How cities grow, how their grain coarsens or holds, and what that does to the life of the street. Each project here starts from a dataset, states its method and limits, and lets you explore the result. By Stefan Al, architect and urban planner, Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Urban Planning program at Hunter College, CUNY.
Every recorded city from the first Sumerian settlements to today, with UN projections to 2035, raised as a tower on two faces of the Earth. Press play and watch urban life move from Mesopotamia to the Nile, the Indus and the Yellow River, then to Europe, and finally explode across Asia, Africa and the Americas.
All 11,686 urban centres on Earth, measured the same way from satellite data every five years from 1975 to 2030. Watch the urban population triple, Tokyo lose its lead, and the Pearl River Delta fuse into the largest urban centre in the world.
A block-face study of building grain and street life. Does a fine grain of lots and older buildings still go with a diverse mix of uses along the street, as Jane Jacobs argued? The pilot measures Manhattan block by block, then tests whether the pattern holds in other cities.
Each project names its sources, the corrections made to them, and what the data cannot tell you. Source data stays with its original authors under their licenses.
5700 Years of Urbanization uses Reba, M., Reitsma, F. & Seto, K. C. (2016), Spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000, Scientific Data 3, 160034, CC BY 4.0; recent decades and projections from the UN World Urbanization Prospects 2018.
The Urban Half Century uses the European Commission JRC GHS Urban Centre Database R2024A (multitemporal urban centres), CC BY 4.0.
Al, S. (2026). 5700 Years of Urbanization [Interactive visualization]. https://research.stefanal.com/urbanization/
For questions, collaboration or teaching use, get in touch through stefanal.com.