CityReads│Watch 6,000 Years of Urbanization in 3 Minutes

2016-06-17 Max Galka 城读

CityReadsVol.83

Watch 6,000 Years of

Urbanization in 3 Minutes

Max Galka at Metrocosm has taken the most comprehensive dataset on cities by Yale researchers and made it come alive in a new video.

Meredith Reba,Femke Reitsma & Karen C. Seto,2016. Spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000, Scientific Data, doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.34

Sources: http://metrocosm.com/history-of-cities/

http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201634

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/watch-6000-years-of-urbanization-in-3-minutes-max-galka-metrocosm/487142/

Today, about 54 percent of population is living in the cities. Humans are predominantly an urban species.

Many scholars question the sustainability of contemporary urbanization, arguing that the rates and scales of urbanization today present a new relationship between urbanization and the biosphere. However, in order to contextualize the current period of the urban demographic process and understand its potential future trajectories, we need data on long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns.

New questions arise as to how urban populations have changed over time. How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? What were the sizes of these urban populations and how were large and small cities geographically distributed? 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.

The only spatially explicit data on urban population with global coverage is the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects. It is considered the most authoritative source of global urban population data and provides information on urban populations for major urban agglomerations around the world. The available data include latitude and longitude values for places with populations of 300,000 or more. However, these data are only available starting in 1950.

A new research spearheaded by Yale University that, for the first time ever, developed the first spatially explicit dataset of urban settlements from 3700 BC to AD 2000.

The dataset uses two principal sources:Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: A Historical Census, by historian Tertius Chandler and World Cities: -3,000 to 2,000, by political scientist George Modelski. Both volumes have been used in myriad fields, including geography, economics, sociology, demography, history, anthropology, and the health sciences.

Chandler Text Sample.

Sample Modelski Data Table.

The researchers compiled the data by digitizing, geocoding, and standardizing information from the two books. The dataset creation process also required data cleaning and harmonization procedures to make the data internally consistent. The result is a clean, accessible dataset of cities, their locations, and their populations over time, going as far back as 3700 B.C.

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.

The primary and original motivation for developing this dataset was to empirically test the oft-cited hypothesis that cities have historically developed in fertile agricultural areas. While the earliest record of cities traces their location to the Sumer region of Mesopotamia, or modern day Kuwait and Iraq, the hypothesis that cities in or near agricultural areas grow faster than cities located elsewhere has not been systematically tested. A long record of urban populations and their locations that spans at least a few hundred years would help establish the relationship between the growth of cities and geographic factors that shape or limit their development. Thus, this dataset was originally developed to test the relationship between historic patterns and rates of urban population growth and a city’s proximity to productive agricultural lands.

However, this dataset has far broader applications than to test the relationship between the growth of cities and proximity to agricultural areas. A geolocated dataset of urban populations that spans several thousand years is a necessary first step to developing the ‘science of human settlements.’ researchers can use it to begin to explore the geographic evolution of urban settlements, the relationship between urban growth and resources, the geographic patterns of urban population growth, and long-term cycles of urban settlement growth and decline.

Now, Max Galka at Metrocosm has created a fun video using that digitized and geocoded dataset.

3700 BC: Beginning of Sumerian civilization

2450 BC: Rise of Indus Valley Civilization

1120 BC: Chou Dynasty formed in China

214 BC: Construction begins on the Great Wall of China

106 AD: Roman Empire reaches greatest extent

250 AD: Rise of Mayan Empire

629 AD: Muslim conquest of Mecca

1345 AD: Aztec civilization rises

1492 AD: Columbus arrives in the Americas

1626 AD: The Dutch found New Amsterdam

1901 AD: Commonwealth of Australia formed