Historical Urban Population
- Creators
- Reba, Meredith
- Reitsma, Femke
- Seto, Karen C.
Description
Purpose
To provide spatially explicit, historic, city-level population data from 3700 BC to AD 2000 for improved understanding of contemporary and historical urbanization trends.
Abstract
The Historical Urban Population, 3700 BC - AD 2000, originally developed by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, is the first spatially explicit global data set containing location and size of urban populations over the last 6,000 years. The data set was created by digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data. Each data point consists of a city name, latitude, longitude, year, population, and a reliability ranking to assess the geographic uncertainty of each data point. Despite spatial and temporal gaps, no other geocoded data set at this resolution exists. It can therefore be used to investigate long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns, evaluate the current era of urbanization, and build a richer record of urban population through history.
Documentation
To access the documentation of this resource, you can use the following link: https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/urbanspatial-hist-urban-pop-3700bc-ad2000/docs
Download
To download this dataset, you can use the following link (Login required): https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/urbanspatial-hist-urban-pop-3700bc-ad2000/data-download
Related materials
This resource is associated with the Earth Observations Toolkit for Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements. If you want to learn more about it, please, check the EO Toolkit portal (https://eotoolkit.unhabitat.org/), a place where you will find use cases, learning material, and many other tools and resources related to the Sustainable Development Goal 11 and New Urban Agenda.