Making Room for a Planet of Cities

The authors document the results of a five-year study of global urban expansion, initiated
in 2005 with a grant from the World Bank that resulted in the report, The Dynamics of Global
Urban Expansion (Angel et al. 2005). That initial phase of the study focused on analyzing
and comparing satellite images and urban populations in a global sample of 120 cities circa
1990 and 2000. A second phase of the study, with support from the National Science Foundation, involved a survey of housing conditions and the regulatory regimes governing urban expansion in the same sample of 120 cities. The survey was conducted by local consultants in 2006–2007.

The third and fourth phases, with support from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), Cities Alliance, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, involved several additional steps and resulted in three Institute-sponsored working papers. They present historical research on urban expansion in 20 U.S. cities from 1910 to 2000; historical analysis of a representative global sample of 30 cities from 1800 to 2000; and the analysis of a new global urban land cover map of all 3,646 named large cities with 100,000 people or more in the year 2000 (Angel et al. 2010a; 2010d; 2010e). The complete data sets, with their associated maps and spreadsheets, are available in The Atlas of Urban Expansion on the Lincoln Institute Web site at www.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/atlas-urban-expansion.