. Flowcharts
   
   
5. A systematic approach to interactive visualization and algorithms
   
   
6. Which Countries Require Visas To Visit
   
   
7. The Evolution of Moscow's Subway Maps
   
   
8. Serious scientific progress
   
   
9. Other things I would rather be doing
   
   
10. According to UN projections, nearly 9% of the world’s population will be living in just 41 megacities by 2030. Great Dataviz by The Economist

Postdoc position, LSE and Oxford - Urbanization in Developing Economies

Prof Henry G Overman (LSE) points out to this great opportunity of a Postdoc position to do research on Urbanization in Developing Economies in a joint programme between Serc/LSE and the University of Oxford.

A major joint research programme on urbanisation in developing economies, with particular reference to Africa, has been launched at Oxford's Department of Economics and LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre with support from the World Bank. Professors Tony Venables, Paul Collier (Oxford) and Vernon Henderson (LSE) are seeking to recruit up to two postdoctoral research economists. This will involve conceptual and econometric work on the overall urbanisation process in developing countries and on the internal development of cities, in particular large African cities. There will be intensive use of satellite data (to classify land use), night lights data, demographic census data, DHS data, survey data, mapping and planning data. The programme offers outstanding opportunities to contribute to cutting edge research in the field, based in two of Europe's leading social science research and training institutions.

7 Misconceptions about Urbanization

George Martine (former president of the Brazilian Association for Population Studies ABEP) was the lead author of the UN Population Fund's (UNFPA) report State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.

In this seminar, Martine discussed seven common misconceptions about urbanization (ht Eduardo Marandola).

1. Urbanization is inherently bad
2. Most urban growth occurs in mega cities
3. Urban growth comes mainly from migration to cities
4. Rural-Urban migration can and should be stopped
5. The poor are a marginal minority in cities
6. Cities occupy a huge amount of land area
7. As a whole, urbanization inevitably harms the environment

Assorted links

1. High resolution maps of urban perception of safety (via C Hidalgo)
   
   
2. The transformation of Colombia’s second city will be hard to copy
   
   
3. A peculiar photo session in Brasilia
   
   
4. Demography's 50th Anniversary! (via Bernarado Lanza)
   
   
5. Oxford University launches new online course on International Labour Migration: Economics, Politics and Ethics
   
   
6. How the Recession Reshaped the US Economy, in 255 Charts (in one chart)
   
   
7. 7 Hand Gestures That Make You Look Like a Real Intellectual (via Vinicius Netto) - I loved the 'The Tiny Dialectic' one.
   
   
8. Map Compare: a useful tool to compare basemaps and cartogrphic styles
   
   
9. Metions to equality, fairness, freedom and liberty in the Democratic and Republican platforms since 1948 

Research Vacancies, LSE and Oxford - Urbanization in Developing Economies

Henry Overman points out to some Research Vacancies on Urbanization in Developing Economies in a joint programme between Serc/LSE and Oxford University.

A major joint research programme on urbanisation in developing economies, with particular reference to Africa, has been launched at LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre and Oxford's Department of Economics, with support from the World Bank. Profs.Vernon Henderson (LSE) Paul Collier and Tony Venables (Oxford) are recruiting a Research Manager, Research Economists and Assistants and GIS Data Specialists to work on the programme. The programme offers outstanding opportunities to contribute to cutting edge research in the field, based in two of Europe's leading social science research and training institutions.

200 years of Urban Expansion

We have mentioned the Atlas of Urban Expansion here at Urban Demographics a while ago. It is an amazing project supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that gathers loads of data for a number of cities across the globe.

Using part of these data, Shlomo Angel and the team at NYU Stern Urbanization Project have recently started working on a new series of great animations showing the expansion of 30 global cities over the last 200 years. Here are the first five cases: São Paulo, Chicago, Paris, London and Los Angeles:

obs. It's a great work and I'm looking forward for the next videos. The only reservation I would make is that these animations can be a bit deceiving as they give the impression of concentric urban expansion. 

Related Links:

• Las Vegas Urbanization (1984-2009)
• Global forecasts of urban expansion
• Buenos Aires Urban Expansion
• Visualizing surface changes over time in every corner on Earth
• The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion

The City of 7 Billion

The City of 7 Billion is an ambitious research project on the impact of population growth and resource consumption at the global scale that reframes the entire world as a single urban entity: the city of 7 billion. The project is being conducted by Bimal Mendis and Joyce Hsiang of the Yale School of Architecture. 

More info on the project here and here.

A visualization of population growth in cities around the world from 1990 to 2015

Assorted Links

1. A renewed look at Europe's population distribution (high resolution map)
   
   
2. Transport costs in the Roman Empire (via Leo Monasterio)
   
   
3. Like camels with tatoos
   
   
4. How many countries already face shrinking population?
   
   
5. What does your smart phone say about much sex you have had?
   
   
6. Live map with every cargo ships around the world (via Leo again). And a nice visualization of shipping in the Baltic Sea.
   
   
7. Labor productivity Around the World
   
   
8. The First Economist

Urban Picture

Would you call this urban sprawl? (via Human Scale Cities, a great blog by the way).

Los Angeles

[Image Credit: ?]

Soundtrack:

Demographic papers published on Science and Nature

It's not everyday you see demographers publishing on journals like Science and Nature. So here is a short list with some of the papers published since 2000.

ps. Massive presence of @IIASAVienna and @WiCVienna researchers!

• (2013) Pervasive Externalities at the Population, Consumption, and Environment Nexus, by Partha S. Dasgupta, Paul R. Ehrlich
  
  
• (2012) Demography's Role in Sustainable Development, Many authors
  
  
• (2011) China’s Demographic History and Future Challenges, by Xizhe Peng
  
  
• (2011) The Demography of Educational Attainment and Economic Growth, by Wolfgang Lutz, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Warren Sanderson
  
  
• (2011) 7 Billion and Counting, by David E. Bloom
  
  
• (2008) Health and Urban Living, by Christopher Dye
  
  
• (2008) The coming acceleration of global population ageing, by Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2006) The Demography of Growing European Identity, by Wolfgang Lutz, Sylvia Kritzinger, Vegard Skirbekk
  
  
• (2005) Average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age, by Warren C. Sanderson, Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2003) Europe's Population at a Turning Point, Wolfgang Lutz, Brian C. O'Neill, Sergei Scherbov

and my two favorites:

• (2010) Remeasuring Aging, by Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2011) Global Human Capital: Integrating Education and Population, Wolfgang Lutz, Samir KC
• Interactive Age and Education Pyramids by Country

[Image Credit: Lutz and KC, 2011]