

– None of the ancient sites in the Ukraine such as Nebelivka, that were for the most part built of wood and therefore have left very little traces compared with cities in Mesopotamia. I have been looking at a lot of ancient sites on Google Earth. Check out our blog for some crypto-related data visualizations. My latest project, Elementus, aims to bring transparency to the cryptocurrency market.

The result is a clean, accessible dataset of cities, their locations, and their populations over time, going as far back as 3700 B.C.Īs the authors of acknowledge, the data has a number of limitations and is “far from comprehensive.” Certain parts of world are better represented than others, and some well known cities do not appear until centuries after they were founded. The researchers compiled the data by digitizing, geocoding, and standardizing information from past research published about historical urban populations. But thanks to a report released last week by a Yale-led team of researchers, it’s now possible to analyze the history of cities over a much longer time frame. World Urbanization Prospects, goes back only to 1950. The most comprehensive collection of urban population data available, U.N. But until recently, tracking its history much further back than that was a challenging task. In 1960, only 34 percent of the world lived in cities. The size of each dot corresponds to its population at that time.īy 2030, 75 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities. For each city, this map shows the date of the earliest recorded population figure, which is not necessarily the date when the city was founded.
