Every recorded city from the first Sumerian settlements to today, with UN projections to 2035, raised as a tower whose height follows population. Press play for the story in six chapters. Drag a globe to turn it; hover a tower to read it.
Before 1950, population estimates come from Tertius Chandler's Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth (1987) and George Modelski's World Cities: –3000 to 2000 (2003), transcribed and geocoded by Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma and Karen C. Seto in Scientific Data 3, 160034 (2016), CC BY 4.0. Where a city appears in both, Modelski's figures are used up to 1000 CE and Chandler's after, following the paper.
From 1950, figures come from the UN's World Urbanization Prospects 2018: annual estimates for every urban area that had at least 300,000 people in 2018. Like Chandler's, they count whole urban areas, including suburbs. UN figures after 2018 are projections; this page treats years after 2026 as projected and draws them with dashed outlines. 776 UN urban areas are linked to their historical record by name, former name or location; the other 1,084 enter the record in 1950.
The record is sparse before 1950. Many cities have a single estimate, and gaps between estimates can span centuries. Between two estimates the towers grow or shrink on a log scale; after a city's last estimate it dims and disappears. Thresholds change over time: Chandler lists cities above 20,000 (40,000 in Asia) from 800 to 1850 and above 40,000 after, so a world that looks emptier in one era may just be less documented.
Corrections to the transcription: Philadelphia 1914 (17,600,000, shown as 1,760,000) and Algiers 1925 (2,220,000, shown as 222,000) are decimal slips; the BCE entries for Teotihuacan, Tikal and Caracol mirror their CE entries and are removed; records separated by more than 1,000 years are treated as separate cities rather than interpolated.
The UN's 2025 revision measures cities differently, by contiguous built-up density, which reorders the largest cities (Jakarta comes first) and extends projections to 2050. It is not used here.